Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6107114" data-attributes="member: 4937">I've already expressed the opinion that your description of your play is at odds with this statement.  You have expressed in your recounting of play complex calculations about what you thought would make the most interesting choice and have discussed at some length world exploration issues and conformity to the expectations of your setting (to say nothing about how your bottom up approach is creating setting as you go).  Yet, "player interest" and "story momentum" are so vague as to be definable however you wish for the purposes of this discussion or how you approach your GMing as a paradigm.  Whatever you do you can describe as "player interest or story momentum".  Whatever I do can be described as "player interest or story momentum".   It's a wonderfully abstract concept that doesn't really tie you down to anything.  "Yeah, I did that because I thought it would increase player interest."  Ok.  What's the opposite of that, "I did that because I thought it would disinterest players?"  And to me you seem to be attempting to prove rhetorical points that have little to do with your own play in practice, since your own play in practice does not seem to be nearly as inflexible with regards to style paradigm and decision making as you would make it here.  The outlines of your play from your story sessions bear minimal traces of this paradigm you are pushing, and could as I said have been produced by groups 20 years ago with no formal concept of what you are talking about.  They are typical results of anyone who does medium to heavy improv.  You seem to pick up on mechanical differences (a wandering encounter table) as being 'proof' of great difference in our approaches, without the slightest consideration for how wandering encounter tables might be used in practice (generous DM fiat is almost always used with regard to wandering monsters in play).Anyway, your story discussions are filled with statements like this: "They players decided that their PCs would try to tame and befriend the bear instead of fighting it. To keep the XP and pacing about the same as I'd planned, I decided to run this as a level 13 complexity 2 skill challenge (6 successes before 3 failures). That was another metagame-driven decision."  Is that or is that not being driven by "player interest"?  I can't tell, but it seems that 'metagame driven' is rather different than 'player interest".   Likewise, other than the mechanics unique to 4e, I can't see any way that your methodology differs from mine.  I also would allow skills to be used to befriend and tame the bear, and also would award full XP for turning a bear into a permenent ally as opposed to killing it.Then you say something like, "Here we see that, while mechanics are important, engagment with the fiction is permeating the whole episode and shaping the way that mechanical resources are deployed and that deployment adjudicated."  Ok....yeah.   What I saw was the plausible creative excercise of player abilities leading to the DM giving the player benefit of the doubt and allowing a skill check (fortune) where success indicated the player's desired outcome and failure indicated the contrary.  That's pretty darn standard DMing.I haven't stated "how I would handle the purchasing of a horse".  I stated about 5 different ways I would handle the purchasing of the horse depending on circumstances.   And for the record, I have stated that the operative way I have in fact been handling the purchasing of horses has been entirely off screen with at most 1 roll to determine sell price.   No, I haven't done that at all.  The concept was 'a lame horse' was brought up by someone other than me in an attempt to prove that I would always rule on minutia, and I flatly rejected that assertion by saying I had no interest in ruling on whether horses go lame and would not roll for it.  I have provided no coherent system for determining whether a horse would lame and have flatly stated that it would never be checked unless the fitness of a horse was important to the story.You ... ahhh nevermind.  What's the point.I believe once Hussar provided context it was established that I would skip the "desert" (for the record, it's not actually a desert, it's an abysmal expanse of decaying flesh broken up by groves of bone like projections resembling ribs, and there is no city either.  It's a crumbling cathedral, at least the first stop.), because it added nothing to the story (then again, I also suggested I might skip the whole scenario unless the PC's were evil because I thought it had too little tie in to player goals and motivations to make the scenario compelling).   And I further added that I'd only consider not skipping it if I could find a way to make it add to the story.</blockquote>

Verification