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

[HarbingerX]

Aside 2 to this conversation.

I think a good example of removing then meaningfulness of player choice is in the reprint of the old Dungeon! game.

In the original version setup would involve dealing out all the treasure and monster cards to the various rooms. Players would then go from room to room finding out what's there and hoping they make the right choices to find the good treasure.

In the reprint, when characters enter a room, the monsters and treasures are drawn from a deck instead. This complete removes the importance of players choosing which rooms to take the time to move it. The choice becomes - how many level 2 rooms do I explore before moving to a different level? In a given play of the game, the +1 sword will always be found in the 4th level 2 room explored, no matter where the players choose to go.

Are the two versions statistically the same? Yes. But drawing from the deck diminishes the importance of the topology of the dungeon.

 

[NotAYakk]

But that's just proving @FrogReaver's point. The only person who knows you placed stuff there and didn't move it is you, the DM. You may derive some satisfaction from that, and maybe they appreciate that you maintain consistency if you tell them, but the actual process is entirely opaque to them. They have no way to appreciate, as a game process, that you're maintaining consistency.

In theory "moving thing around" that any PC didn't see can lead to the exact same world.

In practice it does not.

The world you build when you build it to "exist without experience" is a different kind of world than one builds when you build it as a shadow-play for PCs to see.

There are a pile of things that are cheap to do if you build the "concrete world" but extremely expensive in the shadow-play world.

Those "cheap" things, in the shadow-play world, basically force you to either build a concrete world, or build a huge number of equally awesome possible concrete worlds which are consistent with the player's experience and choose between them. The hint that the orcs might attack village A that is far below the level of clue? Free in the concrete world, other than thinking it up. In the shadow-play world, when they move to village B you need new hints that are equally vague (to maintain the same quality of experience as the concrete world; in the concrete world, when something happens, players can go "oh, that explains that thing that happened earlier!" -- if you want the same experience with quantum ogres, you have to do this for nearly everything as well), and you need alternative explanations for the hints you dropped in village A.

In the concrete world, on the other hand, it just consists of dropping subtle hints of something that the players may or may not experience.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with shadow-play world DMing. It can lead to awesome experiences. But saying the experience is the same doesn't hold water.

 

[Seramus]

Huh? How can their enjoyment be destroyed that they never discovered something they never knew existed in the first place?

The knowledge that there are things that can be missed is important to some people.

Also related but not exactly the same, some players love looking at your maps and encounters after the adventure is over. Either for their personal enjoyment, or to run the campaign for their own table.

 

[Fenris-77]

@NotAYakk - One specific example really doesn't explain the difference. Especially not one curated to highlight the difficulty involved. You don't need to build a huge number of worlds, and you don't have to explain previous hints, not in general. just in your specific example. On top of that you seem to be implying that a game is either DM'd totally one way or totally the other, which is also not the case at all.

Let me give you a different example. I have a letter which contains a crucial clue for the PCs. I initially have it hidden in the Chamberlain's desk, but the PCs don't end up searching the Chamberlain's room, so I quite happily stick that letter in the Duke's desk, which they did actually search. Now tell me how I'm multiplying fictions or making my life or the players lives more difficult or less immersive.

 

[HarbingerX]

@NotAYakk - One specific example really doesn't explain the difference. Especially not one curated to highlight the difficulty involved. You don't need to build a huge number of worlds, and you don't have to explain previous hints, not in general. just in your specific example. On top of that you seem to be implying that a game is either DM'd totally one way or totally the other, which is also not the case at all.

Let me give you a different example. I have a letter which contains a crucial clue for the PCs. I initially have it hidden in the Chamberlain's desk, but the PCs don't end up searching the Chamberlain's room, so I quite happily stick that letter in the Duke's desk, which they did actually search. Now tell me how I'm multiplying fictions or making my life or the players lives more difficult or less immersive.

That's totally fine, and easy to run and fun for the players. But you're also leaving out the interesting possibilities if they don't find the clue.

 

[Fenris-77]

That's totally fine, and easy to run and fun for the players. But you're also leaving out the interesting possibilities if they don't find the clue.

If there were interesting possibilities if they didn't find it then I might not have to move it in the first place, it's all a matter of need and expediency.

It might be helpful here to assume, for the sake of this conversation, that the DMs who are choosing to move things aren't being clumsy and ham-fisted about it. That DM is going to be sub-par no matter which model he's using. If we assume a competent DM who has the best interests of both the players and the story in mind it's a much different conversation.

 

[HarbingerX]

If there were interesting possibilities if they didn't find it then I might not have to move it in the first place, it's all a matter of need and expediency.

It might be helpful here to assume, for the sake of this conversation, that the DMs who are choosing to move things aren't being clumsy and ham-fisted about it. That DM is going to be sub-par no matter which model he's using. If we assume a competent DM who has the best interests of both the players and the story in mind it's a much different conversation.

Yes, there really is a whole spectrum of DMing approaches, and no 'one-true-way'. We all just try for our players to have a good time and if at our table we feel moving a plot point is the right thing to do, then it's the right thing to do.

You can play with the PCs being the prime-movers of the universe, all the way to the PCs being at the whim of forces beyond their control. Taken to either extreme is probably undesirable and the reality is most games will fall somewhere in between.

 

[Charlaquin]

@NotAYakk - One specific example really doesn't explain the difference. Especially not one curated to highlight the difficulty involved. You don't need to build a huge number of worlds, and you don't have to explain previous hints, not in general. just in your specific example. On top of that you seem to be implying that a game is either DM'd totally one way or totally the other, which is also not the case at all.

Let me give you a different example. I have a letter which contains a crucial clue for the PCs. I initially have it hidden in the Chamberlain's desk, but the PCs don't end up searching the Chamberlain's room, so I quite happily stick that letter in the Duke's desk, which they did actually search. Now tell me how I'm multiplying fictions or making my life or the players lives more difficult or less immersive.

I think this is kind of a different thing. If the letter contains a “crucial clue” then it makes sense to move it somewhere the players actually searched cause the adventure kinda can’t continue if they don’t find it.

Generally, I think it’s good policy to either not hide adventure-crucial elements, or to include redundancies (or both). I was kinda taking it as a given that we were talking about optional secrets.

 

[Fenris-77]

I was kinda taking it as a given that we were talking about optional secrets.

We weren't, or least not just optional secrets. Several people's stated belief in this thread is that moving anything at all is 'cheating' and an affront to player agency.

For my part I wouldn't hide a crucial clue without redundancies, unless the whole plan was to have it discovered as above out of a range of reasonable hiding places. In the case the player agency is sussing out which person might reasonably have the information they need and then looking for it, at which point I hand them the letter and then say "yes, and...".

What I'm not going to do is hide the letter, the only clue they need, in a particular desk and then twiddle my thumbs while they search 30 other desks in 30 other offices and find nothing. That's not aiding player agency or the campaign.

 

[Derren]

So before this devolves into quibbling back and forth -

The DM can run the game 2 ways (maybe more but those don't seem relevant for this discussion).

1. The only fiction that is "real" is the players
2. Fiction can be established independently of players

Here's the deal though, the only person that is able to get any satisfaction of a DM independently establishing fiction is the DM himself. The players won't know it. To them the only "true" fiction is what you relay to them in game.

That is wrong.
If fiction exists independent of the players they can interact with said fiction in ways not preplanned by the DM.

If the DM places encounters dynamically wherever the PCs go the only option open to them is to follow a path and murderhobo whatever they find.
But if said fiction already exists the players have much more options. They can go down a different path or create one of their own, knowing that it will lead to something different. They can also scout, preplan and otherwise engage with the game world in other ways, knowing that what they do means something instead of always leading to the exact same result.

And most players do eventually notice it when you move things around to railroad them. It might take some session but at some point the charade is over.