Player Control, OR "How the game has changed over the years, and why I don't like it"

[Thasmodious]

I go into combat not knowing what to expect - the encounter could be avoided entirely (which has happened) in which case it doesn't even see one round. So, do I expect something to die in one shot (aside from minions of course), of course not, but I think what you are getting at is when it happens, does it not get to me in some way (even if that is simply a pout, hehe).

The answer is, no, it doesn't bother me in the slightest - but here's why (and in this way I may differ from some methods)... I play as a cheerleader for my players. I find that the drama is more rich when I play this way. When the players do well, I will tell them (for example), "Damn, good job, that was awesome!" - I think that means a lot to a player when they get it from a DM in a sincere way. Players kill one of my mobs in one round? I might be shocked, but I make sure to express that shock so they really get a good feeling about the success.

On the other side of that, as the "cheerleader" (if you will), I also show sympathy when things don't go there way... you might hear me say "Damn man, that sucks, but I think you will have a shot at it next time... I predict you roll... an 18 next time!"

As I mentioned earlier in this post, yes, they have skipped encounters entirely, but in the event I put a lot of planning into an encounter that gets skipped, that's okay because I can often find a way to use it later, or tweak it to work for some new idea.

With that said, I try not to plan anything too time consuming for just this reason. I want to stay a step ahead of them, but not plot out so much that I put myself in the position of having to toss a lot of content that is skipped.

I hope that answers those questions - I'm typing this quickly as I have a lot of work to get back to!

Thanks again for the conversation so far Thas (in case this gets closed before I can make it back)

Sounds like at the end of the day, we DM in very similar ways. I used to be a fairly narrative focused DM who did lots of prep and adventure design, so being thwarted or having the "damn, i forgot they could do that" moments happened. With situations like my earlier examples, I just rolled with it, but yeah, I'd be disappointed if they thrashed my nifty new monster in a round or avoided the big, dynamic encounter I had carefully set up to challenge them to the limit while playing to their strengths.

These days, I GM mostly on the fly and stick all those good ideas and encounters and monsters in a file to be pulled out when the situation arises and if the monster doesn't get to showcase or the devious trap filled corridor is skipped all together, it can show up again later, tweaked a bit if need be. I, too, don't set up a lot of expectations in the game so the players can dictate the events and the direction. Their five brains tend to be a lot more clever than my one brain (though not at the 5:1 ratio they like to think they have )

All of this is a fair tangent from what I was trying to illustrate a few posts ago, but it's a good discussion nonetheless.

 

[billd91]

Death, IMO, is overrated as a penalty for poor play.

I mean, seriously, what happens when a PC dies?

1) If the specific character isn't intimately tied into the campaign's story arc:

The player gets sorta bummed out, spends the next XX minutes rolling up a new character (varying by edition and level), and somewhere around the next corner the party takes, "What ho! You seem a trustworthy fellow! Care to join us on our epic quest?"

And the player's character is back in the game - sometimes, looking suspiciously similar to the one that just expired.

2) If the specific character is tied intimately into the campaign's story arc:

Uh-oh. The Prince-Who-Was-Promised is sorta dead-on-arrival, or one of the Four Prophesied Heroes isn't going to be there to stand against the Final Darkness. I guess that just about wraps it up for that storyline, huh? Or, maybe we had it wrong, and Bob the Fighter wasn't actually the prophesied hero - the real prophesied hero was this guy, Bob 2 the Fighter!

But why stick to worst case outcomes of character death? Why not:

1) If the specific character isn't intimately tied into the campaign's story arc:

Player gets a chance to try out another character concept he has. I'm usually trying to decide between several when I make up a PC for a campaign. Character death gives me a chance to work up another one, perhaps one even better suited to the campaign now that I know more about where and how it's going.

2) If the specific character is tied intimately into the campaign's story arc:

The situation changes in ways nobody could immediately predict. As a frequent DM, these circumstances can be pretty awesome as they really get creative juices flowing. It will get most people thinking of the campaign in a fresh way.

 

[Thasmodious]

Or write a complete adventure and have the party bypass it entirely due to sheer dumb luck on their part? Yep...

Heh, curse them!

1. I thought part of 4e's design was intended to do away with one-shot kills or disables, so how are your monsters getting one-shotted?

I was speaking of DMing in general and not 4e specifically. That is indeed less common (not gone, by any means) in 4e, but bypassing encounters and thwarting the best laid plans are still part and parcel.

2. There's been lots of talk about the party characters being able to use their abilities to "tell the monster what to do"; maybe there need to be more monster abilities that can, in effect, "tell the characters what to do". A good start might be something like (making this up here) Hyperactive --- Daily --- Duration: Encounter --- You win initiative and act first in any round. Use of this ability is a free action. Give this to every significant monster and that way at least it always gets one chance to show its stuff and mess up the party a little.

You know, that wouldn't be a bad system house rule - the monsters always go first, first round, then roll initiative.

What the players can do, the monsters generally can do in some form, so they push, pull, slide, prone and command PCs on a regular basis, too. Maybe that is Wik's real problem, he doesn't like feeling that he is on equal footing with the lowly player, whom the DM has traditionally bossed around the battlemat while chuckling maniacally. Maybe he doesn't like the shoe being on the other foot now, and his players finally getting a little payback? Is that it, Mr. I-Am-the-Law DM?

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

But why stick to worst case outcomes of character death?

Because I'm responding to people who are lamenting, "Oh Death, where is thy sting? Oh Grave, where is thy victory?"

Player gets a chance to try out another character concept he has.

This doesn't actually require that the PC dies.

The situation changes in ways nobody could immediately predict. As a frequent DM, these circumstances can be pretty awesome as they really get creative juices flowing. It will get most people thinking of the campaign in a fresh way.

Yep - and if you're a really on-the-ball, make-stuff-up-on-the-fly GM, this is a good time for you to show your stuff.

If you're not, though, it's a good way to have things fall apart. And, let's face it, really experienced DMs (the ones who tend to be good at thinking on their feet) also tend, IME, to avoid tying the campaign plot too tightly to specific characters specifically to avoid this problem.

 

[Umbran]

But why stick to worst case outcomes of character death? Why not:

What Lanefan asked was "Where is the fear of death?" If character death is generally a positive experience, then there's no fear of it, and players won't do a heck of a lot to avoid it.

 

[Mark CMG]

2) If the specific character is tied intimately into the campaign's story arc:

Uh-oh. The Prince-Who-Was-Promised is sorta dead-on-arrival, or one of the Four Prophesied Heroes isn't going to be there to stand against the Final Darkness. I guess that just about wraps it up for that storyline, huh? Or, maybe we had it wrong, and Bob the Fighter wasn't actually the prophesied hero - the real prophesied hero was this guy, Bob 2 the Fighter!

Novel-by-proxy games tend to be problematic for reasons like this.

 

[billd91]

I partly agree with the OP, but less from a standpoint of losing control as a DM. I'm just not that keen on the reliability of powers (or specific tactics) in nearly any/all circumstances without consideration for the nature of the target. A creature's offensive or powers may be interesting in themselves as it acts, but, with respect to what my PC is doing to it, I may as well be hitting a generic target with X defense and Y hit points. It's like considering only a subset of possible factors that could reasonably affect a fight.

If the players can trip nearly anything, including oozes, carnivorous trees, and snakes or terrify undead creatures, the game's rules may work consistently, but I don't find that very valuable in presenting a consistent setting that has much verisimilitude. Instead of developing sets of tactics and powers against different kinds of opponents, my effort as a player is better spent in picking a few powers with a lot of synergy. I'm building to generate spikes in effectiveness rather than broad competence because that's the incentive the game provides. The challenge in the game is less "What's our best strategy in this case?" and more "How can I implement my standard strategy in this case?"

4e may have been designed to give players an option to do things other than standing and swinging or being a trip monkey with a spiked chain, but I don't think it has gotten away from the one-strategy pony school of character design. Not with the behavior of powers, anyway.

 

[billd91]

What Lanefan asked was "Where is the fear of death?" If character death is generally a positive experience, then there's no fear of it, and players won't do a heck of a lot to avoid it.

It's in the role playing, Umbran. As a player, death isn't that big a deal. It takes time to whip up a new character, sure, and that take me out of the action for a little while. But my characters... most of them don't like dying for some reason. They totally rage against the dying of the light.

 

[LostSoul]

I was just going to respond with XP but "must spread..." Your hack sounds interesting and I'm clearer on your position now. Clearly, I took you to mean that magic requires no plausibility explanations. So, a question about your hack - do you play out combats in a less abstract manner so the triggers for exploits come up? Is it through structured rules with facing, positioning, and the like or more in DM and players being more descriptive at the table?

It's less abstract; one of the main goals was to draw players into the game world. We describe the actions in some detail, though not too much. Some of the rules allow you to get a lot of modifiers to your attack roll based on your PC's action, so it's in your best interest to describe it even if you aren't setting up an Encounter Exploit.

The rules on facing, positioning, and the like are all about the description and resolution of actions. It wasn't too hard to get into that style of play, since that's how most games that I've played work. We had to drop minis, though; I'm sure they'd help at times, but they bring us out of the game world too much. Maybe later.

There are times when things get confusing for me, when I lose track of who's where and what's going on, and that's a failure on my part. It's a flaw in the game and I'm not sure how to deal with it.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

There should be just enough PC death in a campaign to make the PCs fear it enough to care. This necessarily varies from table to table. At our table, we've gotten down to about 0.5 deaths per campaign being sufficient--though I'm not sure how much of that is drawing on previous, deadlier campaigns.