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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7335267" data-attributes="member: 42582">No. I think the more the map turns from a dungeon map in the classic sense to a wilderness or town map, the less likely Gygaxian-type "solve the maze" agency will be preserved.To try and explain why: suppose the map is hidden in a chest in a dungeon - well, there is a convention in classic play that every chest is noted on the map and in the key, and so it is inherently salient to the player that any given chest might be a repository for the map. (There can be invisible chests, of cousre, so the players may need to use detection magic etc to find them - but this is also an established part of the conventions of game play.)Now suppose the map is hidden in a chest buried at the base of a tree. There is no established convention of wilderness exploration - and I think for obvious reasons there couldn't be - of describing every tree, the nature of every patch of earth at the base of a tree, etc. So the ability of the players to find that map and chest through engaging the map as a maze and beating it is much reduced. They become very dependent on paying attention to the GM's narration to pick up the clues that the particular tree they should be looking for is this one rather than that one.Town adventuring exemplifies the same phenomenon.The map as physical artefact which the players try to duplicate and thereby solve/defeat becomes less important than the GM's narration of particular details that aren't on the map, but are the essentially clues that the players need to solve the puzzle.The example of trying to work out whether or not any official will take bribes exemplifies this.How it's resolved could depend on any number of things, depending on mood and system.The key issue to me seems to be "what is a roleplaying challlenge?"I resolve some social encounters via "free roleplaying" - that is, in effect, the GM saying "yes": the GM (as the NPC) says something, the player (as PC) says something, etc in a mechanically unmediated back-and-forth.But what happens when the GM is not inclined to say "yes"? In the fiction, that corresponds to the NPC potentially rejecting the PC's offer/request. If "roleplaying challenge" means that the player has to play his/her PC in a way that persuades the GM of the successful wooing (or whatever) then that's not really what I'm into. This is when I prefer to toggle from "saying 'yes'" to rolling the dice. The adjudication process directly feeds into GM-driven RPGing. If the adjudication process is "Say the thing that the GM has noted will do the trick", then I consider that GM-driven.If the adjudcation is mechanical, but there is no mechanical framework for what counts as enough successes, that can also feed into GM driven RPGing, as it is the GM who decides when enough is enough.</blockquote>

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