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Hey All, Is This Encounter A Reasonable One?
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<blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 7133231" data-attributes="member: 6787650"><p>If a player likes to <em>know</em> what is coming, there are two ways to run it:</p><p></p><p>(1) You can put the responsibility on the DM and let the players know that they will never run into anything that hasn't been telegraphed in advance; or</p><p>(2) You can put the responsibility on the players and let the players know that they will never run into anything that they weren't capable of discovering in advance if they had looked for it.</p><p></p><p>If you're not having any fun running style #1, consider running style #2. Either the players will use a rogue/shadow monk/chainlock familiar to scout ahead (and you can have fun messing with the scout and/or with the split party while the scout is gone), or they won't, and you can have fun running ambushes like the above, except that the player who likes predictability will have to get mad at the other players for not scouting properly and not the DM.</p><p></p><p>This issue of "how do you feed the right amount of information to the players" is one that I continue to struggle with finding the right balance. Expecting too much information can really stress the DM out (finding ways to telegraph every little thing); giving too little can be unfair to the players. You can also "cheat" and give the PCs special magic items like a dangerometer that basically detects "encounters" and rates them on the Easy/Medium/Hard/Deadly scale; this takes a lot of stress off the DM (you no longer have to think of realistic ways to telegraph e.g. the presence of a purple worm, you just say, "the dangerometer just turned black!") but it is also a little bit gimmicky.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="FormerlyHemlock, post: 7133231, member: 6787650"] If a player likes to [I]know[/I] what is coming, there are two ways to run it: (1) You can put the responsibility on the DM and let the players know that they will never run into anything that hasn't been telegraphed in advance; or (2) You can put the responsibility on the players and let the players know that they will never run into anything that they weren't capable of discovering in advance if they had looked for it. If you're not having any fun running style #1, consider running style #2. Either the players will use a rogue/shadow monk/chainlock familiar to scout ahead (and you can have fun messing with the scout and/or with the split party while the scout is gone), or they won't, and you can have fun running ambushes like the above, except that the player who likes predictability will have to get mad at the other players for not scouting properly and not the DM. This issue of "how do you feed the right amount of information to the players" is one that I continue to struggle with finding the right balance. Expecting too much information can really stress the DM out (finding ways to telegraph every little thing); giving too little can be unfair to the players. You can also "cheat" and give the PCs special magic items like a dangerometer that basically detects "encounters" and rates them on the Easy/Medium/Hard/Deadly scale; this takes a lot of stress off the DM (you no longer have to think of realistic ways to telegraph e.g. the presence of a purple worm, you just say, "the dangerometer just turned black!") but it is also a little bit gimmicky. [/QUOTE]
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Hey All, Is This Encounter A Reasonable One?
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