Providing Meaningful Choices?

[Raven Crowking]

Apparently they only burned the hall after they'd killed the giants, so there was no content bypassing.

Well, a couple of caveats here:

* We know that they bypassed content in the dungeon, because they failed to discover the major treasure. AFAICT, they killed the manticores, then went back upstairs.

* It is possible that giants the players were unaware of remained. AFAICT, only the giants in the feasthall were killed to a man.

Seems to me a GM who can't compensate for a major bypass of his main session point is falling down on the job.

I would think so, too.

I draw a distinction between exploiting facts of the game world and environment, and exploiting the DM.

Me too.

(Either great minds think alike, or fools seldom differ. Yours to decide! )


RC

 

[Doug McCrae]

That's how I see it. Seems to me a GM who can't compensate for a major bypass of his main session point is falling down on the job. Surely most good GMs have a plan B in mind, or are able to improvise something on the spot.

It's easier to do that in D&D with all those random tables and a Monster Manual full of opposition.

Most GMs don't run a sandbox imo. Most have one adventure prepared for tonight and if it falls over quickly there's nothing else. Improv, you say? Well, for a lot of GMs their improvised material is a lot less good than their prepared material, so the players' reward for their cleverness is a less enjoyable session.

I was a player in a D&D game a while back where we bypassed most of an adventure by climbing the outside of a mountain instead of going thru the tunnels. In fact I was the one who suggested it I think. These days I don't believe that was a good idea. The GM has written content for the purpose of entertaining the players. Why would I want to avoid any of it?

 

[Scribble]

Could well be. Smoke and carbon monoxide are denser than air, though, and in the environment of 1e, I would have the giants escape outside if at all possible.

Are they? Not enough time to do any googlefoo... but if this is the case, why do they always say to stay low in a smoke filled environment?

As in the case of changing venues and meeting the girl, who's to say your future wife wasn't in the first bar? The significance of such a choice is revealed after the fact, such that coincidence and meaning are just a matter of perspective.

No one- that was the point, that the importance or consequence was only apparent after the fact in this case.

The short of it is, after PCs do stuff, try to make some future stuff tied to past stuff the PCs have seen or done. A simple literary trick.

But he's also asking for the other kind, where the choice has apparent consequences, so the players have "something to think about" with some choices.

I agree, that trying to do this for EVERY event would be... insanity. But like real life there should be a mix of them.

 

[Janx]

Could well be. Smoke and carbon monoxide are denser than air, though, and in the environment of 1e, I would have the giants escape outside if at all possible.



It may be deemed a failure now, back in the day this was the first-place team. How "smart play" became equal to "bad play" I'll never know; but I suspect it had something to do with 2e and the rise of the "Plan out what will happen in your game session" meme.


RC

I don't know about being bad play, or 2E-ism design. I do know it's pretty easy to design a site made of wood (not a traditional dungeon, but realistic enough for the scene), and forget that the players could just set it on fire.

I had that happen in the 1st session of 1 campaign, and before they did it, I had to remind them that the BBEG supposdly had their crewmate in there. Otherwise, I very nearly had my simple short 1st adventure cut down dramatically.

I could have made the structure of stone to avoid that, but it seemed natural that it be of wood. I was just lucky that I could present the players with information that presented a Choice that would potentially discourage them from short-cutting my adventure dramatically.

I like the idea of setting up Situations, as thats what I try to do (and perhaps I misuse the word Plot when I describe it).

it may be, that as part of the design stage of an adventure, the GM check for:
chokepoints where if X doesn't happen the goal is stuck?
what if the PCs set it on fire?
what if the PCs go the wrong way, but think they are going the right way?
What if the PCs take too long?
What if the PCs fail at something?

I think if the PC deliberately go the wrong way (or don't bite the hook) or get hostile with non-enemies, the adventure you planned to run is done and you enter failure mode. Which is its own situation to deal with, and relatively a different topic/problem.

 

[LostSoul]

What I want to talk about is how do you come up with Questions, and how do you get the players to care about those Questions? How do you get the players to care about them? Where do you put them? Do you just use those related to Goals, or should you use the non-goal, moral/RP ones? Where do you put them? How do you tie them into your adventures successfully?

What you want are flags. Flags are simply things on the character sheet that the player says, "This is what I'm interested in."

In 4E you might do something like ask each player to write a Quest for themselves (or have them pick from a big DM-generated list). That's the Question. All you have to do is challenge or explore that Question.

Quests are good at this because they tie back into other parts of the character sheet through XP and GP, as well as the setting because of the consequences of character choice during the resolution of the Quest.

The cycle is Quest -> Adventure -> XP, GP, setting consequences -> Character effectiveness, resources, and positioning -> Bigger, higher Level, more consequential Quests -> Higher Level adventure -> More XP, GP, bigger setting consequences -> more Character effectiveness, resources, and positioning -> repeat until there are no more interesting Quests to generate interesting adventures).

Sorry for the fancy terms, I have been looking at currency cycles for my hack lately so I have it on the brain. Effectiveness = things like your attack bonus, Resources = things like HP, Positioning = things like your personality, your connection to society and the general setting. As far as I understand the terms.

 

[Doug McCrae]

I don't know about being bad play, or 2E-ism design. I do know it's pretty easy to design a site made of wood (not a traditional dungeon, but realistic enough for the scene), and forget that the players could just set it on fire.

It seems amazing but it is possible to forget how much players love to set things on fire. I think they love it even more than magic items.

The 'blowing up the whole base' bit is one that comes up more in modern games due to the existence of explosives. The GM has obviously intended a 'room by room' typical roleplaying adventure. The players blow all the rooms up. It was suggested once in my last campaign, with regards to a nazi base on the moon, but I think some PCs (only some, mind) thought it would be too evil (and this in a superhero game). It can be avoided by having hostages in the base, like you say.

 

[Scribble]

It seems amazing but it is possible to forget how much players love to set things on fire. I think they love it even more than magic items.

The 'blowing up the whole base' bit is one that comes up more in modern games due to the existence of explosives. The GM has obviously intended a 'room by room' typical roleplaying adventure. The players blow all the rooms up. It was suggested once in my last campaign, with regards to a nazi base on the moon, but I think some PCs (only some, mind) thought it would be too evil (and this in a superhero game). It can be avoided by having hostages in the base, like you say.

I think there's a disjunction in there that you also notice when watching movies...

Game is designed so it's fun to go "through" the adventure, fighting bad guys, and ultimately getting to your goal.

Movies are fun to watch the hero go through his adventure fighting badguys and ultimately getting to his goal.

Person watching thinks... why's he fighting all those mooks when he could just blow the whole place up???

The answer is, because it's fun to watch him bash on mooks.

RPGs give him a stage within which to test this question though.

PC blows the whole place up. Adventure ends, just as the movie would end, and the next few hours of game time are spent "ad-hocking random stuff."

Fun the first few times you learn you can "do anything!" but tends to loose it's effect after a while... and you begin to miss all the fun stuff you could have done instead of ad-hocking stuff.

At least in my experience.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Are they? Not enough time to do any googlefoo... but if this is the case, why do they always say to stay low in a smoke filled environment?

D'oh! Brainfart. You are, of course, correct.


RC

 

[Celebrim]

It seems amazing but it is possible to forget how much players love to set things on fire. I think they love it even more than magic items.

It actually tends to create artifacts in the rules. For example, the fact that 3e fireballs didn't set things on fire was in part motivated by how easily many plots were derailed in 1e by players simply casting fireball and blowing the whole adventure up. It's not justthat it was an 'I win' button because in 1e said players had a tendency to blow themselves up if they used the spell indiscriminately, but it did mean that a carefully planned haunted house/criminal hideout/giants stronghold filled with more than three clues might suddenly turn into ashes.

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

It's easier to do that in D&D with all those random tables and a Monster Manual full of opposition.

Most GMs don't run a sandbox imo. Most have one adventure prepared for tonight and if it falls over quickly there's nothing else. Improv, you say? Well, for a lot of GMs their improvised material is a lot less good than their prepared material, so the players' reward for their cleverness is a less enjoyable session.

Fair enough. The handful of GMs I've played with were always ridiculously adept (or even too adept?) at improv, so sometimes I think that's the norm. Also, maybe I'm a little over-prepared compared to some GMs, as I keep a binder full of hooks, pre-gen "emergency" maps & encounters, randomizing tables, etc, so the "improv" I refer to above is actually fairly well-defined. And of course unused material prepped for that session just goes into the binder.

I was a player in a D&D game a while back where we bypassed most of an adventure by climbing the outside of a mountain instead of going thru the tunnels. In fact I was the one who suggested it I think. These days I don't believe that was a good idea. The GM has written content for the purpose of entertaining the players. Why would I want to avoid any of it?

That's a really good point. It seems fair to me, then, for a GM to simply tell the players, "This is what I have prepared; if you blow up the place, I'll have to pull something out of my [hat], and that might not be as interesting for you."

And then the players proceed to blow up stuff anyway, because explosions are ALWAYS interesting.