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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5754305" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>He says "An encounter with two guards at the city gate isn’t fun." I think the intention of this is pretty clear - don't make the players roleplay through every piece of minutiae their PCs are engaged in.</p><p></p><p>You may or may not like the advice, for RPGing in general or for D&D in particular, but I think the advice is pretty clear. And my personal view is that RPGing wouldn't be ruined if no more GMs made their players play through these sorts of non-dramatic scenes.</p><p></p><p>The qualification is on page 9 of the PHB, as I quoted upthread. If the players <em>want</em> to talk to the guards, then we have a noncombat encounter. The GM isn't given especially good advice on how to handle it (ie the skill challenge guidelines are poorly written, inexcusably so in my view given that the Maelstrom rulebooks, to give one example, predates 4e by 10 years or so), but that's a different matter.</p><p></p><p>I'm happy to put up some other entrants in that race: most of Gygax's advice about alignment and clerics in the DMG, for example; also, his advice on dealing with troublesome players (ethereal mummies, bolts of lightning from the heavens); also, his discussion of managing ingame time in the DMG; also, his characterisation of skilled play in the DMG and PHB, which sees its apotheosis in "flying thief on a rope, bomb-disposal-squad" play of the sort currently being discussed in the Tomb of Horrors thread; and various monsters in the Fiend Folio (Hound of Ill Omen, Aleax) which are essentially ingame sublimations of metagame disputes between GMs and players over alignment.</p><p></p><p>These all (i) fail to acknowledge a range of styles, (ii) settle on narrow (and, as far as alignment is concerned, in my view dysfunctional) approaches to the game, and (iii) in my experience have done far more damage to RPGing over the years than has what Wyatt said in his DMG.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 5754305, member: 42582"] He says "An encounter with two guards at the city gate isn’t fun." I think the intention of this is pretty clear - don't make the players roleplay through every piece of minutiae their PCs are engaged in. You may or may not like the advice, for RPGing in general or for D&D in particular, but I think the advice is pretty clear. And my personal view is that RPGing wouldn't be ruined if no more GMs made their players play through these sorts of non-dramatic scenes. The qualification is on page 9 of the PHB, as I quoted upthread. If the players [I]want[/I] to talk to the guards, then we have a noncombat encounter. The GM isn't given especially good advice on how to handle it (ie the skill challenge guidelines are poorly written, inexcusably so in my view given that the Maelstrom rulebooks, to give one example, predates 4e by 10 years or so), but that's a different matter. I'm happy to put up some other entrants in that race: most of Gygax's advice about alignment and clerics in the DMG, for example; also, his advice on dealing with troublesome players (ethereal mummies, bolts of lightning from the heavens); also, his discussion of managing ingame time in the DMG; also, his characterisation of skilled play in the DMG and PHB, which sees its apotheosis in "flying thief on a rope, bomb-disposal-squad" play of the sort currently being discussed in the Tomb of Horrors thread; and various monsters in the Fiend Folio (Hound of Ill Omen, Aleax) which are essentially ingame sublimations of metagame disputes between GMs and players over alignment. These all (i) fail to acknowledge a range of styles, (ii) settle on narrow (and, as far as alignment is concerned, in my view dysfunctional) approaches to the game, and (iii) in my experience have done far more damage to RPGing over the years than has what Wyatt said in his DMG. [/QUOTE]
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