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