The Guards at the Gate Quote

Some of the recent 3E/4E threads have brought up James Wyatt's quote about roleplaying an encounter with guards at the city gate.

An encounter with two guards at the city gate isn’t fun. Tell the players they get through the gate without much trouble and move on to the fun. Niggling details of food supplies and encumbrance usually aren’t fun, so don’t sweat them, and let the players get to the adventure and on to the fun. Long treks through endless corridors in the ancient dwarven stronghold beneath the mountains aren’t fun. Move the PCs quickly from encounter to encounter, and on to the fun!

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I don't really understand why this quote is so objectionable that it keeps coming up years later. To me it seems like common sense. Time is a relatively scarce resource when gaming, so why not spend it on pivotal encounters, and handwave the mundane?

Once, during the 3E times, I played in a Living Greyhawk game. The first part of this official, published adventure featured us, the heroes, delivering a wagon of tomatoes to a grocer in the city. The entire journey was roleplayed out, including the encounter with the city guards. Nothing interesting happened during that hour. No one made it hard to deliver the tomatoes. There was never any question of the tomatoes not being delivered. It wasted an entire hour of roleplaying time that could have been summed up in a minute with "You deliver the tomatoes to the grocer. The trip takes half a day."

Now, if it's the French Revolution, and your group has just rescued a family of aristocrats from the guillotine, and are smuggling them out of Paris in a cart filled with bolts of the finest French silks, then the encounter with the Jacobite Jacobin guards at the gates of Paris is enormously important, and should be roleplayed to the fullest.

But in the majority of cases, the guards at the gate are unimportant, and a poor use of time. I don't really see why that quote keeps being brought up.

I gather that a lot of players feel that the sort of activities labeled in the quote as "not fun" actually help with a feeling of simulation, that the game world is realistic. Some have taken this quote as emblematic of the notion that 4e is all about combat, with no role-playing. If you skip over all of the "not fun" parts, what's left? Just a bunch of fights? Where's the role playing?

I'm not saying this is MY perspective, mind you, but it's what I gather some other people feel from reading these threads.

But like many of the complainers you seem to ignore the OP's example of a fun roleplaying encounter. You gloss over that part and insist that immersion requires talking to the guards about your cart of tomatoes and any other style must then focus on combat. It seems that way to me anyway.

Curious

I have to admit I was wondering whether he thought this out properly.

IF his game was all about hack and slash with the meeting with the guards being irrelevant then why mention them at all?

To me those guards represent a potential information source, for example what if the Pcs wanted to know where the nearest healer was, or a temple of whatever god even the local wizards guild and they aren't from this area a simple streetwise wouldn't help if you were in a hurry.

Part of d&d to me is not just atmosphere, its also the personality you might want little more than a few hours to relieve the tension but you might also want something a mite more interesting, maybe something relevant to your character or for your dm a possible new subplot whether it results in them seriously annoying the city guard or developing a new contact that might help them when they really need it even if it just someone they know well enough to be able to ask questions even if its to catch up on whats been going on after all if your players are about to be framed wouldn't a friend warn them or at least try to help if they ask for the chance to prove their innocence when it involves facing their accusers before they have them jailed on trumped up charges?
Perhaps they need the help of someone they might know, you never know who they're related to after all.

Of course they could prefer the above option but then again why not offer them the option, let them decide whether they want to bother with something like this rather than have someone summarily discard something they might actually be interested in.

Let me know if i got the wrong end of the stick, it wouldn't be the first time but this feels wrong.

I used to be a Guard at the City Gate... then I took an arrow to the knee.

Because it is symptomatic of many such quotes - that those of us that have the PCs actually need to do something about the guards are having 'bad-wrong-fun'.

It was not just the result of a single quote, but quote after quote, with an attitude that made us feel that we were being disenfranchised. Deal with the guards? Nah, just fight! Traipse through the faerie ring? Nah, just fight! Build a character around skills or spells that are useful outside of combat? Nah, just fight!

Bah.

The Auld Grump

Not sure what Wyatt's intention was, but I read that as "get to the fun encounters, combat or otherwise". A steady diet of combat encounters with nothing to break up the monotony is just as bad as an endless number of pointless gate-guard encounters. Ya gotta get some roleplaying in there, just make it interesting and make it meaningful.

People don't like being told that their preferences are "unfun", "wrong", "bad", "broken", etc.

That quote states as assumed fact, that such encounters are not fun and should universally be avoided by players and DM's of RPG's.

If he had stated it as his preference, and then went on to explain how to bypass such encounters if it's also your (the readers) preference, I doubt people would have the issues with that quote that keep popping up.

James Wyatt made a relatively common mistake, but one that we should endeavor to avoid, of calling somebody elses preference "badwrongfun".

hopeless said:

Of course they could prefer the above option but then again why not offer them the option, let them decide whether they want to bother with something like this rather than have someone summarily discard something they might actually be interested in.

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Sorry, but that sounds really backwards.

You don't need to summarily discard something that you wouldn't need to put in in the first place.

If the players want to talk to the guards, they'll let the DM know.

If they don't, and the guards have nothing to do with the plot, why force it?

GSHamster said:

I don't really understand why this quote is so objectionable that it keeps coming up years later. To me it seems like common sense. Time is a relatively scarce resource when gaming, so why not spend it on pivotal encounters, and handwave the mundane?

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"The devil is in the details?"


"It's the journey not the destination?"


Or maybe, "A young bull and an old bull were up on a hill, looking over a pasture full of cows, and the young bull says . . ."