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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8348475" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Yeah, I tweaked the End of Session move to account for these differences. That is, many sessions don't end up having a fight or treasure, but DO have politicking and diplomacy/intrigue. Since gaining knowledge is already covered, and "overcome a notable...enemy" implicitly permits non-combat methods, I expanded the third question to "did we loot a memorable treasure or form a meaningful alliance?" This has encouraged the players to think not just about physical tools and resources, but about how their choices shape the political and social landscape. One of my players would be thinking about that regardless, but having it baked into the rules themselves adds an extra layer of meaning to it.I genuinely see no point in employing rule 0 without achieving table consensus, or at absolute absolute bare minimum consensus to test an alteration to see if it's worthwhile. I would absolutely never use it without that.But...that's my personal choice. To limit myself that way (and a variety of other ways). I have a pathological concern about deceiving others, so I go to great lengths to avoid it. As I said before though, there are no RPG secret police. There is no mind control spell making it so GMs are incapable of making choices that break the rules. That does not, at all, imply that doing so is good or right. But the freedom to do so exists. Hence why I said I thought it was an uncontroversial maxim. The rules of RPGs are weaker than the laws of nations, which hold no candle to something as coercive as the laws of physics.Now, the books may tell you (and be entirely correct in so doing) that breaking their rules is extremely likely to result in a far worse, more frustrating, less fun experience. And I love 4e D&D, which is totally a game that runs better "by the book" than not, as long as you're up for what it offers. But I don't see that as saying rule 0 is absent any more than I see the rules of writing as being inviolable. (I can't recall if it was you or another, but somebody said that the idea of Rule 0 is unique to TTRPGs, but it isn't: George Orwell wrote of it in his seminal Politics and the English Language, where he explicitly says to ignore any of his rules if it would make you say something "barbarous." That's quite literally rule 0, just for writing, not TTRPGs.)Instead, I see it as a simple but vital word of warning. "We made this game, and made it well. It is an abstract device for producing experiences. Change it, and the experiences it produces will change. You have been warned."I see the moments of downtime as providing necessary contrast and pacing. If absolutely every moment is constantly ratcheting up the tension, we'd just...break. Having a moment to catch your breath makes you able to sprint again when the danger rears its ugly head once more. And, as I said, an issue ignored is an issue that gets worse, so I don't really see how I'm not doing that part; the black dragon's gang, for example, has got a near-stranglehold on the darker parts of the city's criminal underworld now, because the players largely ignored it to focus on other things. This has led to new concerns and new adventures. Grim Portents (like street toughs becoming more violent...and apparently juicing up with alchemical steroids!) are coming to pass. The party can't just rest on their laurels, but I'll give them a breather now and then.I always understood "fill their lives with adventure" to mean...well, making adventure a key part of the characters' lives, not making every waking moment a struggle against the odds. From the SRD: "Fill the characters’ lives with adventure means working with the players to create a world that’s engaging and dynamic. Adventurers are always caught up in some world-threatening danger or another—encourage and foster that kind of action in the game." In my game, they've been caught up in no less than five ongoing world-affecting plots/situations, of which they've permanently resolved precisely one, the Song of Thorns. The other four they've dealt setbacks to, but they've also learned that the scope of these threats is often bigger than it seems at first. The Cult of the Burning Eye is apparently thousands of years old. The Raven-Shadows have somehow survived centuries of attempts to exterminate them (being a heretical cult that considers the act of murder to be the path to enlightenment will do that). The black dragon hidden in the city has spent centuries building up a power base to take over. And the Shadow-Druids have mastered the art of shapeshifting into specific people and are shockingly competent eco-terrorists (they just are, or rather were, bad at cleaning up their paper trails.) I don't really see how letting the group have a day or two at the midpoint between major events--at most half a session--where their backs arent pressed against the wall is somehow bleeding all the adventure out of their lives.But perhaps I'm taking you to be more strident than you mean (or you were taking me to be more strident than I meant). Not every player-driven situation occurs in downtime. I just used a tidy example coincidentally from that downtime in part because that meant, as stated, that I didn't need to explain a ton of additional context. As an example high in adventure content, summarized rather a lot so there will be lost nuance, the PCs had found a man who was infected rather severely by the Song of Thorns, and wanted to try to cure him. I invented a lost artifact, an enchanted obsidian mirror said to allow the now-defunct culture of the northern jungles to heal diseases of the mind. The party was tasked with finding this mirror. As they traveled, with a local guide descended from the culture that used to occupy the jungle, they established facts about the place, and I exploited my prep (something explicitly in the DW gamemastering rules) to reveal tidbits and provide context. They eventually reached the lost city after a Perilous Journey through the jungle (that revealed many things about the Battlemaster's military service and the Druid's lack of knowledge about animals outside the group's desert/aird homeland), solved some difficult puzzles, dodged (sometimes narrowly) some traps left to keep looters away, and eventually fought a mindflayer and a corrupted couatl (whom they cleverly cleansed with one of her own, previously shed feathers). They learned a bunch of stuff, got the treasure, and then had a similar but distinct Perilous Journey back to "civilization." At which point they spent a night celebrating their triumphal return with Carouse, then booked it for the quarantine area where the infected guy was so they could try to heal him (which they did, though that was another adventure all by itself, and only resulted in partial success, so the guy was gonna need to convalesce for a good while but is expected to eventually make a full recovery.)Edit: Dammit Autocorrect, "obsidian" is not "Indian"! They're hardly similar at all!</blockquote>

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