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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7391537" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, the dungeon is special in a few ways. Its a HIGHLY constrained environment, and most of the common likely situations have pre-existing rules structure (dealing with traps, climbing, ropes, secret doors, slopes, supplies, time, doors, surprise, tracking, etc.). There are genre tropes (deeper = more dangerous) etc. which also factor in. It is, of course, possible for a situation in a dungeon to be entirely up to the GM to decide what would happen, but USUALLY (certainly at low levels) the possibilities are close to a closed set. In the wilderness none of this is so true. There are rules and conventions, but the possible options for the players, the things they can attempt to do, the situations which can be generated, is MUCH larger, and much more likely to produce these situations where the GM is forced to make up something 'rule like' (a ruling). This can lead to a breakdown in player agency WRT what the characters can do. The point I'm making is this is far afield from the initial paradigm. The GM is not just running a game, and using existing rules. The game is now basically a creature of the GM. Most GMs express this as a great difficulty in being able to place significant challenges in front of the PCs which the players cannot simply find an end run around. I know how this is, being VERY good at torpedoing GM plans and defeating the most crazy threats with unanticipateable means at high levels.Yeah, it is, which is in fact part of the illustration of what happened with classic D&D when it tried to do 'story', and continues to happen when you do story with a system that isn't equipped for it. If you know the right techniques you can do story, but a largely linear flow AP-type setup won't cut it. TSR was out of its depth here.Heh, yeah, I was at that tournement <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />So, yes, the A series is quite linear, and TSR didn't understand how to make a story work in D&D (never did figure it out even 15 years later). They were still TRYING. The re-use of the tournament material was another issue, which didn't help.DL to me was pretty much uninteresting. I was doing a better job of it already by that point. Again, illustrates how classic D&D's structure fails to work as a story game.Sure, even 4e has them (Tomb of Annihilation for instance, but even H1 is mostly a dungeon). I mean it was the death of the dungeon maze in a paradigmatic sense. That was no longer the model for all adventures.Right, because, if you are going to A) have a story, and B) use a module, which necessitates a fixed number of set encounter locations, then you're pretty much stuck doing this. Nobody has really made headway in this, the APs for PF are pretty linear too! Actually they're BETTER, but only to the extent that they do what you did, add more paths such that encounters can happen in different orders. It helps, but it doesn't really make it a story centered game.3e said that, but it means it about as much as 2e means what it says. My interpretation of 'Back to the Dungeon!' is "story gaming doesn't work, we can't do it, so lets just do what works, dungeon crawls!". HOWEVER 3e in fact has much of what is needed to do story gaming. It has strong character build systems, which allow the player to express through classes, race, PrC, skill choices, and feats, what he wants his character to be 'about' (and character backstory is of course available to fill in). It has a workable, if clunky, skill system that can handle checks to 'see what happens'. All it really lacks is GM and player advice on doing Story Now, but even 4e doesn't quite have that...So, 3e can be seen as an advance, but it was kind of stillborn. Also, because d20 is open, it was easy to create variants of 3.x that actually do story now. There's no reason to play with the core rules and do it. hehe. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f631.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":eek:" title="Eek!    :eek:"  data-smilie="9"data-shortname=":eek:" />Well, I think that 'D&D' in a more abstract sense continues. For now 5e is alive and well, but since it basically reneged on all of 4e's cosmological and lore evolutions, that aspect is kind of 'dead', its really a statement of 'things should remain the same, GW is the last word.' In terms of styles of play and other similar evolutions, again, 5e squarely rejects 4e's Story Game orientation, so where can you go from there? 5e will, IMHO slowly become irrelevant. Maybe in 10-15 years when its largely left behind WotC/Hasbro will simply go on, a new set of designers will come and some new experiment will happen. I don't think D&D will be a major RPG at that point, though some completely new version might 'rise again'. Meanwhile other 'D&Ds' will do the innovating. I guess this vindicates the vision that produced the OGL in the first place. New games will sprout from D&D's fertile soil to re-imagine it in the form of Story Game, of this that or the other thing we don't even have a name for today.Yes, and in this Story Now kind of thing it isn't that useful to classify the activities. I don't need to have characters 'balanced' between activities or have some of each pillar in my game, or any other such things. I need to have activities reflect story considerations. Only the dramatic characteristics and actual narratives of the activities, and how that feeds back into driving the story matters. Notice how Story Games MOSTLY have a pretty generic type of mechanics too, even 4e is very much this way, because there's not really a value in distinguishing activities mechanically. Even 5e falls into this category pretty much.I guess the only sense in which it might be worthwhile to think of classification of activities is in the sense of evaluating the mechanics of a game to see if all the envisaged character activities are covered adequately. So in HoML I'd think about if there's a 'boon' that produces 'guy who is good at tracking' (which a player who wants to track down someone might add to his character to express that).Not really, maybe nobody is interested in anything that you would classify as 'social interaction', so why would I need to have that occur or make room for it? More to the point, these classes of activities are so broad and general that OF COURSE some of each is likely to happen in any game, and probably fairly often. I don't need to 'provide' those opportunities, they will arise if needed.hehe. Well, anyway, I think I'm doing exploration the justice it NEEDS, its an activity which provides framing for drama. I guess I would say that we can play it out in as much detail as we want. I think that the better way to think of a Story Now version of a dungeon exploration game would be to call the exploration the 'central theme' of that game. Thus 'crawling the dungeon' becomes the agenda, or at least the genre/milieu in which all else is cast. You would then be able to play out the drama I outlined above, and play through the details of exploration. How the characters handled the tension would then be a relevant thing. There might even be mechanics for that...</blockquote>

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