Be honest, how long would it really take you to notice all of this stuff...?

[Emerikol]

I think there are any number of ways to play D&D successfully. For my playstyle and yes this time I mean it in the broadest sense, detailed preparation adds to the play experience.

I'm not though a railroading DM. I run sandbox campaigns almost exclusively these days. My players totally drive the action. By having a detailed world with lots of opportunities for adventure allows my players the freedom to do whatever they want. The world keeps moving around them too.

So I don't believe one implies the other. Detailed DMs are just detailed. I'm sure beyond that they can be any other type of DM.

As for setting unfair expectations for new DMs, I find DMs inclined to run my style of game start out using prepackaged worlds and sandbox adventures. Once they see how its done they start doing their own. It's not hard so much as time consuming. It does take some creativity of course but really no more than other types of DMs.

 

[Savage Wombat]

​

IME, many of the times when people start talking about how this or that rule is broken, there's a fair number of times the brokenness is due to user error rather than the math behind it. This is one of the things I really appreciate about WOTC D&D, either 3rd or 4th edition. The math is accurate more times than it isn't. Being able to trust the mechanics and not having to constantly audit the books is a major plus in my books.

I knew a guy back in 1e with an incredibly broken barbarian character. Turns out the "broken" part was the "DM never audited the character sheet" and hadn't seen that the guy screwed up the math calculating his AC bonus. He was not happy when I pointed this out.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Unless I badly understood the posts in question, [MENTION=67338]GMforPowergamers[/MENTION] was holding the toughness of the monsters constants as the PCs in the game gained levels. But that constant toughness was mechanically realised in changing ways - solo to elite to minion.

well what I was trying to show was that I used 4e mechanics (in the past I used 2e, 3e, 3.5 Wod, Rifts, Shadowrun, and other mechanics) to make a fun game that was internally consistent.

The first few times they ran into these guys they were hard to hit and had a bunch of powers... they hit hard and were very deadly.

The next few times they ran into them they still were tough, but the didn't hit hard enough to be too hard, and the fights were a little faster

the final time they ran through hundreds of them because 'in game' they got better and they they upgraded and they learned how to fight them...


See I could write a good tv show with what happened (well one with a downer ending... I mean like 95% TPK and the world all but destroyed)

I could also make a good story with out the minion rules...but I made THIS story with them...

 

[Emerikol]

For the record I personally do not like a game that is relative to the players instead of some objective standard. So I'd want the same ogre to always have the same stat block regardless of PC level.

Just my pref.

 

[Lanefan]

The "necessity" arises from the desire to have smooth and engaging gameplay. It's the same reason that most people, if they want to run a combat of 100 vs 100, will look for mechanical tooset other than core D&D combat. (I gather 5e is going to come with such a Battlesystem built in.)

As to "destructive to internal consistency", how so? What internal consistency has been destroyed? If the toughness of the ogre, or giant, or whatever, is constant, where is the destruction? Heck, I've preserved internal consistency of gameworlds across changes in system eg from D&D to Rolemaster.

Preserving true consistency across a system change can't have been easy. I went through this as a player - a game I'd been in for quite some time changed from 3e to 3.5e on the fly with the pre-warned knowledge that consistency was going to suffer. And it did.

Within the same system, a creature's toughness is in part measured and-or defined by its hit points; and if those and other elements of its makeup change arbitrarily (rules-based, not DM-based) based on what it's facing that's not very consistent.

Lan-"of course, if it was a DM-based change people would be screaming blue murder"-efan

 

[Lanefan]

I also agree with [MENTION=205]TwoSix[/MENTION] that there is often an assumption that more world prep will lead to a better play experience,

Which, in my own experience, is a very valid assumption that I will happily continue to make: if all other things are equal, a well-prepped world will give a better game than an unprepped one. For much the same reason, a homebrew setting will (usually) give a better game than a canned setting, because the DM has invested her own imagination into it rather than simply reading and assimilating the imaginations of others.

It's not that simple to present a deep rich setting for your players to bash around in without first presenting it to yourself during design.

Lan-"and of course, as with anything, taking world design to extremes leads to quickly diminishing returns"-efan

 

[pemerton]

Within the same system, a creature's toughness is in part measured and-or defined by its hit points

But it is not defined solely by its hit points. In 4e, in particular, it is defined also by its level, which determine attack bonus, defences and damage.

Hence the fact that toughness can be held constant while the factors that contribute to it are re-arranged.

 

[Pickles JG]

Which, in my own experience, is a very valid assumption that I will happily continue to make: if all other things are equal, a well-prepped world will give a better game than an unprepped one. For much the same reason, a homebrew setting will (usually) give a better game than a canned setting, because the DM has invested her own imagination into it rather than simply reading and assimilating the imaginations of others.

It's not that simple to present a deep rich setting for your players to bash around in without first presenting it to yourself during design.

Lan-"and of course, as with anything, taking world design to extremes leads to quickly diminishing returns"-efan

While I expect tbis is true for well prepared homebrew it not the case for poorly fleshed out settings or ones in which the DM does a poor job of communicating it. It's why I like playing in the Realms say as there is a lot of shared background that can colour the game. I also feel that a lot of back story is for DM's rather than player's benefits, though that's their perogative to write (but the Onan references do spring unbidden to mind)

There is an issue with communicating background without massive exposition dumps. For myself I appreciate fluff but as a rule dislike reading it. How do you communicate details of a homebrew setting to the players? Hmm could be another topic

 

[Nagol]

Thanks for the post. What you depict below is very akin to the formalized advice/process for creating and handling the evolution of fronts in Dungeon World. What you've described is very familiar to me. It is, as you put it, pretty much in the middle. I've run games on both ends of the spectrum and areas in between. My current GMing best practices does push play towards low resolution setting backstory at the outset ("lots of blanks") and just enough calibrated PC backstory such that all of those setting blanks can be filled in during play (by our play) and the trajectory of the "story" is established alongside it through deft GMing (provoking players' thematic material that they have embedded within their characters) and player investment in the conflicts to be resolved.

I've found over the years that if I demand myself to be spontaneous and improvisational, I will deliver the goods and enjoy the experience more than if I prepped meticulously. Further, I've found that if I leave enough spaces/blanks for my players to fill, and demand the same level of creativity, they will deliver the goods coherently (from a genre perspective and an internal consistency perspective). In contrast, I've found that as the shared imaginary space is contracted (due to less blanks/higher resolution setting/rigid adherence to established canon), operant conditioning takes hold and players constantly look to me to vet their creative impulses. That is not what I want from me, not what I want from them, and not what I want out of our play.

I know you (and others) have had reservations about an abstraction: player agency infringement correlation. There is, of course, a natural arrestment of the causal logic chain for real life actors as information is lost. However, RPG players naturally function in a low resolution environment where sensory and spatial information is fundamentally retarded with respect to real life. Regardless of how well the GM conveys "the dynamics on the ground", there will be an inescapable perspective dissonance from player to GM and from player to player. Each player must assimilate what the GM has conveyed, what other players have conveyed, the context for that information, along with the required in-fill of their own, unique perception bias. Understanding that reality, playing with tools that zoom out a bit in response to that (broad descriptor resources and conflict resolution), heady GMing/attentive playing, and synchronicity on genre conceits has served to protect against any player agency infringement because of abstraction.

The above also applies to the exchange that Sadras[/mention and pemerton are having.

I have no idea what "player agency infringement correlation" is -- player agency correlated against what and how is it an abstraction?

My style is pretty improvisational as well -- sandboxes by their nature need to be I think. The wider the choices available to the players, the more improvisation is necessary. The tools guide me as to what the players will find the next time they turn their attention somewhere and what is information is available in their environment. The tools I described help deal with the necessarily restricted information flow to the players by providing post-hoc justification for coincidence and in-game occurrences of a type directly perceived by the players.

Don't mistake my preference as a player (actor stance only, no actions dictated by me that do not have a corresponding decision point for the character) with my DMing style. I'm happy with a collaborative approach and player input into the campaign -- more than my players are, it seems. I enjoy running games like FATE or My Life with Master where the players have a much stronger voice about how situations unfold, have added player agency via Lion Rampant's Whimsy Cards (a randomised player meta-game asset) to a variety of games, player world-building is encouraged and most campaigns have a standing offer for anyone to DM any situation with the only restriction being it can't directly contradict current table understanding (my current Conspiracy-X campaign doesn't have this offer since the players don't have sufficient knowledge as to how the world works at this point; once they work out the rules and relationships it'll open up again).

 

[Quartz]

I'm late to the party so I'm responding to some of the early posts...

3E imbalance was recognisable as a possible problem out of the gate. But really CoDzilla etc are only problems if you allow players to get away with nova. Sure the cleric can cast a spell or two to become a better fighter than the fighter, but the cleric can only do it once or twice a day. And when they do nova, hit them with a Dispel Magic or Disjunction; play the enemy spellcasters intelligently (and maybe it's the enemy rogue who's using a Ring of Spell Storing or using her UMD skill). And enemies don't sit still; they will harry the PCs. Enemies will act as their intelligence directs. Also, give players downtime to create magic items, especially scrolls of less-used spells (the 4E concept of rituals for such seems a very useful alternative). Expect spellcasters to be a level or two behind non-spellcasters. Encourage the use of XP-burning spells like Permanency, and Wish.

And then there's multiclassing...