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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6093048" data-attributes="member: 42582">Which thing do you not overdo - "beating encounters in unorthodox ways" or "punishing players"?For what it's worth, my vote would go in favour of more beating encounters in unorthodox ways, less punishing of players.It's not true that giving the players authority over scene-framing makes attempts to challenge them (or their PCs) meaningless.A simple example is the old "working our way through DDG". I build my high-level PC. I run him/her in a combat against Odin. The action resolution rules tell me whether or not my character won the fight. (Of course, there can be wonky bits in adjudication, especially in classic D&D, where an impartial referee might help. But I don't think that undermines the basic point.)There are issues about whether the players can really be surprised when they are given scene-framing authority - if they get to set all the stakes themselves, things can become a bit predictable. But that's a different matter.And in any event, the main reframing authority we're talking about here is to get out of the current scene into a better one. So [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] is not trying to dictate what he will encounter once he crosses the desert on his centipede - he just wants something more interesting than the desert. And @Greeenfield isn't trying to dictate what s/he finds once the cliff has been Feater Fall-ed down - s/he is just trying to get closer to the culmination of the adventure.The setting hasn't changed, but the stakes have. And it is the stakes that are central to the scene. (You can frame a scene without setting, other than perhaps a bit of loosely-narrated set-dressing, but you can't frame a scene without stakes.) Hence Hussar is in my view correct:For me, this also emphasises how certain aspects of D&D are essentially about reframing, in the absence of a "say yes or roll the dice" rule.In a more modern indie-ish RPG, the feather fall ability would be numerically rated just like a climb skill. So if the players opted to use feather fall rather than climbing, the GM would have options like (i) still requiring a check (but with the complications being, say, blown off-course by the wind, rather than dashed brains at the bottom of the cliff), or (ii) saying yes. But the GM could also "say yes" to the climb, as well, if nothing dramatic was at stake.4e is somewhere between trad and modern in this respect, but it has distinctive features to prevent powers (from class or item) being shared around like the Ring of Feather Falling. Its "scene reframing" abilities are located in its ritual system, and that has enough features of its own to give the GM leeway on how to respond - in particular, rituals tend to have casting times of at least 10 minutes, which gives the GM enough ingame colour to allow the introduction of a new complication if it seems dramatically warranted.</blockquote>

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