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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7378930" data-attributes="member: 82106">Right. At most the GM might think to himself "I believe that good pacing dictates that I interject a less (or more) tense scene right here." and thus concern himself with 'dramatic needs of the whole story' as opposed to maybe a laser focus on the character need of a particular PC which might be served equally well by a big showdown at this juncture. The RQ intercepting the teleport seems to potentially fall into this category, a small break in the rising action injects a bit of variety. It obviously had a mechanically motivated element to it in play, but it could also serve dramatic purposes.Yeah, this is the whole point of the 'level of detail' discussion. REALITY, actual world reality, is constructed such that every single element of it is causally connected to every single other element of it in some way! The amount of detail is effectively infinite. Our ability to anticipate and understand it at all is entirely based on the fact that certain configurations of matter are effectively equivalent and we just lump them together, so we can now say "its most likely I can walk down the street and no meteors will strike me" but that isn't actually a statement based on causally connected elements, it is pure induction! It is hopeless to attempt to achieve this in the fantasy world, so it is only a matter of what the dramatic effect of any given narration is. Its logical consequences are purely limited to the narrative realm and, given the impossibility of connecting it to anything resembling causal reality, it has no other significance. Thus in game terms you are utterly correct, and this is a point which has long failed to be appreciated by many in the gaming community. That any two narratives with the same logical structure are in fact equivalent and one can only prefer one over the other, or one technique of generating such, for aesthetic reasons. Agency simply cannot logically be a factor in terms of the in-game details of the narrative. Agency arises purely out of who gets to decide the structure of that narrative!This point is one that I appreciated so strongly within 4e that when I rewrote it into my own system I canonized it! ALL such sequences are scenes and all scenes are challenges, without exception. The other alternative is to cast it as an interlude, which definitionally cannot have any bearing on the success or failure of the characters in a conflict. This structure makes it very clear to me when I GM exactly what is happening, and forces stakes to be explicit at all times. Thus BEFORE THE TREK TO THE GIANTS HAPPENED, the parameters of the challenge would be established, what the positive and negative outcomes were, and how the characters intended to mitigate risk, what the costs for such risk mitigation were, etc. This universally annihilates any 'Front Porch' type issues as a side benefit. Interesting. I wouldn't favor 'hours long' interludes, but I've found that a more 'operational' and 'strategic' focus to play than what 4e provided can be more interesting. At least I like to have a game which makes these tools available. OTOH I also tend to find ways to structure challenges so as to work logistics into the game more as narrative explanation than as a puzzle to solve. So when the party is going to trek across the desert I set the challenge up as "equip yourselves for and execute the journey across the desert." Now if a player wants to say "I make a Survival check to resist the heat of the desert" it can be cast in terms of water (a resource). "Make a Survival check to see if you properly calculated the needed amount of water. If you fail then you've run out and suffered the consequences." This also puts things on a "challenge the character" kind of footing. In practice I don't require the players to sit around calculating the quarts of water needed to get across the desert and juggling the contents of their packs to fit it in. If the journey is 'long' then presumably they acquired a camel and a driver to alleviate some of the capacity issue, and a long desert trek will thus require the time, expense, and involve the presence of, some amount of baggage train. Logistics, in this framework, can now also be cast into the realm of cost/benefit and become a part of stakes setting. You could wait 3 days to acquire the needed camel-train, or you can just light out in hot pursuit of the bad guy without prepping and hope you can catch him before you get too deep into the Great Desert! The structure of the challenge is thus dictated by the players and its stakes are set (IE either a severe risk of dehydration and death, or a serious risk of losing the quarry).</blockquote>

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