Charlaquin
Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
I’m not claiming everyone does it. However, anyone can do it. You are refusing to acknowledge it as an option because it being an option makes your argument weaker.Yes I am ignoring feats. I've explained why I am ignoring feats, but I will continue to repeat myself.
You do not get a feat before level 4. There is an exception if you are a V. Human or a Custom Lineage, but as I have repeatedly stated, I am not assuming a specific race. Could you be a V. Human? Yes. You could also be a Fairy. Your attempts to force me to assume everyone plays Variant humans will continued to be ignored. There is an exception if you have specific backgrounds from Strixhaven. I'm not assuming you are playing in Strixhaven. So I am not assuming you have those specific backgrounds. Maybe you have backgrounds like Soldier or Entertainer which do not grant feats. I will continue to ignore your attempts to force me to assume everyone uses a background which grants a feat. I'll even acknowledge some people homebrew and houserule to allow feats at first level for everyone. But I will not be assuming that everyone uses that houserule. You can try and continue to force me to assume everyone uses that houserule, but I will not be.
We can be done with it if you want, sure.So, are we done trying to force feats into this scenario? Or am I going to have to repeat this on every post?
Bully you? Seriously? That’s what you think is going on here? My friend, I’m just rebutting your arguments.The original point of the example was that your DMing style ignored the potential to use bardic inspiration to help the situation, which you acknowledged you would have put a stop to when they first proposed their original plan.
The party comp itself was not a critique of your style. The fact you feel the need to bully me into changing it because you don't like it really is starting to annoy me though.
I mean, we could.Wish we could have that conversation instead.
It’s certainly worthless if you ignore all the things players might need to spend it on. Do your players ever have to pay lifestyle expenses? Do you track light sources, rations, ammunition, expensive spellcasting components? Can they buy magical items? This is one of those things, like choosing travel tasks, that a lot of DMs ignore because they don’t see the immediate utility of, and then complain that there’s no use for money, or that the game has no exploration mechanics. These things are part of an interconnected system, and I have found that when you actually utilize all parts of the system, they work together harmoniously to create fun, challenging gameplay that generates emergent stories.There is a far cry between "you can't have everything" and "being able to safely traverse a space requires a minimum of 6 people"
And it isn't really a meaningful decision in my mind. They are going to pick to spend money, as long as they have a enough (which isn't always the case) because you can't spend money if you are dead, and DnD money is a fairly empty and worthless thing anyways.
If they can afford to, probably; it’s a pretty efficient strategy.And of course they will spend it on people who can fight, leading to increasing threats, because they will have far more bodies on the field.
I mean, yeah, if the help they hire is faceless merc #3, that wouldn’t make for a very good story. Part of the DM’s job is to make NPC hirelings more than faceless mercs.None of this is what the game is about. The game is about the stories, and the story of needing to hire faceless NPCs to make sure they have enough eyes to not be ambushed every time they go anywhere isn't a good story. We can do far better than "do you spend money on faceless merc #3 or do you risk getting lost for an hour in the dungeon" in terms of meaningful decisions.
Unsurprisingly, when the search consists of saying “I search” and rolling a die to see if you found anything. That was also my experience, until I tried DMing a different way. And you know what I’ve found more and more often since then? When the search itself is engaging, people are excited by it too.You know what I have found, more and more often? No one cares about the search. No one is excited by the search. They are excited by finding the item. That's when they get excited and engaged. Similarly, no one is excited by assigning a marching order and declaring their actions. No one cares. They care when something happens.
We can certainly do differently than that, and maybe for you it would be better. I happen to enjoy the resource management challenge. And I’ve found that even players who didn’t think they liked resource management challenge actually do when it’s executed well.Sure, you've created a resource scarcity to make moving safely between the interesting bits harder. I suppose that is a sort of challenge, but... can't we do better than that? If you want to make moving through the dungeon harder and more of a challenge, can't we do it without making it something that is solved by hiring more people to cover more actions?
If the players can’t perceive the monsters through the secret door, how on earth are the monsters supposed to perceive the players through it?How could they? You wouldn't even check the monster's stealth against the player's passive perception, because they can't notice the door. I guess maybe you could have noises coming from inside the wall, but then you have still revealed the location of the secret door, which you said you would not do.
So how do you propose to alert the party to the prescence of monsters hiding behind a secret door, without revealing the secret door?
If that’s where you think 90% of traps are going to be found, then it should be pretty easy for you to come up with a reasonably specific description of how you search for them.Seriously? You thought a person looking for traps in a room wouldn't look at the ground? Man, I guess my highly trained killer, used to dozens of delves into dangerous places has encountered so many floating mid-air traps that they just stare straight ahead just in case. Maybe they closed their eyes before moving?
I know I'm being sarcastic and a bit rude, but seriously, where else would they look for traps if not the ground?! 90% of all traps are either on or triggered by the ground.
I thought I had made myself pretty clear that I want to avoid making any assumptions at all about the players’ actions.This is the type of thing we talk about when we talk about assuming the PCs are professionals who know what they are doing. We assume when someone is looking for traps, they look where traps will be. This seriously blows my mind.
Looking for traps was your goal. Giving it as your approach too is redundant. “I look for traps by looking for traps.” That doesn’t convey any information about how you are looking for traps. “I look for traps by slowly walking forward looking at the floor” does convey information about how you’re looking for traps."Looking for traps" isn't good enough, that's like shouting at you shoelaces to tie themselves, but "looking at the ground for traps" is perfectly intelligible and acceptable.
All of that is infinitely more interesting to me than “I check for traps” clatter. Now, I get it. If you don’t have enough information to make meaningful decisions, you end up going through laundry lists of pointless SOPs just trying to eliminate any conceivable danger, and yes, that gets boring. That’s why a key part of doing this style well is giving good information, both directly in your description of the environment, and indirectly through good level design. If this style done poorly is a pixel-hunting point-and-click adventure game, then this style done well is Portal.Because then all the interesting parts of the game are bogged down by the minutia of protecting themselves. It becomes and endless parade of hyper-specific intstructions with the singular goal of preventing any possible unforeseen circumstances.
They pull out the plate gauntlet before opening anything, make sure to have a wet-rag wrapped around their face for spores and poison gases, probably try to get a full-on gas mask, then they make sure to never touch anything directly, while never standing in front of anything in case it fires out further than a foot. It goes on and on and on and on. And none of it is interesting. It is just tedium, and it can all be trivially prevented by just assuming that the PCs are professionals.
Hey, look at that, something we agree on. Absolutely it’s more interesting when the players are aware of the trap, because then they have the ability to meaningfully interact with it. And if the trap isn’t interesting when the players know it’s there, it won’t be made more interesting if they don’t. So, I do tell the players the trap is there. I just convey that information diegetically (colloquially, I “telegraph” it), because I think it’s more immersive and interesting that way. Is it possible players might miss telegraphs sometimes? Yes, and I’m ok with that. But, in my philosophy it should at least be clear enough that in retrospect, the players can recognize the clue that they missed, and what they could have done differently had they recognized it. That’s key to making the outcomes feel like direct results of the players’ actions instead of random, unavoidable screwjobs. That’s the difference between a good trap and a gotcha.Telegraphing is a fine line to toe though, because if you telegraph to the point people notice it, then how much difference is there between just telling them in the first place?
Honestly, I have strongly considered just telling players when they could a trap exactly what and where it is. Because if there is an interesting challenge, it would be in safely disarming the trap.
Level design and tutorializing are powerful tools here. I like to use common themes and motifs in dungeons, so I can introduce a trap early on, in a very obvious, impossible to miss way, and then re-use the same type of trap throughout the dungeon in gradually subtler ways and/or in gradually more complex contexts. That way, the players can learn to recognize the patterns and apply what they’ve learned in more challenging situations to overcome those challenges by their own skills, which is an incredibly rewarding feeling.Unfortunately, most traps are trivial to disarm if you are aware of them, which is why most trap design discussions are difficult to even have. Because any trap that is trivial to beat if you see it isn't actually well-designed, but a well-designed trap is HARD to figure out.
But it does matter to me, because comparing the goal to the approach is an essential part of my action resolution process. I figure out whether or not to call for a roll by imagining the action and asking myself if it could result in bringing about the goal, if it could fail to do so, and if there would be a meaningful consequence for it failing to do so. I need both pieces of information to do that process.Their goal is whatever their goal is. It would be context specific and it truly doesn't matter what the goal is. The player thinks that playing a sad song on their viol is enough to achieve their goal, and if I don't understand what they are going for in the attempt, I would ask "okay, what are you hoping to accomplish?"
Because none of that is relevant to the question of if the approach can succeed in the goal. At least not usually. I mean, I suppose if the goal is like… to woo the Dwarven ambassador with a song or something, maybe then the song being from Dwarven culture might be relevant. That’s why I need to know both the goal and the approach.But the larger point is, must like "search the room" could have dozens of specific variations of action, so can "play a sad song". In fact, it could have even more, since I could ask which culture the song is from, dwarven? elvish? gnomish? That might make a difference, right? Except... no one ever asks that.
That’s what you think! Until I put a trap in the adventure that triggers when a hidden mechanism resonates with the right musical frequency! Muahahaha!!!!!!!No one wants the same level of detail they want for searching a room for playing a sad song. Because playing a sad song can't trigger a trap.
(I kid, of course. Trying to bring some levity to what has been an exhaustingly serous discussion.)
But there are ways a player might play a song that could fail in them achieving their goal, depending on what that goal is. In order to properly resolve an action, I need to know the goal and the approach, to a degree of specificity so that I can determine if the approach can succeed in achieving the goal, if it can fail to do so, and if there is any consequence for failing to do so.There is no way that the player could say they play that song that leads to them automatically failing and triggering something bad. So no one bothers to ask.