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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7361548" data-attributes="member: 82106">OK, that's fairly explicit. I guess my basic answer is there are an INFINITE number of these 'what if the player wants' questions, I could ask "what if the player wants to only play the exciting parts" and that's just as much a what-if. So, we can really only say "in my experience, this is what players typically want, and this is what can serve most of them well a majority of the time." Hopefully that can also be relatively adaptable so that you can adjust how things work, at least to some extent.IME players get bored. I mean, yes, a player who is new or in a certain mood will probably relish crawling around in a dungeon pixel bitching every cobblestone trying to find traps and secret doors and whatnot endlessly, and scrounging for every copper piece and whatnot. This WILL almost certainly get old after a few sessions, at most. MOST players will begin to desire to move into a more narrative, cinematic, heroic sort of play. Maybe they will also want to do some 'boring stuff' as well, like they might become fascinated with shopkeeping or farming or something, but they don't really end up wanting to spend vast periods of their table time on it every game. Its enough to make a few critical decisions and feel like they're having the experience. Usually this kind of thing will segue into "the thieves guild is trying to take 90% of your profit!" or something rather quickly and that will be more interesting than trying to negotiate a cheaper source of quality high hard boots (15gp). I feel like it is always possible to do some 'development' if the player wants, but its almost always a pretty good idea to get on to pushing things pretty soon. I find that 4e's SC system is really awesome here. I can make up an SC for "successfully convince the thieves guild to stop threatening you" and that will include plenty of shopkeeping action and a real interesting plot that 'goes to the action' at the same time. Its probably not going to dwell on book keeping, negotiating contracts, and meetings of the cobbler's guild, but those things might factor in as scenes within the SC.I find that I want to see what happens in the game. So I like it if there's a fairly robust plot progression. I feel like there's always more characters and more situations and more games to be had and there's no need to linger and draw out one specific situation when there is an infinite amount of gaming I could be doing.Oh, maybe I got distracted, lol. I think I was going to say "cool to place obstacles in the way of making it thrive or growing his holdings into a Kingdom or whatever." I would also say it would be cool to threaten THE WHOLE WORLD, that would of course necessarily threaten his castle, but there's a progression there to more global concerns, so it doesn't really feel so much like endlessly repeating the same thing. I mean, its sort of like Superman, after the 100th time some villain kidnaps Louis Lane it GETS OLD, so you have to move on. Players should always feel like they've accomplished something and their achievements will stand. Never refight the same battle!<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=":)" />Right, and I agree that it is the pace experienced by the players that is really actually experienced and thus forms the basis of their enjoyment (or lack thereof) in play. I don't think its necessarily true that the pace should be unrelenting at the table either, there needs to be some degree of pacing, but I don't think every sticky situation that the PCs are in need be immediately hair-raising either. Maybe they are spending the next hour of table time negotiating and planning. These can still be DRAMATIC activities, and even punctuated with action scenes, but they don't need to be Indiana Jones crazy rollercoaster every minute either.I call those scenes basically 'Interludes'. They often take place outside of table time too. Nothing is really at stake, but the parameters of the next challenge may be set. I don't think that games have to be merely reactive on the part of the players to be 'go to the action' either. "Some guy walks in with a map" and now things are rolling and the party is in the driver's seat, for now...Well, they seem better to me than the AD&D ones! lol. I mean, "every time you're injured you have to wait weeks to do anything again" wasn't really very thrilling, and the "well, just find a cleric to magic you back to health 100x faster!" didn't really cut it either. The fact that half the party used a totally different resource scheme than the other half wasn't winning me over either. This is a BIG reason as well that I like 4e over 13a or 5e, because it DOES have a consistent set of resources that all classes basically share (ignoring some ill-considered exceptions).</blockquote>

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