The Guards at the Gate Quote

[OnlineDM]

If so, then "combat encounters aren't fun." Because combat, combat, combat, combat, combat, combat, combat, combat, combat, combat, rest, combat, combat, combat, combat, combat. Isn't fun.

I personally agree with you here, but I thought it was worth pointing out that for some players an endless string of combats interspersed with the occasional rest IS fun. It boggles my mind, too, but the players in one of my campaigns fall into this group. They patiently humor me as I try to involve them in the world and the story and motivations and so on, but they really just want to kill bad guys.

So, while I'd say this isn't the NORM, I'd also say that telling people "an endless string of combats isn't fun" is not all that different from saying, "an encounter with two gate guards isn't fun." These things ARE fun for some players.

 

[Aberzanzorax]

Empty rooms matter.

More on empty rooms mattering (and innocuous encounters with guards, etc. etc).


Here's a story from my gaming group. We had an exellent DM who loved using minis, tiles, and set pieces for encounters. The problem that occurred was that we knew it was an encounter when he pulled out those pieces. We were metagaming.

We weren't TRYING to metagame (especially at first), but then it became so obvious that an encounter was coming that we began to do it unconsciously because we'd been trained to do so.

Set pieces come out, roll for initiative, cast protective spells.



But then a great thing happened...He had gotten a very cool bridge setpiece...it was BEGGING for an encounter. He'd shown it to us opon arrival and we were all looking forward to a bridge encounter.

He put the bridge out...the wizard and priest cast some buff spells, we changed our marching order, the thief hid, etc.

....and there was no encounter.


I'm sure anyone reading this knew that was the inevitable conclusion to the setup I've provided. (Later we crossed another bridge and got our encounter, btw.). But the point is that he helped us to remember we were metagaming by changing his style.

Experienced dms know that if every cracking branch in the forest is a bandit sneaking up on the players' camp, the players will act accordingly. If there are occasional cracked branches from, say, a deer, a rabbit, or a moose, there is a chance for a meal, a snack, or being mauled by a moose (some things are better left alone).

The same is true of guards...if every encounter with the guards is "plot driven" the players will metagame. "Oh, the guards say we have to surrender. Ok, we surrender." (Or what have you.)


The other important component of empty rooms is adding flavor and a sense of security. It's done in horror movies all the time...the excitement level (or fun level in gaming) must wax and wane...it must juxtapose normalcy with terror, including the "empty room" when a character walks down to the basement alone, the creepy music crescendoes, and...there's nothing there.


Two last important elements of empty rooms is that they need to be 1. interesting and 2. treated for what they are. I'll use a thanksgiving dinner analogy for this. Encounters may be the main dish...the roast turkey, if you will. But no one wants JUST turkey on thanksgiving. There are usually numerous side dishes. Overdoing the best thing without interspersing other interesting (even if they're not AS interesting) flavors results in a bland and boring experience. You don't pile your plate high with one side and just a hint of turkey either, of course, but you neither do you leave the sides untouched.

Insofar as they need to be interesting: Empty rooms/side dishes can't just be "slop". No one wants overcooked broccoli or burnt stuffing. No one wants to walk into a room and it's truly just "you see an empty room...noting else, just an empty room." An empty room can be thick with dust (or have been recently swept), it can be damp and dank and smelly, or scented like fresh loam. Most empty rooms can provide interesting details about the world. E.G. with "city guard" encounters as the "empty room", we've seen numerous examples in this thread of things people can learn about the city (especially its feel). You don't just do the same city guard encounter every single time, no matter the city the players go to, the level they are, etc etc...you spice it up.


So, I'll agree with Wyatt that "boring encounters are boring" if that's what he's trying to say. But I don't agree that "encounters with city guards aren't fun".


We don't need advice that certain "empty room" encounters aren't fun...we need advice on how to make "empty room" encounters fun. If only there were some sort of guide for dungeon masters to teach us this.

 

[Aberzanzorax]

So, while I'd say this isn't the NORM, I'd also say that telling people "an endless string of combats isn't fun" is not all that different from saying, "an encounter with two gate guards isn't fun." These things ARE fun for some players.

Oh, I agree. And for some people doing the 10' by 10' by 10' crawl down a straight corridor is fun as well.

My point there was that if you take things to an extreme, only the greatest outilier groups will continue to enjoy the experience. Some will like my 10 dragons a day, per day theme....most won't.

Saying ANYTHING isn't fun categorically can get you into trouble...because someone might really dig it.

 

[Bullgrit]

Cross corridors are decision points. You would rather that they be glossed over?

Yes, cross corridors are the something we wanted to get to by skipping the "10 feet, 20 feet, 30 feet...." The DM could just say, "You go 40 feet and come to a cross corridor." Or, "You go 60 feet and find a door in the west wall."

Bullgrit

 

[I'm A Banana]

Holy crap! So that Player ended up basically sitting out part of the adventure, (most of a whole game session), because we played through an encounter with the city guards.

Y'know, there was a similar situation in the last 4e game I played. I was a swordmage, who <3's her sword (as every good swordmage should), but the DM had an encounter-with-the-guards-at-the-gate that ordered us to surrender our weapons.

Well, WHAT THE FRIG.

We tried a few things to get around it (ultimately, the bit of a swordmage's swordbond where they can restore it from a shard helped out), but it took some active metagaming to get there. The DM was trying to gently guide us to the planned encounter, and my character was in danger of sitting it out because of a part of her design. It wasn't until I realized that the DM was flustered not having me around that I, as a player, said, "Oh. Well, let's fix this, since I don't want to sit it out."

So, really, the problem with the fighter not willing to show their face was a problem in player communication. It sounds like a cool hook, and an interesting complication, but not an un-solvable problem. The DM needs to volunteer solutions that don't violate the player's character (like bribery, intimidation, forged papers, an on-the-spot conversion, whatever), and the player needs to be willing to try these, in order to get on with the game. People work together to have fun. The character doesn't NEED to sit outside like a punished dog for daring to have a creative character hook.

I had a DM who would mention every freakin' 10 feet of the passages we went down.

That doesn't mean that exploring endless passageways isn't fun. That just means your DM was paying too much attention to things that the group didn't care about.

But the quote doesn't say, "You can feel free to gloss over the details your group doesn't care about" (even if that might be what it was intended to say). It says that trekking through endless passages is not fun, period.

It implies that trekking through endless passages, or talking to guards, is something that every group everywhere in the history of D&D will always find tedious and un-interesting, so every DM should skip it, and get on to "the fun" (which is presumably a skill challenge or a minis skirmish encounter).

It is clearly, obviously, gobsmackingly wrong to say that.

I don't doubt that the intent was to explicitly tell DMs that they don't have to bother with things that their group is uninterested in (which can be useful advice!). But for whatever reason, it doesn't actually say that. So the "problem" that folks have with that quote (and at least one other infamous Wyatt quote) is what it actually says, the concrete substance of which it is made, the actual words that make up the thoughts conveyed on the page.

There are basically two options you can fall into. Either the quote is horribly written. OR the quote is actively trying to dissuade people from RP and exploration by claiming that no one actually has fun with these things.

Either of those is fairly firm grounds to have a "problem" with the quote.

Now, you might not share that problem. You might not take issue with a single badly written paragraph in the DMG (every DMG ever has probably had loads of these!). Or you might agree that RP and exploration are boring and that you want to get on to the orc killin' ASAP. Which is all fine and good and dandy. AFAICT, no one thinks you are WRONG to be OK with it.

Clearly, though, some people think that most everyone should be OK with it. Thus, this thread. Because some people are not OK with it, and those people are not insane aliens from an outer dimension, or pre-teens with a hate-on. Those people are intelligent, reasonable, well-educated, peers, who have good reasons for thinking the way they do, even if you personally disagree.

I mean, sometimes these threads can seem like I'm entering a room full of people under the influence of some sort of mild autism or sociopathy (or, as they are more commonly known, People On The Internet). Yes, other people have different feelings from you. No, your feelings are not the only feelings that anyone should have about this. It is not this hard for most folks to understand that some people don't like some things that you love, and that you don't like some things that other people love, and that doesn't mean that anyone is wrong. It just means that people are different, and that's actually awesome.

No one is wrong to have a problem with this quote. No one is wrong NOT to have a problem with this quote. I myself fall into the "Well, that's a horribly written piece of advice, and it's unfortunate that it's there, but whatever, the DMG is a lousy tool for learning the game, anyway," camp.

I guess I feel we can all get a lot farther in life if we assume the person on the other side of the intertubes is actually a reasonable human being instead of assuming that they're an extremist goofball with an axe to grind.

Not that some folks aren't extremist goofballs with an axe to grind, just that those folks existing doesn't automatically invalidate everything anyone says in criticism or support of something.

Anyway, babbling now.

 

[Jasperak]

If anyone knows, where is Wyatt's quote referenced from?

EDIT: nevermind, answered above, but does lead me to a new question. Is there a central repository one can find all of these quotes and links to videos for someone that wants to study WOTC's marketing campaign for the 4th edition rollout and subsequent fall out from certain business decisions that some of their customers didn't like? Is there maybe a timeline for WOTC's decisions and the market's reactions? I am interested in looking at WOTC's entire marketing program since sold to Hasbro.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Would anyone like to rewrite that to make it more inclusive of other playstyles? Guess I can try...

As a Dungeon Master, you need to focus on the fun! If your group loves flower picking but hates fighting orcs, bypass the orc camps and skip to the meadows! Groups that hate tracking rations and water won't enjoy a survival game! Groups that love big dramatic fights will love fighting dragons! If you're not having fun doing it, don't do it! Focus on the fun!

 

[Jhaelen]

The last bit just blows my mind -- in D&D, exploring the dungeon isn't fun? Really?

That's not what he's saying.

Sorry, but D&D (the game, not any group or person's required experience) includes dungeon crawls, and "dungeon crawls" are not tactical skirmish tournaments.

Well, that's sort of correct. It seems to be the focus of "Old-school D&D", but I'm unsure how many actually play(ed) D&D like that. And that's what's important (to me at least).

Without knowing the full context of this quote, to me it's not saying dungeon crawls are not fun. It's saying traveling down that 10-mile long corridor deep into the mountain *with nothing there but the continuing corridor* is not fun.

Exactly!
I don't know why everyone criticizing Wyatt based on this quote feels they must misrepresent the point he's trying to make. To me it's obvious he's referring to endless, pointless and boring exploration of empty corridors.

Am I the only one who played through a bunch of adventures featuring a labyrinth at some point? I cannot recall a non-boring example for this except the 4e approach of representing it as a skill challenge essentially glossing over the details.

Examples of perfectly boring and/or annoying labyrinths in offiical D&D modules include:
- Dragons of <?> (1e Dragonlance; dwarven underground city featuring geomorphs)
- Needle (2e; forcefield maze)
- The Standing Stone (3e; burial mound)

In all of these adventures one of two things happened:
- Everyone except the player doing the mapping zoned out.
- The DM got bored and eventually decided to skip the frigging thing.

We've also played a free Earthdawn adventure (Kaer someting or other) where we spent four session mapping an entirely empty Kaer without having a single encounter. I was almost ready to start attacking my party members at that point to finally get it over with!

THIS is the kind of thing Wyatt's talking about!

Yes, cross corridors are the something we wanted to get to by skipping the "10 feet, 20 feet, 30 feet...." The DM could just say, "You go 40 feet and come to a cross corridor." Or, "You go 60 feet and find a door in the west wall."

Even cross corridors are boring and don't really represent a meaningful choice unless there are some noticable hints where they might lead to, be it tracks, smells, different wall styles, etc.

That doesn't mean that exploring endless passageways isn't fun. That just means your DM was paying too much attention to things that the group didn't care about.

Eh. I don't know any group that enjoys mapping endless mazes of corridors for hours.

I remember I enjoyed mapping all of the dungeons in the Bard's Tale video game series, but those featured regular random encounters, traps and riddles, AND those are single-player games. as mentioned above, mapping may be fun for a single player, but never for the group as a whole.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

No, actually, that is exactly what he was saying - that is the problem with direct quotes from printed materials - it is pretty easy to check.

Further, it is what he said, and said, and said - more than once, more than twice.

Personally, I think that Mr. Wyatt meant exactly what he wrote. He has had numerous chances to make corrections, and has not done so.

It is what it says on the can. Over and over Mr. Wyatt's message was 'play it my way.'

Tell me truthfully, does this uniform make me look fat?

The Auld Grump

 

[LurkAway]

"Hello. Welcome to Fun™ Encounter #17. My name is Svard Skullgnasher, the guard at the gate today. I'm not sure I like you very much. Would you like to roll Bluff, Intimidate or Diplomacy?"