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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7732462" data-attributes="member: 29398">I'll admit this one surprised me, when I was looking into what would be involved in my character building a stronghold.  Basically, if there's no good reason not to, the DM gives the player a hex on the map to work with (though still retains control of whatever monsters etc. might happen to reside there), and it's up to the player-in-character to clean out the hex of monsters and make it habitable.Perhaps.  That said, 0-1-2-5e are all malleable enough to handle even this, via the DM tweaking what classes are available to play and-or changing some classes (Fighter might become Swashbuckler, for example; reliant on Dex and guile and attacking prowess rather than heavy defense).That's because most of the time Conan in D&D terms is a 25th-level behemoth fighting things a very long way below his pay grade e.g. hyenas.For all we know Conan is probably doing double-digit damage with those punches....That, and is Conan what core D&D is really trying to replicate?  I think not.  Instead I suggest it's trying more to replicate the LotR/Hobbit parties.I'm impressed.  Well done.You're not the first I've heard of who has managed to make a 4e game last well beyond the norm.To support developments in the story, or mechanical developments in the caracters?A story or campaign can develop quite happily for a very long time without the characters advancing in level or mechanics at all.  It's the mechanical advancement that puts an end to what really should be open-ended; to which the obvious solution is to dramatically slow down said advancement until it becomes an occasional side effect of ongoing play rather than a/the focus of it.Your 4e game might have had another 6 years in it had you slowed down the advancement; but now you're at 30, and where can you go from there?Actually, it isn't clear at all.  A true railroad would not allow for failure - they'd find that adventure no matter what they did, and get run into it somehow.  Allowing for failure to even find the adventure in fact speak to the game not being a railroad.  Yes the DM has a story in mind and an adventure ready to run, but that doesn't mean she's necessarily going to get to run it.And if they do find the adventure but fail to rescue the elves...well, that's just part of the game.  PCs don't (or shouldn't) automatically succeed at everything they try; and if their fireball just happens to clip the prison cells where the elves are being held and wipe half of 'em out, all you can say is 'oops'.Sure.  No problem here; the DM has storyboarded out what will ideally hapen if everything goes according to plan, and has her adventure ideas lined up ready to go.And here's where you go off the chart.  Player choices can - and almost certainly will, at some point - alter it; and the DM has to be able to roll with that.If we take LotR as a game log, we've no way of knowing whether the DM in fact had them storyboarded to get through Caradhras without problem but a combination of her weather tables and player choices got in the way, after which she had to improvise.  Maybe Moria wasn't even on the original storyboard!We know from the game log that they succeeded.  What we don't know is how close to the original storyboard the end result wound up.Using a different example: I keep a log of my game here:<a href="http://www.friendsofgravity.com/games/decast/dec_adventure_list.html" target="_blank">www.friendsofgravity.com/games/decast/dec_adventure_list.html</a>That page shows the list of adventures played in the current gameworld/campaign, with each one linked to the log for that adventure. (caution: long and possibly very boring reading ahead should you be so brave as to delve into those... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> )What you won't know...and my players mostly don't know...is how much resemblance* that list of adventures and the stories told therein has to the original storyboard I drew up for this campaign.  The only thing that was nailed down and agreed on by all ahead of time was that the first adventure would be Keep on the Borderlands, because...Keep.* - hint: not much.So if this is a railroad, there's sure a lot of interweaving tracks and choices on where to go. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Not quite, me hearty.  You can't change the ingame situation before you interact with it (just like real life), but once you're there you can change the hell out of it.  You can't decide whether or not there's a cottage in that glade ahead - the DM says there is, and so there is - but on seeing it you can decide to burn it down and kill its occupants, thus changing the ingame situation significantly.The theoretical limit of the players' control is their own characters and what they do; with the results of consequences of their actions reflected by changes to the game world.  The more usual limit IME is that the players can make minor changes to the game world that don't and can't affect the run of play (e.g. as a player I can design the cottage or even the village I grew up in provided it's extremely unlikely it will ever enter play).But a player can't declare "The world has three moons, not two"; nor can she say "The world has two moons, I'm looking for a third" and on a successful check a third moon appears.  It just don't work that way. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />"I look for handholds" forces a determination (or, if pre-determined, a narration) of whether there are any.  The difference lies in who makes that determination, and how it's arrived at.  As the handholds would or would not have been there regardless of PC interaction, they are thus part of the game world and under the DM's purview.  She uses whatever means she likes to determine their presence or absence, and narrates accordingly...which might mean simply saying "There aren't any, as far as you can tell."This is where it gets confusing, as some of us are arguing that from the perspective of the PC it does really exist - the imaginary-to-us game world is the reality the PCs operate in and has to be treated as such when talking about what a PC can observe.Lanefan</blockquote>

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