D&D General No Fixed Location -- dynamically rearranging items, monsters, and other game elements in the interests of storytelling

[The Crimson Binome]

So, what would you call this sort of thing? Is it fudging? And what do you think of it as a DMing tool? Is it wrong? Is it good? Do you ever do it yourself, or is it against your DMing code? Let me know!

It's cheating, plain and simple. You are biased toward a specific outcome, for whatever reason, so you secretly alter reality in order to force that outcome.

I would never play in a game if I knew the DM was doing that. It defeats the entire point of having free will.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

I'm currently preparing a dungeon that has a lot of hidden goodies. I thought about doing it this way, but I decided that it'd feel more authentic with an old-school approach. Here's what I did to mitigate some of the pitfalls Prakriti brought up:

- The big reward is a magic item in four pieces. Three of the pieces are hidden, but the fourth is in a prominent location and obviously missing three bits, so the PCs know that they should be looking and how many they should be looking for.

- It's a pirate hideout, and every one of the pirates has been stashing a little plunder on the side. There are nine different hidey-holes stuffed with small-to-medium amounts of treasure scattered throughout the cave. The PCs will probably find some and they'll probably miss some, but the amount of gold they walk out with will be a more statistically reliable measure of their ability to search dungeons than if the hidden loot were all in one find-it-or-miss-it bundle.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

It's cheating, plain and simple.

You say "plain and simple", but I think for most people the "plain and simple" definition of cheating is "breaking the rules in order to win", and (a) the DM decides what the rules are and (b) the DM is not winning.

 

[Fenris-77]

It's not plain and simple at all, otherwise I wouldn't be doing it (I'm going to just assume you aren't calling me a cheater). It's got not a thing to do with defeating the point of free will either, in fact rather the reverse. As the DM it puts me in a position where my whole campaign doesn't grind to halt because the players went off on a tangent. It means I can comfortably just play the "yes and..." game and let the players go where they want. Why the everliving eff should I let player free will ruin a campaign? By which I mean put the DM in a position where he has to free form and improvise absolutely everything and just toss hours and hours of prep? The players should have free will, but player free will doesn't mean handcuffing the DM either.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

It's not plain and simple at all, otherwise I wouldn't be doing it (I'm going to just assume you aren't calling me a cheater).

If you cheat, then you're a cheater, the same as if you fudge dice or meta-game. The game has rules, and you're breaking them.

Which part of "describe the environment, ask the players what they want to do, and adjudicate uncertainty in action resolution," sounds like "alter reality such that player decisions are meaningless"? If you know what you want to happen, and the campaign grinds to a halt if anything else happens, then you should be writing a novel instead of pretending to DM.

 

[Fenris-77]

Oookay. Wow. Judge much? You have absolutely no clue how I actually mange anything in game, nor did you ask, you just went right ahead and made not only a ton of unwarranted assumptions about me, but also a ton of immensely arrogant assumptions about how your idea of what the game is and how it should be played is the only one. Yikes.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Oookay. Wow. Judge much? You have absolutely no clue how I actually mange anything in game, nor did you ask, you just went right ahead and made not only a ton of unwarranted assumptions about me, but also a ton of immensely arrogant assumptions about how your idea of what the game is and how it should be played is the only one. Yikes.

I didn't say that you cheat, or that cheating makes you a bad person. I said that if you cheat, then you're a cheater. Likewise, if you swim in water, then you get wet.

Whether you care about cheating is entirely up to you. Whether cheating is tolerated is up to your group.

 

[hawkeyefan]

It's not cheating. It's a perfectly valid way to GM.

Not everything needs to be a secret. If you want the PCs to know or find something, then there's no reason to leave it up to chance that it is found. Not everything needs a skill check or similar to be discovered.

 

[Fenris-77]

@ Saelorn - So you're in charge of how to play the game? I can't believe no one told me that. All this time I've been using the parts of the rules I liked and devising fixes for what I don't. So much wasted time. Next time I'm not sure what to do with my game I'll PM you and you can tell what's kosher or not.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

It's not cheating. It's a perfectly valid way to GM.

Not everything needs to be a secret. If you want the PCs to know or find something, then there's no reason to leave it up to chance that it is found. Not everything needs a skill check or similar to be discovered.

Related dirty DM trick:

If you want the party to know something, have each PC roll a relevant knowledge check, then give it to the highest result whatever it is.