Mod note:
"It isn't what I like, so I will cast insulting aspersions upon it," is not acceptable.
D&D 5E Oops, Players Accidentally See Solution to Exploration Challenge
Mod note:
"It isn't what I like, so I will cast insulting aspersions upon it," is not acceptable.
MNblockhead
A Title Much Cooler Than Anything on the Old Site
Ah, man, not I need a long rest to prepare a different spell.
Greenfield
Adventurer
I played in a game where we were searching for a lost adventurere/person of interest. The overland map we were given had the start city, a line marking the road through the mountains on the way to the next city, and at an intermediate point there was a rock formation marked.
We didn't need to see any other layers of that map to know where we'd end up finding the person we were hunting. There was only the one marked location on the map, other than the start and end points.
On the other hand I once wrote an adventure for a tournament at a convention. It included a drawing of the destination, a stronghold, as viewed from a slight rise at the entrance to the valley. There was a broad hedge-maze in between, clearly visible. If the players asked (but only if they asked) if they could try to map that maze, the DM was supposed to hand them that drawing, which had the maze pattern clearly drawn.
BTW, there were three dirty tricks inherent in this. First, the drawing really did show the layout of the maze, but it was designed so that there was no valid route from the one side to the other.
Second, it was equally clear that travelers could simply walk around the maze.
Third, since it was a hdege maze, there was no reason that PCs armed with swords, axes and magic couldn't simply carve a straight through any time they wanted.
The adventure having a Viking flavor I thought the "carve a hole" approach would seem obvious, but you'd be amazed (no pun intended) how much time some people spent trying to "solve" that maze.
We didn't need to see any other layers of that map to know where we'd end up finding the person we were hunting. There was only the one marked location on the map, other than the start and end points.
On the other hand I once wrote an adventure for a tournament at a convention. It included a drawing of the destination, a stronghold, as viewed from a slight rise at the entrance to the valley. There was a broad hedge-maze in between, clearly visible. If the players asked (but only if they asked) if they could try to map that maze, the DM was supposed to hand them that drawing, which had the maze pattern clearly drawn.
BTW, there were three dirty tricks inherent in this. First, the drawing really did show the layout of the maze, but it was designed so that there was no valid route from the one side to the other.
Second, it was equally clear that travelers could simply walk around the maze.
Third, since it was a hdege maze, there was no reason that PCs armed with swords, axes and magic couldn't simply carve a straight through any time they wanted.
The adventure having a Viking flavor I thought the "carve a hole" approach would seem obvious, but you'd be amazed (no pun intended) how much time some people spent trying to "solve" that maze.
Prakriti
Hi, I'm a Mindflayer, but don't let that worry you
Some of that might just be people misreading the DM's expectations and suspending their own disbelief in order to engage in the game. In other words, the players assume that navigating the maze is part of the adventure as written and don't want to break the social contract of D&D by bypassing it.
I haven't advocated for any particular approach to play. I've said - contra some other posters in this thread - that @Mistwell is right in saying that it is possible to approach the decision about what path to take without having regard to the "metagame" knowledge if it's the case that a certain sort of decision procedure was being used and can still be applied.
Part of the difference from the troll case is that such decision procedures are fairly common for decisions about which square/hex to enter, whereas they are relatively uncommon for decisions about which attack mode to use if one's standard attack mode (ie weapon) is not working.
Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
So, then, you don't support this kind of play, you merely say that it can happen. That's not a terribly useful observation, is it? Lots can happen, and no-one claimed that it's not a possible approach in that sense. The argument was that it's an unnecessary approach to solve a problem that doesn't have to exist.
If your argument is just that you can play that way, there's nothing to discuss and I'm left wondering if you really thought such a trivially obvious statement needed to be said.
Well, I addressed this point in my response to you prior to the one you quote above. If you'd like to discuss it further, you should read and respond to my previous response rather than just reiterate your original claim.
At least one poster, maybe more (I've not gone back upthread to check) told @Mistwell that it was impossible to play the situation without regard to the secret information once the secret information had been revealed to the players. I am disagreeing with them, and agreeing with Mistwell, that it is possible under certain conditions that - at least in my experience - aren't that uncommon in this style of D&D play.
Under those conditions your contention - or at least implication - upthread that the movement case and the troll case are relevantly similar doesn't hold. I've never encounted D&D play in which players use decision procedures that produce an answer to what do I try against the troll given my weapon isn't working without being affected by actual knowledge of troll vulnerability. Whereas I agree with Mistwell that it is not uncommon for there to be decision procedures which do produce an answer of where do we go next without being affected by actual knowledge of an optimal path.
If your experience is different well, I guess that's that. We're all playing in different communities and have experienced different things as typical and atypical.
Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
That's a shift of the goal posts. Your claim was that people said you can't play using a random choice mechanic or a standard procedure -- this was never said. What was said was that you cannot make a decision once you know something as if you did not know it. This is trivially obvious.
Example: let's say you have to pick between two boxes. You do not know their contents. How you go about choosing a box, ie the actual decision making process, is up to you. Say that you usually, absent better information, will pick the left hand box. Or you'd roll a die. All valid, absent information.
But now, let's say that you do know that the lefthand box has something unpleasant in it -- something you'd avoid otherwise -- and the right hand box has a reward you'd normally chose. At this point, you cannot make a choice absent this knowledge -- it's impossible. Whatever you choose will be affected by having this knowledge. If you choose to use your usual, ie pick the leftmost box absent better information, then you've already made a choice due to the information -- you've chosen to ignore the better information that says the left hand box is a poor choice.
This is what was being broached -- once knowledge exists, it cannot be ignored. You CAN chose to do the rote left-hand choice by pretending you don't know better when you do, but you're making that choice against your knowledge, not absent it. Your shift to arguing that someone said you cannot use a rote procedure or random choice is a strawman of the actual point. Probably why there was so much confusion around your claim -- it's subbed in a trivial refutation for a simplistic (and incorrect) version of the argument actually made. You cannot make a decision as if you did not have knowledge you do have, it's tautologically impossible.
As for the relevance between the troll case and the choice of path case, I've made that argument upthread. You've yet to engage it, so it's rather pointless to continue to discuss it if you cannot at least to the minimum of addressing the counterargument already made.
No it wasn't:
I've bolded the key bit ie the assertion that you can make decisions about where to go that aren't "tainted" by the "metagame" knowledge.
The second para of that quote also makes it clear that I'm not advocating for this possibility, merely noting it as possible.
As for the claim that once knowledge is obtained it can't be ignored or set aside in a decision-making process, this isn't true in general and so I don't see any real reason for it to be true in the RPG case. (I imagine that the main example @Mistwell has in mind is the same as mine - eg judicial or administrative decision-making which is based on stipulated considerations. If the decision-maker learns something that is outside those considerations s/he can put it to one side and proceed based on the information that is relevant. This happens all the time, and is robust enough provided that the decision procedure is relatively determinate given the relevant considerations relied upon by the decision-maker.)
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