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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7394887" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, we have the same fictional meaning, and we both understand that in terms of 'process of play' its different, but there is an equivalence.Right, by either your way or my way the player is going to make decisions and the character is going to succeed or fail based on the resulting fictional positioning and the outcome of checks. This is fundamentally why in HoML there are ONLY 'Challenges' and not single throw-away checks. You can face the challenge of making your way via the secret route, or the combat involved in overcoming the guards. One or the other may be easier, either inherently or due to some planning, etc. but if that wasn't the case then the game would be pretty dull. So, once I've decided that the level of difficulty of the task, the cleverness and luck needed to carry it out, as well as possibly specific character traits, then I'm good.I won't speak for anyone else. IMHO what that means is you don't literally reverse things that PCs have accomplished. However, they might not turn out to be, in the long run, the best outcomes. I think its perfectly OK to have a guard at the end of the secret passage. It seems to me that the most likely reasonable way for things to be is that finding the secret passage and sneaking up on the guard, etc. should provide the same tension and sense of danger and accomplishment as taking out the two guards in the foyer that you just bypassed. That makes sense from a dramatic standpoint, as its taking up the same part of the story arc and there's probably thus the same pattern of rising and falling tension.Now, this hasn't touched on how one pathway might challenge a character's beliefs or put his agenda at stake. There could be moral considerations, for instance. Or maybe the character just thinks he's a bad ass and doesn't shrink from fights, or etc. Sure, the answers are in place, but then there's only one set of choices, and they weren't designed to speak to any particular interest or need of the story. But honestly, once you're playing in a more Story Now kind of way there's a lot less of this tactical futzing around in a passageway kind of stuff. I mean, I noted there could be story implications to using a secret passage vs going in the front door, but truthfully a lot of that sort of tactical detail isn't all that exciting in a dramatic sense. It would be much better to say "I'm sneaky, can I find a way to sneak in?" and clever sneaky guy probably manages that. The secret passage is then simply framing.</blockquote>

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