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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7382173" data-attributes="member: 42582">The bolded phrase is key here. Exploring the game world and finding new things = making moves that trigger the GM to tell you stuff. (Because there is no actual world that is actually being explored. There is just the fiction, which is being authored by - in this case - the GM.) Of course if you have never met players who don't enjoy that, then you wouldn't play "story now" RPGs. But I can tell you one player who doesn't really care for that - me.If I want to "explore a world and find new things" then I'll read a fantasy story written by a better writer than my GM. When I play an RPG, I want to learn the fate of my character - so if my character is a knight of a holy order, who is committed to defending the innocent and upholding the values of his god and the honour of his family, then that's what I want to learn about.And as a GM I don't want to tell my players a story about stuff I made up. I want to learn the fates of there characters. What will and won't they do to achieve their goals? How will they reconcile seemingly incompatible aspirations? If they don't, what conflicts will result?Maybe you're not familiar with how 4e works. The DMG has a table indicating the treasures that are to be distributed at each level - so-called "treasure parcels".As I've already posted several times, my 4e game was several treasure parcels behind. So I provided some parcels, as gifts from the Raven Queen.The treasure would not have been more earned, the players more worthy of it, if - instead of handing out in the way I did - I had (say) narrated them finding a treasure storeroom when they tore up Torog's Soul Abattoir. It's still just treasure parcels correlating to encounters resolved and hence XP accrued and hence levels gained.As far as player satisfaction, the players in my 4e game seem not to have objected to the narrative of treasures and powers being bestowed as gifts. The first such gift happened at 1st or 2nd level, when a member of a household whom the PCs saved from goblins gifted one of them a neck ornament which (it turned out) was a +1 amulet of protection.This is hardly at odds with the genre literature. In The Phoenix on the Sword, Conan is gifted a magical sword. The Fellowship is gifted magical items by Galadriel; and Narsil/Anduril is inherited by Aragorn, not taken as loot. Etc, etc. (Even the Foreword to Moldvay Basic described the slayer of the dragon tyrant as having received a magical sword as a gift from a mysterious hermit, although - unlike 4e - the rules of the game don't actually support that mode of treasure acquisition.)You are looking at the game through a very narrow lens if you treat treasure that - in the fiction - is a gift, as "unearned" in comparison to treasure actually taken off the body or from the treasuries of defeated foes.One of the PCs is a demigod. One of the PCs is Marshall of Letherna. One is an Emergent Primordial. One is an Eternal Defender. The last is a Sage of Ages. These are epic tier PCs. They have already killed a god (Torog) in order to further the Raven Queen's interests. They obtained the destination they teleported to by outwitting and deceiving Vecna, the god of secrets.I'm not sure you're appreciating the situation as an epic tier one.I want every movie I watch to be great. The greatness of a movie is not primarily comparative, it's primarily inherent - story, editing, acting, staging, etc. I don't make sure I watch a re-run of Ace Ventura in between each decent movie I watch.I want every novel I read to be great. Sometimes that doesn't happen, but it would be my ideal. If every fantasy short story I read was as good as Tower of the Elephant, that would make my life better, not worse. I every serious novel I read was as good as 9say) The Quiet American, that likewise would make my life better, not worse.I want every academic paper I read to be great, full of clever insight and skilled argument. If every paper I read was as good as Hilary Putnam's "Dreaming and 'Depth Grammar'", that would make my life easier and happier, as I wouldn't have to wade through mediocre contributions to the literature.This is also true of my RPGing. If every session was absolutely awesome then that would just make my RPGing better. I don't need boring interludes to remind me of why I enjoy the good stuff - the good stuff speaks for itself.Now if what you meant was not the above, but that - for instance - pacing is important, well my games have pacing. I'm not a pacing genius, but I think I'm moderately competent. Spending time telling players about intersections and potential allies and stuff that no one cares about isn't any sort of solution to pacing problems - or, at least, if there's a problem to which it is a solution I don't know what that problem is, and certainly don't have it in my games.This is treading very close to being an Unwarranted Generalisation - who are these "many people" (clearly there are some, eg you and [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] and your friends)? It is also treading very close to a Truth-obscuring Projection - because you (for whatever reasons) regard it as "unrealistic" to elide significant periods of time, so that must be unrealistic per se. But obviously that's not true - quite naturalistic novelists, film makers etc do this all the time. For instance, in LotR there are extensive time cuts in the first few chapters, and the last couple, but this doesn't make it "unrealistic" - the reader (correctly) infers that nothing interesting happened to Frodo in that time.Likewise, there is nothing "unrealistic" about saying "OK, you travel through the underdark and arrive at a cave filled with lava . . . etc, etc . . .". No doubt the PCs passed numerous intersections, even crossed some flagstones and descended some stairs, but no one at the table cares. Those are not things anyone is interested in authoring, and so they remain unauthored.</blockquote>

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