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

[Arilyn]

It's all illusion. The GM could have changed the location of that treasure around five times before you stepped into the world as your character. The GM rolls for random encounter, and poof, a band of orcs materializes out of essentially nothing. The GM is designing things between sessions. One day it's not there and then it is. Your party decides to head across the ocean, and now maybe your GM has to create new locales and adventure seeds before next week. Often it's conveniently created to match your level, or not, depending on GM. Does it matter when these things are created? If GM changes her mind about something or realizes events are more logical in a different way, does it matter if the change comes night before or during game, as long as consistency is not disrupted?

Once again, no one is advocating handing players easy victory, just crafting more engaging tales, if necessary. A once in a while option.

 

[Monayuris]

I don't understand the distinction you're making. It sounds like you agree with me.

In my opinion, with all due respect, pretending that something built by abstract concepts and human imagination and which has characters and, often enough, a plot, is not fiction, is simply abstruse.

It is the intent.

Did I find the treasure because I was clever or lucky and my choice resulted in finding the treasure.

or

Did I find the treasure because the DM decided I should get treasure. My success was solely based on the whim of the DM.

A common argument is if the player doesn’t know then it doesn’t matter. I guess that is true... until the player figures it out.

Again... as I mentioned... some players wouldn’t care and it’s not a big deal.

Personally, though, I would not appreciate it.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

It is the intent.

Did I find the treasure because I was clever or lucky and my choice resulted in finding the treasure.

or

Did I find the treasure because the DM decided I should get treasure. My success was solely based on the whim of the DM.

Literally everything in the game world (including every treasure) is put there for you, the player, to encounter. Some things are challenges , some things are neutral and some things are boons.

The treasure you get after defeating 10 deadly traps, 3 dragons, and an army of undead is the SAME treasure you might also find sitting alone on the side of the road.

The difference is how you, the player, feels about the treasure when you get it. If you fought for it and won, it's much sweeter in your eyes than if it was just given to you for no reason.

I'm positive you agree with me.

What peoe are trying to explain to you is that some of us flip the switches and dial the knobs and move things around to make the game better for the players. This means that we are actively TRYING to give you that sweet taste of victory when you succeed (rather than just hand you things or let you cakewalk over something that is supposed to be a challenge) and actively TRYING to keep you in the game after you have lost your 4th character in 4 sessions and just want to tap out.

 

[Monayuris]

Literally everything in the game world (including every treasure) is put there for you, the player, to encounter. Some things are challenges , some things are neutral and some things are boons.

The treasure you get after defeating 10 deadly traps, 3 dragons, and an army of undead is the SAME treasure you might also find sitting alone on the side of the road.

The difference is how you, the player, feels about the treasure when you get it. If you fought for it and won, it's much sweeter in your eyes than if it was just given to you for no reason.

I'm positive you agree with me.

What peoe are trying to explain to you is that some of us flip the switches and dial the knobs and move things around to make the game better for the players. This means that we are actively TRYING to give you that sweet taste of victory when you succeed (rather than just hand you things or let you cakewalk over something that is supposed to be a challenge) and actively TRYING to keep you in the game after you have lost your 4th character in 4 sessions and just want to tap out.

This is literally the exact opposite of what i want from the DM.

I don’t want rhe DM to TRY to give me the sweet taste of victory. I want to earn it.

I want the DM to provide a clearly described environment such that my choices have clear and understandable consequences. I want an environment that exists to interact with that I feel I can trust and believe

if my choices lead to a cakewalk defeat of my enemy, then awesome. If they lead to my crushing defeat then oh well.

I’m an experienced B/X player...4 character deaths in 4 sessions are not going to bother me.

if I lose 4 characters in 4 sessions, my feeling would be that i need to get better

 

[Coroc]

The DM is not a computer with game files stored in his brain. He is human aka adaptive to sudden changes.

The party otoh does only see what is presented. It does not know the setup intended by the DM initially before he changed it midgame for some reason.
Call this metagaming all you like but you have to admit that this is the difference which makes PnP much more fun than any computer game sometimes.

If you cheat as a DM for drama or plot then do it so that the party does not get the tiniest clue about it.
E.g. roll in the open, use monster HP as only emergency discriminator, do not change their combat behavior so it gets notable, like e.g.:

Party fights a mage, mage casts a fireball, party is heavily damaged. Another two spells like this and it is a TPK.
How you do cheat in this case w/o the party noticing (assuming you want to keep the party alive)?
If the wizard now only puts out low damage spells someone in the party might notice, but if you noted down your spreadsheet for the mobs like this (like I heavily recommend):
Mage HP 35, 8d4 + 16, 24......48 (assuming mage has a Co of 14 for +2) you can easily wing it.
Assume the mage is already hit so he has got 15 HP left of his intended 35 just reduce mentally from 35 to 25 so he has got only 5hp left instead, and the next hit by the party is fatal. No need to hide rolls behind your DM screen for this.

Another example: you have a great solo boss mob HP 142 15d8+75 90....195 (Assuming Co of 20), but your party has very good luck on the dice and dishes out 135 HP in the first round. One more hit, and the big bad one goes down not very dramatically. So just mentally up his HP to the 195 and you got another two or three rounds of fight.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The DM is not a computer with game files stored in his brain. He is human aka adaptive to sudden changes.

It would be a mistake to assume that CRPGs are completely "fixed". Quite a lot use the "random" encounter that advances the plot device. Many others scale monsters to match the level of the PC(s).

 

[Arilyn]

The flexibility of a GM is what is missing from computer and board games. I don't want adventures to fizzle out because my players get stuck. They are probably stuck because of an error I made anyway, so fixing on the fly is a good plan. And sometimes, half way through an adventure, it might hit me that the story we are creating would be so much cooler if X happens rather than Y, and I'll adjust. If I'd been thinking clearer I'd have realized this two days ago while prepping, but I didn't, and I am not going to let my weaker idea stand just because the session has already started.

And the idea that players are going to somehow figure this out? How? I'm usually altering to improve things or fix logic errors. What is possibly going to make players think that I originally intended the gardener to have the clue and not the stable boy? The players can still fail, reach the wrong conclusion, get in over their heads, but they are not going to be hitting dead ends and wandering off to do something else, because they have run out of options. That's boring. I'm also not going to let a TPK occur because I goofed on the number of deadly encounters in the tomb. I put the encounters there, I can take them out.

 

[Coroc]

It would be a mistake to assume that CRPGs are completely "fixed". Quite a lot use the "random" encounter that advances the plot device. Many others scale monsters to match the level of the PC(s).

Please do not hesitate to cite my post using @Coroc so I get a notification about it.

On your random generator, true that, and in some games you can even experience some "weighting", means e.g. if you are close to level up you get an extra hefty "random" fight.

But random or fixed or weighted random, that is just the thing I pointed out in my original post. A DM is much more flexible than the best random engine. On top there also might. come his personal momentary mood. This should not influence his decision, but we are all only human.

Still it is the "no-gods-end by design" and "infinite list of answers in a NPC dialogue", which are the things why I prefer a PnP game over a CRPG.

 

[Fenris-77]

There's a lot of ink spilled about player agency in this thread. A lot of people who have some very specific and complex demands they want to make of the DM. Mostly this indexes "you can take my life but you can't take my freedom" sort of take on player agency and the need for an entirely fixed set of fictional elements. It should be obvious by now that I don't agree with those people, but that's ok, we all have different things we want out of the game. What I find a little disappointing is how many people seem to think that what they want as one player at the table is so much more important than what anyone else, especially the DM wants.

D&D is a game that can be used in a lot of ways to tell a lot.of different stories. When you sit down to a new campaign for the first time there is a contract involved between the players and the DM. An agreement about what kind of game we're playing, and, either spoken or unspoken, an agreement to try in good faith to play that game. Not any game, but the one we all agreed on.

It's usually the DM who pitches a game, and very often that game is the product of significant labor on their part. I think it's pretty much a given that DMing is a lot more work than playing too. All the set up, all the between session prep, and all the improv necessary adds up to a lot, and a lot more than any player is putting in. That work is a product of the DMs desire to realize a particular story or idea, somehing they were excited enough about to put in all that work. And something they've agreed with the players to try and make happen as best they can. So what about DM agency? What about what the DM wants out of a campaign?

What feels to me like the worst kind of player entitlement is the notion that despite the fact that the DM has more invested than any other single person at the table and despite the fact that planning an adventure is by its nature an enormously complex and recursive task, that the only thing that matters is player agency. Are the players supposed to be completely free to adjust to curcumstance but not the DM? What that agency might look like depends entirely on the specific game of course, and could look very different in a complete sandbox than a more focused narrative. The entire game is spun out of gossamer by the DM, it feels like hubris to say they can't manage it at the table in order to tell the collective story they all agreed in the first place to try and tell.

I can already imagine the replies about "well, nothing in your post means having move or change things, and yadda yadda". Just assume that behind this post are all my other posts. Not to be a jerk, but because it doesn't do the thread any good to rehash. I just wanted to point out that some consideration for DM agency might be appropriate.

 

[Charlaquin]

@Monayuris and @The Mirrorball Man, I think you two have hit on a strong distinction in D&D philosophy and play style. For some people, D&D is a vehicle for collaborative storytelling. For these people, the illusionism is an understood and accepted, even welcomed part of the experience. For others, though, D&D is a system for emergent storytelling. The DM isn’t telling the story, or even co-creating it with the players. The DM is laying down the parameters for the players’ engagement with the systems, and the story, such as it is, is what arises organically out of the players’ engagement within that set of parameters. For these people, the illusionism is the DM changing the parameters on them, and that is not desirable. That makes the story less emergent and more constructed, which is not what folks who prefer that style of play want.

I think both are valid and enjoyable ways to play D&D, but when you get a group that has a mix of players and/or DM who prefer one style or the other and those preferences aren’t communicated in advance, you often run into some friction. I also think we tend to run into similar friction when we talk online to folks with different preferences in this regard, especially when we don’t understand what it is the other party wants out of the game.