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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 3761810" data-attributes="member: 42582">Thanks again for the reply.By "open-endedness" and "thematic exploration" I had in mind the following sorts of examples. The first is from "The Ebon Mirror" - so I better give a SPOILER ALERT - the second from my own game many years ago:*The climax to the module requires the players to choose whether the half-orc antagonist is reborn as a pure orc, reborn as a pure human, or remains a half-orc. Each alternative has implicaitons (spelled out by the module author, Keith Baker) for the personality of the antagonist and her future relationship with the PCs. Each also has implications that are not spelled out, but are obvious in the context of the adventure and the nature of the choice posed, for an understanding of racial identity in D&D and therefore (I believe) in the real world. Which choice the players should make is not mandated; unlike many typical modules, therefore, the win is not rail-roaded (contrast this with, for example, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where there is a climactic choice at the end, but the adventure writer tells us what counts as a win, so we have an incentive to use Detect Magic etc to learn which is the true Grail - in "The Ebon Mirror" even knowing the consequences of each choice does not tell the players what counts as a win - the thematic determination is there's to make). In this sense the adventure is open-ended. *The climax to one of my adventures involved the PCs travelling to another plane, where an enemy cult were preparing a sacrifice to a dark god. The PCs had been intending to fight them. One of the PCs, upon learning the motivations and reasoning of the cult, instead decided to join with them, and helped them sacrifice another of the PCs. This choice (unsurprisingly) fundamentally altered the direction of the campaign from then on.In both these examples, the circumstances and context of the climax are pre-determined by the adventure writer, but it's resolution - and especially the thematic implications of that resolution - are up to the players. This is (in my view) a type of rewarding open-endedness that does not rely upon resource management.If the focus of the game is thematic, in the way I've tried to explain above, one can then introduce mechanics which empower players to pursue the themes that interest them, and remove the incentives you identify always to fall back upon the "tactically superior" options.For example, suppose a player decides one motivation for his character is to "uphold my late father's honour" and this includes wielding his father's sword. That PC might receive a bonus of +1 dice of damage whenever pursuing this goal. The player then has an incentive to pursue the theme, and does not have to trade off that goal against the prospect that the +1 greatsword is a tactically superior choice to his father's cutlass.Linking this to novels, Aragorn and Conan both fight better when there is something at stake that moves them deeply. Mechanics can support that - perhaps Aragorn gets +1 dice when wielding Narsil/Anduril, +1 dice when fighting to restore his kingdom. Then the player of Aragorn has an incentive to push the game in a certain direction, make certain choices, and gets rewarded not just by engaging in tactically superior play, but by pursuing certain themes even if they are (from the tactical point of view) irrational. For example, charging a troll might be irrational in general, but if Aragorn does it wielding Narsil, because it is the only way to keep his hopes of inheritance alive, he gets +2 dice of damage and suddenly it becomes mechanically feasible to make the choice which would in other circumstances be irrational.Per-encounter rather than per-day resources can support this sort of play by stopping operational considerations from getting in the way of these thematically-driven choices.Of course, for a fully dynamic and open-ended game of this sort the player has to be able to change his or her thematic commitments. TRoS's Spiritual Attributes allow for this. So do The Dying Earth's tagline rules (in a much more light-hearted way).I will be interested to see whether 4e has any mechanics of this sort. I suspect that it will not, but you never know.</blockquote>

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