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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7362850" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, D&D lacks any sort of resource or mechanic which would produce that kind of balancing. There's no 'doom pool' or anything like that. So, if you put authorial privilege into a check, then in D&D it is purely a new factor in favor of the player. And since in the archetypal Gygaxian D&D the player and the character are essentially one, you have 'powered up the character' in a sense. This is where the anxiety about 'giving the player power' is coming from. Any player in Gary's basement in 1974 given the ability to make checks to create narrative elements would OF COURSE create ways to 'cheat the maze', because beating the dungeon IS the game! Now, had Gary thought of it, he could have created something like 'plot coupon' or something that came with a balancing factor, it just was a bridge too far from wargaming and not in the cards for the first ever RPG.Passwall, that is spells, do actually work almost as plot coupons, though they are fairly elegantly wedded to the game world action. [quite]Absolutely it can. A combat can be part of a skill challenge (eg defeating the monster generates 1 success). Or a skill challenge can unfold within, or parallel to, a combat.There is a good recent thread in the <5e editions sub-forum about skill challenges in combat contexts.</blockquote>Right, there's no clear line in 4e between combat and non-combat. Combat DOES have special rules, but the standard rules still apply (IE SCs and checks in general, see page 42 for example). Right, fiction is fiction is fiction. This again goes back to my observations about pacing at the table vs in game narrative. You can assume a vast amount of stuff happened in game and not even talk about it. Heck, there's no reason in principle that you can't skip major, and significant, portions of the character's stories and lives. If a player WANTS to bring up a certain element at a certain point, then sure, if you elided that whole sequence of events, then they'd have to raise their hand and bring it up, or something. Generally in our games we have pretty much of a consensus about what to elide. 4e provided, in DMG2, a bunch of advice about doing things like vignettes and interludes as tools you can add to the story-telling toolbox in order to get to what you want to play out.I think the 'realisticness' is a conceit. That's always been my point with the whole issue of causality and its non-existence in RPGs. Every game is fundamentally filled with undecided, and not formally decidable stuff. Its made up, there's no point in worrying about whether it was made up on the spot to be interesting, or all predefined long ago using some complex procedure.[/QUOTE]

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