You're doing what? Surprising the DM

[Jackinthegreen]

I would take exception to this part since it's not actually combat that I'm all that interested in. In this specific case, sure, it's the combat I'm interested in. But, not generally. I mean, heck, in the other cases, I'm skipping combat to get to the next part. After all, I'm skipping all those encounters with bandits on the way to the city, most of which are likely going to be combat oriented.

It just happens that combat is the goal in this specific case.

Understandable. I guess I made the mistake of generalizing (or at least not being specific enough), just as everyone in this thread has at some point, but I was trying to make it go with that grell scene. The combat was the goal and the DM putting the players on a detour to that by making them go through the long hiring process is a bit railroady. While I'm using that analogy, I could probably comparing it to the conductor switching the train to a different set of rails that take longer to arrive when the passengers are all worn and beaten and just want to get to the station.

 

[pemerton]

I think the key thing to note here is that Celebrim and Nagol (and likely others) prefer a simulationist style where everything is set up and can't just be handwaved while Hussar and Permerton (and likely others) see the game as being there to be fun first and foremost, even if a sense of verisimilitude is lost by breaking the simulation to get on with more interesting things.

My only disagreement with the way you put it is that I don't agree that a non-simulationist approach has to threaten verisimilitude. Verisimilitude can be preserved via consistent and judicious free narration. That's part of the rationale for summoning the huge centipede to cross the desert - it provides the veneer of verismilitude for free narrating an easy crossing.

Well, it was a D&D game, so that mechanical framework doesn't quite apply. However, my character was a fighter and a caravan guard as his background. I figured that should give him a fair bit of insight into the hiring process.

Nice. Once again, plenty of veneer of verisimilitude for a free narration of succesful hiring!

If I want to visit, say, the Temple in City B, then having to cross the desert between there and here is as relevant a complication as arriving at the city gates to discover that, for whatever reason, I cannot be granted immediate entry to visit the temple.

Only if your measure of relevance is ingame geography.

If you measure of relevance is stuff that the players are invested in, then a siege of the city in which their destination temple is located strikes me as quite a bit more relevant than the surrounding desert.

I would suggest crossing the desert between you and the city is directly related to engaging in any activity which requires you be in that city

That relation is purely procedural - I have to cross the desert to get to the city. Without more, it is not an emotional or thematic relationship.

An alternate fiat would be that there are no warriors seeking a day or less work risking their lives battling some supernatural beast.

Sure. Part of good GMing, in the absence of resolution mechanics like BW's Circles, is making a sensible choice of which way to go with this sort of stuff.

So you cannot envision the possibility there could be some level of engagement interacting with well written mercenaries.

I can envisage the possibility. But not for me. And not for Hussar either, given that he has actually lived through the experience and returned with his testimony!

Or we can just hire half a dozen cardboard cutouts who add nothing to the game. Now, which one would be more engaging?

The cardboard cutouts, if that means we can cut more quickly to the stuff I care about!

I found the Myth Adventures book where the protagonists gather a force to defend against an army had very engaging mercenary characters myself. The Magnificent Seven and the Dirty Dozen provide other examples.

I don't know the books you're referring to. The Seven Samurai, though, read through RPG lenses, isn't about recruitment of NPC mercenaries. The samurai are the PCs, the peasants are NPC patrons.

In any event, I don't play RPGs to experience the GM's narration of his/her gripping stories and NPC personalities, nor do I have that sort of goal in mind when I GM. (This is another version of [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s "fanfic" comments upthread.)

only you and Pemerton seem to think the GM has a vested interest in boring you to tears.

I don't think the GM has a vested interest in boring anyone to tears. As I indicated in a post upthread, I think there is a certain approach to GMing, and to RPG play, that emphasises GM narration and the players "immersing" in that experience - like your refrence above to "welll written mercenaries" - which I personally have little interest in. A GM who wants to run that sort of game is going to bore me to tears, yes.

You keep trying to treat 'killing the Grell' as your goal. It makes it seem like you are playing 'Orc and Pie' and killing the Orc is your goal. What is your goal actually here? Why did you fight the Grell in the first place? I mean, I know you've turned this into a personal vendeta because there are dead PC's, but before that happened what were you trying to do? Without knowing things like that I can't tell you how I'd try to tie the recruiting of mercenaries to your goals. And frankly, if the players don't have something more intersting to offer in terms of goals than 'we want to kill the grell', I'm going to get bored in a hurry.

This way of looking at the situation is very foreign to me. If it's the players' goal to kill the grell, by way of vengeance, then that's their goal. If I as GM want to link that in some way to a bigger picture, or some other - perhaps more profound - player gaoal, then the onus is on me to do that without getting in the way of the players. And frankly there are dozens of ways to do that, some involving the mercenaries, some not, but none of which involves free narration in 90-minute detail of the hiring process.
[MENTION=37609]Jameson[/MENTION] Courage and I are far from identical in playstyle, but look at his description upthread of his "mercenary's widow" complication: he didn't divert play for 90 minutes onto stuff the players weren't engaged with and weren't interested in. He introduced the complication as an immediate and integrated component of resolving the actions that the players had declared for their PCs; and then followed the players' leads in developing it. That's the sort of GMing that I admire and enjoy and try to learn from.

I'm a player, and DM, who presumes that this level of minutia is a given and I simply don't even reference it. If you are going out into a winter scene, of course you have winter clothes, even if it's not on your character sheet, unless there is a reason why you don't that is established in play. For example, you are teleported naked into the snow would be a good reason why you don't have any winter clothes.

<snip>

Say the DM is going to chuck in this kind of complication 10% of the time. Totally arbitrary number, just work with me here.

The problem is, the players cannot ever know when that 10% will come up, so, they have to treat EVERY situation as that 10%.

<snip>

Which grinds the game to a screaming halt as every possible loop-hole must be plugged. Every scene must be played out to a complete conclusion. It doesn't matter that 90% of the scenes are exactly what's written on the box and it didn't actually need to be played out. The players cannot ever presume that.

Excellent analysis, and fits my experience 100%. The sort of consquences you describe are inherent in Rolemaster as a system - it makes it very hard to handle pacing other than via exhaustive mechanical resolution of any action that might have ingame causal significance - which is one of the reasons why my dissatsifaction with it grew over many years of GMing it.

you sound like the kind of player who "of course" had winter gear packed away for just such an emergency, and has simply neglected to transcribe it when updating that character sheet last.

Newsflash: In my 4e game I also don't make the player of the archer track his ammunition. Life's too short!

 

[pemerton]

I've already expressed the opinion that your description of your play is at odds with this statement. You have expressed in your recounting of play complex calculations about what you thought would make the most interesting choice

I don't see how that is at odds with confining my purposes to player interest and story momentum. I'm trying to judge those things and respond to them.

The outlines of your play from your story sessions bear minimal traces of this paradigm you are pushing

Except that there are no episodes of wolrd exploration in the form that [MENTION=6681948]N'raac[/MENTION] and (a best I can tell) you are advocating for and defending. The only example of an exploration-focused scenario that I've posted is one in which, of the following points of world detail, all but the first two were worked out in the course of play:

1. The manor dates from the Nerathian empire (100 years ago rather than 1000 years ago) and the time period of the scenario is only a few years after the fall of Nerath;

2. The manor became abandoned when the pending fall of Nerath to gnoll invaders (the downstream consequences of which have been a bit part of the campaign to date) led its wizard owner to go mad with the strain and kill his apprentices;

3. The guardian spiders were mostly not undead but a Bloodweb spider swarm (this tied nicely into the spider-filled tunnels under the ruins that the PCs had already dealt with - the Large spider they killed in the gameworld "present" was the sole survivor of the many swarms of Tiny spiders they would encounter in the gameworld past);

4. The religion of the dead mage was a particular cult combining worship of Bahamut (god of the east wind and also of the dragonborn - it is an already established fact of the campaign that the dragonborn empire had been in this region some time prior to Nerath), Kord, Pelor and Ioun - so a type of mystical sun, weather and strength worship;

5. That the burial practices of the cult had the intention of trying to avoid the dead being dealt with by the Raven Queen, instead going directly to Mount Celestia or Hestavar as exalted (the party has a cleric, a paladin and a lapsed initiate of the Raven Queen, so this was likely to be an interesting point for the players);

6. That the spiders in the skull were undead spiders as the module stipulated;

7. That the last work the wizard who owned the manor had been undertaking before he went mad was to try to find a way of harnessing the power of the Raven Queen without compromising the principles of his cult, in order to create more powerful defences by which Nerath might resist the invading gnolls - he snapped when his most religiously devout apprentice learned what he was doing and accused him of treachery.​

How were these determined?

(3) because the spider encounter would relate to, or echo/reinforce, an earlier spider encounter that the PCs had played through and that I knew, as the GM in that earlier session, had engaged them and drawn them into the situation in a range of ways.

(4) because it referenced certain game elemens - Bahamut and the dragonborn empire, and Ioun - that were already established as interesting to the PCs (who included a Tiefling and a somtime Ioun worshipper) and also more generally reinforced cosmological elements - the gods and their relationships - that every player is engaged in via their PCs (four divine PCs plus a sorcerer PC who is a member of a religious cult).

(5) because 3 of the PCs were worshippers of the Raven Queen and hence they (and their players) had an immediate stake in it.

(6) because it reinforced other elements, like necromantic experimentation by the dead wizad, that pushed the players' buttons - especially the players of the Raven Queen worshippers (plus undead spiders seemed like a fun bit of colour).

(7) - see (5) and (6).​

Here is another example from the same post:

When the player of the paladin had his PC look closely again at the scroll describing the cultic burial practices and made a good perception roll, I decided that he noticed a stiffness/crustiness in the paper. Eventually, after use of Object Reading, the PCs worked out this was evidence of invisible ink.​

The player chose to investigate something, and so I used that as the trigger to make the obejct in question interesting for the player.

I don't care whether these ways of GMing are common to high improv GMs or not. The more the merrier! What I do know is that what I describe is deliberately deploying elements of No Myth techniques. That it is driven first and foremost by player signals. And that it bears no resemblance whatsoever to the GMing that [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] is criticising in this thread. Everything I've just described is pretty much the opposite of insisting that the players play out a desert trek, or a recruitment process, in which they have no interest. Or of building a world with things in that the players may find interesting if only they engage in the requisite exploration to discover it.

If you're now telling me that you GM in a similar fashion to this, no worries, but I'm not sure how to square that with your earlier stated dislike of extemporaneous GMing, nor with your list of desiderata for a new campaign setting.

 

[Nagol]

Agreed.

Do you expect to win a combat just because you say you want to, or do you expect to have to engage in the tactical exercise and take some risks with your character in order to beat the enemies the GM puts there? If the GM was in the business of handing out success for no effort or risk, there wouldn't be much of a game to begin with. The GM is there to provide challenges and role-playing opportunities, but at some level you're supposed to earn the rewards.

You want great success, you should be willing to engage in the process of achieving the success. If you want to hand-wave things, then the results will be at best middle-of-the-road.

Rather than at best middle-of-the-road, I prefer to think they'll be more variable. You may end with exactly what you would have chosen for yourself with the hand wave. It's possible you'll end even end up with better (if the group is poor at selection or has unspoken prejudices about whom to select for instance). But it is certainly possible to end up with worse because the group's definition of 'best' and the group's ability to discern the inobvious exceeds the DM's expectation.

 

[Nagol]

I don't think it has to be a given that D&D plays this way. Or, to put it another way, I don't think that a player who uses 3E Plane Shift is, per se, agreeing to the acceptability of the GM running a more-or-less freestanding, unrelated scenario for a session while we get from the point of arrival to our desired destination.

The player group should be prepared for the explicit and expected consequences of their actions and be prepared to deal with them. They can request to DM tyo skip them if they feel they are inconsequential, but they should be prepared to deal with them if the DM disagrees on their irrelevance. The group is in the desert because they chose to go there -- they may have hoped to avoid it by rolling low, but such is the nature of relying on luck. Now that they are here, they have to get there and the DM thinks the travel in consequential let's get started. If the situation is unacceptable the player group should prepare the PCs to mitigate those consequences.

I think this is also borne out by the history of the Plane Shift spell. In AD&D (1st ed, at least), it is a cleric only spell and silent as to accuracy. In AD&D, the wizard doesn't get Plane Shift, but as a 7th level spell (in UA) gets Teleport Without Error, which can cross planes but when it does so has the ordinary (5th level Teleport) chance of failure.

In 3E the plane-crossing function of TWE was pulled out, and given to the wizard instead in the form of access to Plane Shift as a 7th level spell. And the designers seem to have reached some sort of compromise or clarification on the accuracy issue - no chance of failure in the Teleport sense, but a random deviation from the intended destination. This makes the spell unreliable from the point of view of Scry-Buff-Teleport, but I don't think it was done with the intention of marking out any special realm of GM authority over pacing or scenario content. Which is to say, if the group in general plays a more tightly focused, player-driven game, I don't think Plane Shift is in any special way intended to figure as an exception to that.

And your point? In the edition being played at the table, Plane Shift had known inaccuracy -- in fact can't be accurate. And the rules do include abilities to improve that accuracy (high level spells), negate distance travel (the various Walk spells, Greater Teleport, and likely more besides considering at least some splat material was included). The group knows that 50% of the time the group would be 200+ miles from their destination. If it does not prepare to mitigate that journey and the DM believes the journey to be consequential then the outcome is a lot of walking. In a tightly-focused story-based game, the DM is likely to consider the travel inconsequential or it is consequential and it is time for the players to figure out why.

Of course, in a certain sense the GM is always free to frame things however s/he wants, including on insisting playing through the desert. But for a player-driven group that would be bad GMing, regardless of the use of a Plane Shift spell.

So a GM shouldn't feed the consequences of player action back to the players in a player-driven game? You and I have different definitions.

But this doesn't require any extended playing out. Within the confines of 3E, for instance, it can be resolved within 5 minutes via Gather Information checks ("What's their reputation?") and Sense Motive checks ("Do they seem shifty or unreliable?").

Furthermore, as [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] pointed out above, there is no particular reason to think that playing things out over 90 mintues makes it particularly more likely that the players (or the PCs) would do better at learning any of this stuff. I'm 99% confident that the GM Hussar is complaining about did not do the resolution the way he (?) did because he thought that was required to be fair to the players. He did it that way because he learned somewhere (from a rulebook, or a magazine article, or some other RPGer) that "real" roleplaying is not about combat but is about immersion, and that immersion includes free roleplay between PCs and NPCs even in completely mundane, low-dramatic-stakes situations.

<snip>

I suspect the DM didn't spend 90 minutes of time presenting a monologue to the players regarding who showed up. That means one or more players participated. Obviously, Hussar did not enjoy the episode. I will not comment on how appropriate the time spent was since I do not know how engaged the other players were in the scene. It has certainly been the case for me that the players have spent much longer talking to what I thought of as bit players than I thought reasonable. I won't comment on the DM's motivation or competency since we only have part of one side of the story.

 

[Nagol]

That has basically no bearing on the sense of "story now" as I was using it, which is in the Forge sense. Story now, in the Forge sense, has nothing to do with the nature or quality of what is produced by play. It's about the way in which it is produced - and in particular, the role of the players in that production.

A thought experiment for you: You rplayer are discussing how to get to a particule destination. hey choose to go by a circuitous route that covers a few hundred miles of unexplored and inhospitable terrain rather than taking a more direct and simple route that would cost a bit more.

Do you make that choice meaningful and incorporate the travel and known aspects of the land into consideration or do you invalidate that choice by skipping directly to the destination?

 

[Nagol]

I think the key thing to note here is that Celebrim and Nagol (and likely others) prefer a simulationist style where everything is set up and can't just be handwaved while Hussar and Permerton (and likely others) see the game as being there to be fun first and foremost, even if a sense of verisimilitude is lost by breaking the simulation to get on with more interesting things. Neither way of playing the game is, in and of itself, wrong. The only wrong part would be if those people come together and their massive differences in what they expect the game to be led to problems for themselves and other people.

You won't come to an agreement, other than perhaps agreeing each other can be a jerk and/or stubborn and that you shouldn't play at the same table ever. Things that matter to one side mean little to nothing or might even impede things for the other side, and vice versa. Congratulations, you've got opinions! Just like everybody else. You are unique and special, just like everybody else.

Even in a player-focused game, you take the player action, react and feed it back to the layers to give them something to work with. The player action in this case is plane shift and the resulting feedback is "You've stranded yourselves in the middle of a desert in the Abyss. There's hundreds of very inhospitable miles between you and your destination. Go!"

 

[Nagol]

This seems to imply that a game adjudicated on the basis of "say yes or roll the dice" - ie only focus on those challenges that are built up around player cues and player-driven story momentum - must necessarily be middle-of-the-road. I don't agree with that.

To put it another way: if I can think of a million and one challenges and complications that relate to player cues, that I know will engage the players via their express PC goals (such as investigating things in City B, or wreaking vengeance on the grell), why would I detour play through an hour or more of stuff that is irrelevant to all that? It's not like in the game where I resolve the desert, or the hiring, in a few minutes of free narration is going to have any lesser density of challenge per unit of play time, nor per unit of PC advancement. It's just that all the challenges will be ones that are centred around the signals sent by the players.

Because you can think of even more scenes based on player cues and desires set in their current location and you can make the location and poor spell result memorable, fulfilling, and relevant i.e. story now? Why are you assuming the desert had no value to the table? Because a single player doesn't see that value immediately?

It's the GM's job in player-focused games to make the consequences of player action meaningful and valuable and advance the narrative. Here's a consequence the group won't experience everyday -- trapped in a desert in the Abyss; that should be tied back to something.

 

[Nagol]

Because, IME, it is 100%. Maybe not 100% of the time. But, the odds that its going to happen is pretty close to 100%. And, it's not just you in this thread Celebrim. Look at N'raac's responses. Or Nagol's. Nagol's idea of a "best" person to hire includes someone who is going to kill me in my sleep because I didn't define "best". I mean, can you get any more antagonistic than that?

I've had group that would think the criminal is the 'best choice'. I've had groups that think he's the worst. I've had groups that really don't care and want to choose the best with weapons and if that means dealing with a mutiny or robbery later, fine. I've had groups care only about party cohesion and insisted on no non-good alignments even it it meant leaving behind all the trained fighters.

Best is entirely subjective. If you want me to arbitrarily determine what is 'best', I'll make that call, sure, but I'll make it based on what I think you think 'best' is and I'll revert to using your skills and characteristics to determine how you rate the members of the pool and you'll have to live the results of your choice to defer to selection to the game mechanics.

 

[Nagol]

I can't xp but this is pretty much the crux of it. Great post. Just because you aren't dealing with every possible micro-adversity that someone would deal with in a real-world simulation doesn't mean that you aren't constantly pressuring the PCs with genre-relevant macro-pressures.

I posit that appearing in the middle of a desert on the Abyss hundreds of miles away from your expected destination does in fact count as genre-relevant macro-pressure.