4e does not have an explicit Rule 0, no. Hence our earlier exchange - as you pointed out, there are those hints of it still lurking in some of the world-design guidelines.
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Why I don't GM by the nose
- Thread starter fireinthedust
- Start date
Agreed. The point I was trying to make was that (IMO) 4e heads more in this sort of direction than earlier versions of D&D, or at least (in the case of examples like being the son of a Baron) better facilitates it.
We play every 2nd to 3rd weekend for 4 hours or so, and don't keep up an especially cracking pace in that time. I don't know if it will go for 8 years, but I'd think 5+ is pretty likely, assuming everyone wants to keep going.
A 1st ed AD&D Fiend Folio humanoid. From memory, it paints itself in war paint and wields a sharp sword (maybe a scimitar?) which has some sort of critical/max-damage/vorpal feature. I think (but am not sure) that Qullan's would be on the Unearthed Arcana expanded list of giant class creatures against which Rangers get a damage bonus.
That's part of what I mean. To give an example. One of the PCs in my current game is a Drow rebel who worships Corellon (the Elven god of magic). He is also a sorcerer who draws power from the Elemental Chaos and the Abyss. At night, by the campfire, he sings ancient Drow lays of when they lived in the surface world beneath the stars and beside the waters. And his long-term goal is to reunify the races of Elvenkind.
Now that's character backstory and goals. It's not a plot per se. But what it tells me is that this player wants adventures and encounters that enliven these various elements: from small things, like his fluency in Elven making a difference, to big things, like having to choose whether to draw power from the Abyss even though that may strengthen the hand of Lolth and thus reduce the propspects of any unsundering of the Elves.
As I build these sorts of opportunities for that player into the game, I define more and more of the backstory of the world. The player's responses to those opportunities - which are influence by how they tie into the backstory and are likely to shape the development of the world - make the game unfold.
By "the plot" of my game I would generally mean the thematically relevant backstory, plus the choices the players have made for their PCs in response to that backstory, plus the immediate consequences of the resolution of those choices, plus the stuff that is likely to come next in the game in response to what has unfolded so far.
This last part of "the plot" - being oriented towards the future - is of course provisional, even in some cases conjectural. But I still have it in mind when I design encounters/adventures/backstory - I want what is happening in the game at present to at least be consistent with, and at best be supportive of, the destination that the game seems to be heading towards. For example, I envision one element of the culmination of this Drow PC's Epic Destiny being a confrontation with Lolth (who is statted out in the 4e MM3), and I always have that in the back of my mind when designing adventures and encounters at the moment. But if it turns out that this isn't going to happen (eg maybe at some stage the PC will change his mind and become a Lolth worshipper) then I will have to respond to those changes in further developing adventures, encounters and backstory.
Hussar
Legend
For someone who goes out of their way to jump on me every time I might misunderstand something, you're awfully quick to add in things that aren't there.
I'll stand by the point that the DM has way more power to end a game. Even without any "major problems". All a DM has to say is, "Gee guys, I'm really not liking this anymore, let's do something else." and the game ends. It takes an entire group of players to do that to end a campaign.
Lanefan has multiyear camapigns where only a small fraction of the original players are present at the end of the campaign. No single player, and frequently no minority of player numbers can end a campaign. But, OTOH, all Lanefan has to do to end his campaign is say, "Guys, it's over."
How is this not an example of much greater DM control?
But, in any case, yes, your comment, " But if you meant to say nothing more insightful than "DMs have more ways to effect events inside the game", then, my bad, I'll just move along..." is pretty much spot on. Go back and reread the thread. I was discussing with Beginning of the End how players had even remotely equal power to effect events inside the game and that's all I was discussing.
In fact, I believe, I actually approved of the idea that DM's have greater control over their game. Design by committee is not something I want to see in tabletop games as a standard.
It would be really nice if just once the peanut gallery would argue the point and not the poster.
Raven Crowking, I'll quote but with some snippage and rearrangement. I think you are right that there has been some miscommunication, but I also think there is an element of disagreement (resulting at least in part, I think, from a difference of emphasis - what I describe upthread as a difference of playstyle).
Thus if I mention a barkeep to my players they are likely to infer that s/he is an evil cultist, or otherwise of potential interest to them. For some playstyles (eg where it is supposed to be a mystery as to who the cultists are) this wouldn't work. But that's not the sort of game I'm genrally GMing. I will try to explain in more detail below, but in brief, the way I prevent choices from being obvious is not by concealing the optimal choice through inclusiong of camouflaging detail, but by elminating the notion of optimal choice. Once the players know that the barkeep is a cultist, what is the optimal choice for them to make? There isn't one. How they respond depends on where they want the game, and the story of their PCs, to go.
As I said above, I think this is a playstyle thing. I believe (from past posts of yours) that your playstyle is at least somewhat Gygaxian (based on 1st ed PHB notions of "good play"). Anyway, that's the way in which I'm reading your posts. My playstyle is fairly different.
This is not the only way of doing it, obviously, and from your posts I gather not your preferred way. As I said, it's a playstyle thing. No one in my game is interested in descriptions of ingame forest landscapes to the requisite degree of detail to do it otherwise. I would not therefore say that my gameworld lacks colour or texture. But the description of that colour and texture is focused elsewhere, on the things (like statues of Orcus) that are salient given my best guess at player interests as manifested through their PC builds and backstories and their prior play of those PCs.
There is no answer to this question. From the metagame point of view, any is a possible route to XP (whether combat XP, skill challenge XP, quest XP or more than one of the above). Also from the metagame point of view, any is likely to produce an interesting game, although each is obviously interesting in a different sort of way.
From the ingame point of view, some choices are obviously more optimal than others relative to a given set of PC goals, but the whole point of the example is that the choices invovle, to an extent at least, setting the PC's goals.
Furthermore, as a GM, I couldn't predetermine an optimal choice because the range of options isn't known to me. It is created by the player in question. As a GM I respond to the possibilities raised or actions undertaken as best I can, using the encounter-building and action-resolution rules the game gives me. (I should add - this example is a slightly pared-down example of something that actually happened in the course of play. The player ended up choosing to try and cleanse the statue. I resolved the attempt using the rules on page 42 of the 4e DMG, and awarded XP for completing a minor quest. This was only a minor piece of action, but it helped set the overall scene for further undead-related developments in the campaign.)
As to the move to (3), which you say is a non-sequitur - I had taken you to suggest that the notion of only including "relevant" details is pernicious, because it leads to the GM signalling the optimal choice and thereby depriving the players of the opportunity to choose. If I misunderstood you in so taking you, I apologise. But what I tried to do with the Orcus statue example was to provide an example where including only relevant details, so far from being pernicious because a way of signalling optimal choices, is in fact the very way in which the possibility of genuine player choice is opened up. But the choice in question is not a game-mechanical or tactical choice. It is a thematic or aesthetic choice.
This is not the only sort of choice that comes up in my games - once combat starts, for example, I resolve it using the standard 4e rules and this opens up the space for many tactical choices by players, which can be more or less optimal. Even in respect of these choices, however, I don't think it hurts to focus primarily on relevant (ie thematically salient) features of the ingame situation. In a recent combat I ran, for example, the PCs had to stop a ritual and rescue the prisoners being used as sacrifices in the ritual. Their were two main ways to fight the battle: stay in a defensible position near the entry to the ritual room, beat the guards, and then deal with the enemy ritualists; or, go immediately to the ritual circle on the other side of the room and try and stop the ritual, but then have to fight more foes simultaneously from a much more vulnerable position. My players took the first option, and found the combat quite a bit easier than I had anticipated, but failed to save one of the prisoners, because they didn't stop the ritual in time. A meangingful choice was made, with obvious ingame ramficiations (as well as resulting in fewer than maximum quest XP). It wasn't thwarted by a failure to desribe non-relevant details of the situation. Nor did I telegraph matters - indeed, in designing the encounter it hadn't occurred to me that the players would adopt the course of action they actually took. I assumed that they would try to rescue the prisoners straight away.
But this is also a case where the notion of "optimal choice" has no real purchase. What is optimal - to rescue both prisoner via a more risky strategy, or to increase the risk to the prisoners by adopting a safer strategy? It's rather a question of the players settling their own priorities, and the goals of their PCs.
I don't agree that "a real choice being offered is impinged upon in direct proportion to the degree to which the optimal choice is clear to the players", because it presupposes that there is an optimal choice. And I therefore don't agree with your conclusion about relevance/irrelevance. The point of interesting NPCs, for example, is not that optimal choices are obscured, but that interacting with them will give rise to multiple courses of action that are viable and exciting relative to the game me and my players want to play. So evil cultists make interesting NPCs (they can be killed, bargained with, converted, or gain converts, all of which have exciting implications for a game in which multiple PCs are priests or paladins, even the non-clergy PCs have strong religious commitments, and this is not just because the players wanted a PC with healing but because they enjoy exploring the mythic/religious dimension of the gameworld and of game play). Barkeeps, as a general rule, do not.
Thus if I mention a barkeep to my players they are likely to infer that s/he is an evil cultist, or otherwise of potential interest to them. For some playstyles (eg where it is supposed to be a mystery as to who the cultists are) this wouldn't work. But that's not the sort of game I'm genrally GMing. I will try to explain in more detail below, but in brief, the way I prevent choices from being obvious is not by concealing the optimal choice through inclusiong of camouflaging detail, but by elminating the notion of optimal choice. Once the players know that the barkeep is a cultist, what is the optimal choice for them to make? There isn't one. How they respond depends on where they want the game, and the story of their PCs, to go.
As I said above, I think this is a playstyle thing. I believe (from past posts of yours) that your playstyle is at least somewhat Gygaxian (based on 1st ed PHB notions of "good play"). Anyway, that's the way in which I'm reading your posts. My playstyle is fairly different.
See, my preferred solution to this particular conundrum is to assign the Wolf-in-Sheep's Clothing a Stealth score, and to only mention it under one of two conditions: a PC succeeds on a perception check, in which case I mention that they notice a carnivorous plant disguised as a rabbit on a stump; or no PC succeeds on a percpetion check, at least one PC comes within range of the monster, and I mention that the PC is a victim of a surprise round from a carnivorous plant disguised as a rabbit on a stump.
This is not the only way of doing it, obviously, and from your posts I gather not your preferred way. As I said, it's a playstyle thing. No one in my game is interested in descriptions of ingame forest landscapes to the requisite degree of detail to do it otherwise. I would not therefore say that my gameworld lacks colour or texture. But the description of that colour and texture is focused elsewhere, on the things (like statues of Orcus) that are salient given my best guess at player interests as manifested through their PC builds and backstories and their prior play of those PCs.
I don't fully agree with your (2) - the reason that the optimal choice is not obvious is because there is no optimal choice. Is it optimal for a paladin of the Raven Queen to betray his mistress and throw in his lot with Orcus? Or to remain faitfhul, but in cowardly fashion leave the statue undisturbed because he fears he can't deal with it at his current level of power? Or to try and cleanse it, even though this risks corruption? Or to . . .?
There is no answer to this question. From the metagame point of view, any is a possible route to XP (whether combat XP, skill challenge XP, quest XP or more than one of the above). Also from the metagame point of view, any is likely to produce an interesting game, although each is obviously interesting in a different sort of way.
From the ingame point of view, some choices are obviously more optimal than others relative to a given set of PC goals, but the whole point of the example is that the choices invovle, to an extent at least, setting the PC's goals.
Furthermore, as a GM, I couldn't predetermine an optimal choice because the range of options isn't known to me. It is created by the player in question. As a GM I respond to the possibilities raised or actions undertaken as best I can, using the encounter-building and action-resolution rules the game gives me. (I should add - this example is a slightly pared-down example of something that actually happened in the course of play. The player ended up choosing to try and cleanse the statue. I resolved the attempt using the rules on page 42 of the 4e DMG, and awarded XP for completing a minor quest. This was only a minor piece of action, but it helped set the overall scene for further undead-related developments in the campaign.)
As to the move to (3), which you say is a non-sequitur - I had taken you to suggest that the notion of only including "relevant" details is pernicious, because it leads to the GM signalling the optimal choice and thereby depriving the players of the opportunity to choose. If I misunderstood you in so taking you, I apologise. But what I tried to do with the Orcus statue example was to provide an example where including only relevant details, so far from being pernicious because a way of signalling optimal choices, is in fact the very way in which the possibility of genuine player choice is opened up. But the choice in question is not a game-mechanical or tactical choice. It is a thematic or aesthetic choice.
This is not the only sort of choice that comes up in my games - once combat starts, for example, I resolve it using the standard 4e rules and this opens up the space for many tactical choices by players, which can be more or less optimal. Even in respect of these choices, however, I don't think it hurts to focus primarily on relevant (ie thematically salient) features of the ingame situation. In a recent combat I ran, for example, the PCs had to stop a ritual and rescue the prisoners being used as sacrifices in the ritual. Their were two main ways to fight the battle: stay in a defensible position near the entry to the ritual room, beat the guards, and then deal with the enemy ritualists; or, go immediately to the ritual circle on the other side of the room and try and stop the ritual, but then have to fight more foes simultaneously from a much more vulnerable position. My players took the first option, and found the combat quite a bit easier than I had anticipated, but failed to save one of the prisoners, because they didn't stop the ritual in time. A meangingful choice was made, with obvious ingame ramficiations (as well as resulting in fewer than maximum quest XP). It wasn't thwarted by a failure to desribe non-relevant details of the situation. Nor did I telegraph matters - indeed, in designing the encounter it hadn't occurred to me that the players would adopt the course of action they actually took. I assumed that they would try to rescue the prisoners straight away.
But this is also a case where the notion of "optimal choice" has no real purchase. What is optimal - to rescue both prisoner via a more risky strategy, or to increase the risk to the prisoners by adopting a safer strategy? It's rather a question of the players settling their own priorities, and the goals of their PCs.
I don't quite follow. If the statue is mentioned and the players don't pick up on it, then as a GM I have made a minor mistake - insofar as I have included an element in my description that I had expected to be of interest to one or more players, given my best guess as to what they're looking for from the game, and my expectation has turned out to be mistaken. Given that the players haven't picked up on it, nothing is likely to come of it. If, subsequently, the players do pick up on it (eg "I remember something about an Orcus statue back there - maybe we should see if by cleansing that we can reduce the undeads' strength") then it has become relevant (and suppose they go and cleanse it, succeeding in a quick skill challenge, they can all have a +2 on their next attack roll against undead, or some similar modest benefit, as well as XP for the skill challenge itself and perhaps a minor quest).
I don't follow this. If the existence of the statue is mentioned, then it is there. If not, it is not. I don't quite see how the next campaign is relevant - is the concern that another group of PCs might enter the same dungeon? I don't design campaign worlds or dungeons in that sort of way, as environs to be explored independent of any particular set of PCs/players. I design them (or, more often, adapt them from modules) with particular PCs and players in mind, and I continue to tweak them up until the moment I run them in order to maximise their relevance (in the sense I've been describing) to those particular players. This is not a full-fledged "no myth" style of play, because I do prepare in advance (I find that 4e demands a degree of advanced preparation if it is to give its best), but it tends at least somewhat in that direction.
Raven Crowking
First Post
Okay, let's talk about choices for a second.
(1) In order for a choice to be meaningful, the result of a given option cannot be the same as that of all other possible options.
If I say "Choose a number between 1 and 6", but the result is the same regardless of what you choose, then there is no real choice. This is the problem I have with "Regardless of whether the PCs go left or right, the same thing is waiting for them" GMing.
(2) Assuming any goal, whether GM-presented or player-driven, if the result of an option moves the PCs forward toward that goal, it is (in general) a better option than one that does not. Likewise, if resources are to be taken into account, an option that reduces expenditure whil moving toward a goal is (in general) superior to one that includes heavy resource attrition.
(3) Since we are discussing the results of meaningful choices, there must be both context (sufficient information to at least make the choice something other than the result of random chance) and sufficient consequence (i.e., all choices cannot be equally optimal based upon the goals of the players, whether self-generated or GM-generated) to make the choice meaningful.
A choice where no option is more optimal than any other is, essentially, meaningless. Counter-examples always, perforce, contain some element of optimization, even if what is optimal is the level of fun the participants enjoy.
For example, if you say
The point of interesting NPCs, for example, is not that optimal choices are obscured, but that interacting with them will give rise to multiple courses of action that are viable and exciting relative to the game me and my players want to play.
I would point out that those multiple courses of action allow for choices that optimize what game you and your players want to play (i.e., they allow the players to drive the game in a direction they find more enjoyable), and the excitement arises from the tension between what is known and unknown while driving the game in that direction.
For example, you say
Once the players know that the barkeep is a cultist, what is the optimal choice for them to make? There isn't one.
But, then, your next sentence demonstrates that, in fact, there is one.
How they respond depends on where they want the game, and the story of their PCs, to go.
"Optimal choice" =/= "mechanically optimal choice" of necessity (although, of course, it does in some contexts).
The same problem lies at the root of your other examples. You are not describing cases where there is no optimal choice, you are describing cases where there is insufficient information (specifically, the desires of the player in question; i.e., that player's interest that makes one option better than another) to know the optimal choice.
It does not follow that, because you and I see different choices as optimal, there is no optimal choice. Nor does it follow that, because you and I would choose differently under conditions where consequences are obscured, that we would discover that we had made the "best" choice for our desires.
Given my initial premise (that "a real choice being offered is impinged upon in direct proportion to the degree to which the optimal choice is clear to the players"), it seems somewhat odd to me that you would attempt to refute that by demonstrating real choices where the optimal choice is even more obscure!
Or, perhaps, another way of putting it might be
From the ingame point of view, some choices are obviously more optimal than others relative to a given set of PC goals, but the whole point of the example is that the choices invovle, to an extent at least, setting the PC's goals.
which seems perfectly consistent with what I was saying, to me!
Moreover, the part of my post that you didn't get (about the statue) seems in conflict with this idea. Knowing that the players are not going to find a statue, or a barkeep, interesting presupposes that you can predetermine an optimal choice, as well as predetermine what the players will find interesting -- and the barkeep isn't it!
(Ditto the statue, etc., in the examples you didn't get.)
Yes, they would.
Whether or not you find it problematical, this is exactly what I described upthread. If you only mention the things you believe to be important, the players automatically assume (1) that anything mentioned is important, and (2) that anything not mentioned is not important.
Thus, you say
See, my preferred solution to this particular conundrum is to assign the Wolf-in-Sheep's Clothing a Stealth score, and to only mention it under one of two conditions: a PC succeeds on a perception check, in which case I mention that they notice a carnivorous plant disguised as a rabbit on a stump; or no PC succeeds on a percpetion check, at least one PC comes within range of the monster, and I mention that the PC is a victim of a surprise round from a carnivorous plant disguised as a rabbit on a stump.
which is, of course, a perfectly valid way to play, but one which (to some degree at least) minimizes player choices because the PCs never have a "full view" of their environment.
And, yes, I do understand that there are benefits to this approach. For one, you do not need to worry about the players going off on a tangent, simply because no tangents are presented.
But it could be, if you decided that you were the sort of GM who wanted to lead the players by the nose. It is easy enough to do. All you have to do is decide what the players should choose aforehand, and make ever other potential choice result in maximum suckage.
(And, yes, games like that do exist.....and arguably, some design paradigms lead potential GMs in this direction more than others.)
It is well within the power of the GM to constrain player options. In fact, by limiting what you describe of the world, you perforce constrain player options. And, as no GM can possibly describe everything that the PCs would see/hear/smell/feel, to varying degrees we all constrain player options by the choices we make when offering descriptions of the world.
Some simply constrain these options more than others, for good or for ill (or, as seems more likely the case, to offer a composite of good and ill that seems interesting to that particular GM).
AFAICT, you are replying to the suggestion that "a real choice being offered is impinged upon in direct proportion to the degree to which the optimal choice is clear to the players" by disagreeing with the premise, but basing your disagreement on statements that strongly support the premise: essentially that, in some cases, the optimal choice is so obscured that you do not know what it is, and that these choices are meaningful.
The base statement would be refuted if, instead, you could demonstrate a case where knowing what is optimal somehow results in the choice being more meaningful.
RC
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Mark CMG
Creative Mountain Games
Do you make changes on the fly if the players express disinterest during play, such that if players roll their eyes at a particular element when they encounter it, would you simply ignore its previously designed details? Along the lines of -
GM (Knowing that revolving the statue opens hidden grates): The exits of the statue room seal and the whole room begins to fill with water . . .
Player 1: Traps like this are no fun.
Player 2: Maybe we should switch campaigns.
Player 3: This is a waste of time.
GM: While attempting to stay dry, one of you bumps into the statue and must have hit a secret catch, opening grates and draining the room as the doors unseal and . . .
Hussar
Legend
While I don't do that personally, I have to say, given this exact scenario you present, is there anything wrong with that? When every player at the table expresses dissatisfaction with what's going on, wouldn't a good DM pick up on that and make some changes?
Granted, it's a pretty far out there example. Hopefully the DM has a somewhat better read on the players than this, but, it does happen.
And, even if the DM does insist on playing out this single example, if he hits the players with it a second time, despite their very vocal protestations, in some sort of attempt to "train" the players into the "right" way of playing, he definitely wanders into "bad DM" territory for me.
Interesting example. I've never quite had it come up - and certainly never in the language of Player 2 - but I tend to agree with what Hussar said in his reply. I do tend to take this sort of approach to a lot of exploration elements (eg I don't fuss very much about food, ammunition, weather, etc unless it emerges out of the mechanical resolution of a skill challenge) but this isn't really altering things real time in the course of play - it's more about adopting a certain approach to play in the first place.
The sort of changes I tend to make during play are to assumptions about relationships between the PCs and NPCs, and hence to assumptions about what sort of conflict will happen next. To elaborate: like many GMs (I think), I tend to sketch out a sequence of encounters for a given session, which presuppose (i) some sort of sequence of events that will lead the PCs through those encounters (not necessarily in any particular order, and perhaps not all of them) and (ii) some sort of "orientation" or "comportment" of the players towards those encounters ie whether I'm expecting them to fight, or negotiate, or explore, or . . . These two things are interrelated, because the way that the players approach an encounter obviously affects the way that it unfolds and resolves, and this in turn effects the sequence of events that leads through the encounters.
Because I know my players and their PCs pretty well, and I plan with this knowledge in mind, mostly my planning works out. But every now and then, though, the players approach an encounter in a way that I didn't expect, or resolve it in a way that I didn't expect. (I'm not talking here about anticpated variations - like do they save two, one or zero prisoners from ritual sacrifice - but about significant variations, like joining in with the cultists and helping finish the ritual.) This can require both developing or alterning an encounter on the fly (eg if a fight starts, 4e needs a battlemap, and a battlemap needs terrain details that I probably won't have worked out in detail if I was assuming that the room would just be the site of negotiations) and then coming up with new encounters, or resolving entirely new events, as the whole direction of play changes in a way that I didn't anticipate. For me, perhaps the most frustating aspect of 4e is its lack of a good mechanical interface between skill challenges and combat, so making these changes to the "orientation" of an encounter and to the direction of play is sometimes non-trivial.
Both from my own play experience, and from what I used to read in old Dragon letters columns and what I read now online, I gather than not all GMs do this. For example, in an adventure path, I gather that the players are more-or-less obliged to follow the directions of the module author and the GM as far as the primary villain is concerned, and also as far as the principal events are concerned.
I also know that some people have the view that players have a sort of duty of civility to follow the GM's adventure hooks. Consistent with what I've said above, my preferred approach is to have the players build the hooks into their PCs - either at creation, or through the way that they play their PCs as the game goes along - and then I build and resolve the encounters in accordance with those hooks.
I regard this approach to play as a non-sandbox alternative to the railroad. It's my favourite way to RPG, both as GM and player.
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