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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8241723" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is a consideration that only makes sense against a host of background assumptions of a broadly D&D-ish nature: (i) that an important part of play is the PCs raiding hostile installations/dungeons; (ii) that an important element in the success of those raids is the availability of limited resources; (iii) that those resources recharge, but at a pace that is very different from the rate at which the action unfolds.Other than AD&D, none of the games that I've GMed in the past 10 years shares those assumptions:* 4e D&D (as my group played it) has only modest (i) and very little (iii);* MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic has only modest (i), no (ii) and no (iii);* Burning Wheel (as we play it) has no (i) so far; no (ii) in the D&D spell lot/power slot/spell point sense; and a different approach to (iii) also;* Prince Valiant has no (i) so far (castles have been taken, but not in the D&D-ish room-to-room style), no (ii) and no (iii);* Cthulhu Dark has none of (i) to (iii);* The Dying Earth has no (i), and (ii) and (iii) work very differently from D&D;* Classic Traveller has had little (i), and has no (ii) and no (iii).[/indent]The last dungeon I ran as more than a one-shot was in Cortex+ Heroic, as I think I posted upthread. The details were all established in play by either my framing or the players' action declarations for their PCs. There is skilled play in Cortex+ Heroic, but its nothing like D&D. To give an example:* The PCs were teleported to a deep part of the dungeon by a Crypt Thing (mechanically, I spent 2d12 from the Doom Pool to end the scene); * The PCs started the next scene each suffering a d12 Lost in the Dungeon complication (this was a GM stipulation based on the terms on which the previous scene ended); * Not long after that, I established a scene in a great hall in the dungeon that included Strange Runes on the Walls as a scene distinction; * One of the players had his players decipher the runes to see if they would tell him where in the dungeon the PCs were - and they did! (Mechanically, this was a recovery action that included the scene distinction in the pool and that targeted and - with a good success - eliminated that characters Lost in the Dungeon complication.)Seeing ways to play the fiction like that is a skill, but it doesn't have much in common with the skill needed to beat a classic D&D dungeon. In Cortex+, if PCs retreat, or proceed, and this will affect things down the track, that is reflected through appropriate scene distinctions, complications and the like. There's no play-independent setting to keep track of.I think the point of this post is that the impact of different approaches to prep, and its use, on the play experience is (perhaps obviously) affected by details of the system being played.</blockquote>

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