D&D 5E Resting and the frikkin' Elephant in the Room

[Ovinomancer]

Heck. I know tons about vampires and the don't even exist. Because there are only two, I shouldn't know anything about them?

So, then, your worldbuilding includes stories about mythical vampires, excellent! Are they accurate stories? Do they reflect the vampires' mechanics at all?

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

[MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] - if the only way to lose a limb is to be hit with an artefact level sword, I'm going to say that it's a bit of an outlier.

Point being, if I, the DM, decide that the king dies of sepsis after being gored by a boat, I should be able to do so. Even though that completely bypasses the rules of the game.

The first time I had a NPC with lingering injuries my players all went "wait, 8 hour rest in this edition pretty much cures cancer, how is he still hurt?"

 

[Lanefan]

... if you're choosing to build your world based around the encounter rules for PC's... well that's going to have ramifications that arise because you've chosen to use a tool meant for one thing to do something else with.

Well, eventually all those encounters are going to start to form a picture of the world as a whole, much like many single brushstrokes eventually turn into a portrait. And from there one logically would extrapolate the rest of the world and how it probably works.

Or, of course, one could build one's world organically from the top down and just tell the mechanical elephant to jump in a lake.

So you're purposefully choosing to place deadly encounters in the safest places of the gameworld because... why again?

As others have said: for no other reason than to feed the elephant when it gets hungry.

This is my disconnect with you... no rule in the game makes you place specific encounters in specific places of your world? PC's don't have to be challenged with deadly encounters every day of their lives and probably shouldn't be in safe places... otherwise they aren't safe. So why are you creating a safe place in your world and then choosing to make it dangerous for anyione PC or NPC's... that's what I don't understand.

Fair question.

My disconnect is that what's dangerous for the PCs when they are present is (and was, and will be) still just as dangerous for the game-world inhabitants when the PCs are not present.

if the only way to lose a limb is to be hit with an artefact level sword, I'm going to say that it's a bit of an outlier.

Last I checked, Oil of Sharpness ain't exactly artifact level...

Point being, if I, the DM, decide that the king dies of sepsis after being gored by a boat, I should be able to do so. Even though that completely bypasses the rules of the game.

Particularly as boats don't usually have gore attacks except when ramming other boats...

Lanefan

 

[Tony Vargas]

Particularly as boats don't usually have gore attacks except when ramming other boats...

I'm guessing either 'gored' or 'boat' is an auto-correct thing. Like it should have been 'gored by a boar' or 'bored by a vote' or something...

Well, eventually all those encounters are going to start to form a picture of the world as a whole, much like many single brushstrokes eventually turn into a portrait.

Yes! because DMing is more Art than Science!

Of course, it could be a picture of a world that's just plain out to get the PCs... y'know, they walk into town and everyone locks themselves in their basements, because they know an attack must becoming...

 

[hawkeyefan]

It almost sounds to me like people assume that encounters must happen for PCs EVERY SINGLE DAY no matter what.

Don't you control worldbuilding impact by simply narrating travel through areas that would be safe? I mean, saying an area is safe and then forcing a bunch of random encounter checks just to "feed the elephant" and then blaming the system for ruining the worldbuilding....well that's a bit odd, no?

 

[Lanefan]

It almost sounds to me like people assume that encounters must happen for PCs EVERY SINGLE DAY no matter what.

To satisfy the elephant in an adventure where overland travel plays any significant role, this is largely (and sadly) true.

 

[Tony Vargas]

It almost sounds to me like people assume that encounters must happen for PCs EVERY SINGLE DAY no matter what.

Certainly not every single day, just any day they're meant to have a non-trivial encounter, they 'need' to have two (if they're all deadly) or more additional encounters, because: Elephant.

To satisfy the elephant in an adventure where overland travel plays any significant role, this is largely (and sadly) true.

If you're not willing to acknowledge/deal-with the Elephant, you could just have 6-8 encoutners during an extended overland adventure 'just happen' to all be on the same day. Hey, they're /random/.

Isn't that an old saying?
"Long periods of boredom, punctuated by attrition from 6-8 encounters."

Something like that, anyway.

 

[Imaro]

To satisfy the elephant in an adventure where overland travel plays any significant role, this is largely (and sadly) true.

Or you could just use the gritty rest variant during overland travel and have the 2 deadly encounters over the course of a week or less... couldn't you?

 

[Maxperson]

But this is the crunch for designing encounters, which is then being, IMO, incorrectly applied as a worldbuilding rule. These aren't rules to create encounters for non-adventurers, or NPC's and they aren't the rules to populate the world... these are rules to design encounters for the PC's nothing more and nothing less. In other words you are choosing to take these rules and choosing to extrapolate things they aren't meant to determine and then claiming they make no sense when used in a way they were never meant for...

It's ridiculous to think that the PCs are some sort of mighty cosmic encounter attractors that cause multiple encounters a day to spontaneously happen where they are at the moment. Said encounters somehow don't happen anywhere else in the world. Rather, the PCs encounter so many creatures daily, because there are craptons of creatures all over the world and that's how many they encounter that day.

That leaves DMs who actually care about consistency to have to figure out how to fix the problem. Since there are so many dangerous creatures all over the world, there would have to be tons of adventurers all over the world to combat them. Of course, that can rub those who like PCs to be super special the wrong way. The only other way I can think of to keep things consistent without upping the adventurer population, is to lower the encounters that happen daily and thereby lower the deadliness around the world.

 

[Maxperson]

I don't agree with that. Perhaps my decision is made with the mechanics in mind....I could certainly say that a horde of orcs would mechanically very likely destroy a small town and therefore I could decide that the orcs win and the town is destroyed.

I could just as likely decide that the townsfolk make some kind of Thermopylaen final stand that led to them winning. I could decide this based purely on my desire to have the PCs encounter the haggard survivors for some story related purpose; i.e. narrative needs rather than any kind of mechanical determination.

I think that what's happening is that a DM who makes such a decision is using his sense of logic and world details and the like to make the judgement call. And I think that game mechanics also lean on such logic and world details. So there's an underlying commonality at play, I agree, but I don't think that it's the mechanics dictating anything. It's simply that the mechanics are derived from the same factors as the DM's judgement.

Technically, deciding which side wins is one of 5e's mechanics. You only roll when the outcome is uncertain. If you decide that one side or the other wins, the outcome was not uncertain.

I also think you might be taking "mechanics dictate" a bit farther than it's intended. Mechanics and fluff have to match or there is a disconnect, but beyond that they don't really dictate. If there are so many monsters that the PCs are encountering them even weekly, then then that encounter mechanic informs the DM that the world at large has a ton of monsters roaming about.

The DM decides how to use that information like you lay out above. He decides that this time it's orcs attacking a village. He decides whether the outcome is certain and which side wins, or whether the outcome is uncertain and rolls to see which side wins.