D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Warpiglet-7]

And that's where I disagree; I think both of those (though the first more than the second) can be made better by handling. If you don't, well, that's what it is.




And this makes an extremely optimistic assumption about how easy it is to find a group that works well enough without other efforts. Its the sign of people who've been unusually lucky.



And does, quite a bit.

Ok.

You got The answers. You get people to go with your way…the better way. The way you like.

Congrats.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Ok.

You got The answers. You get people to go with your way…the better way. The way you like.

Congrats.

There's no need to be sulky because I don't think your simple solution is always or even usually a solution. Its just explaining why I don't think its generally a very useful answer.

 

[pemerton]

So why is this such a sticking point for you? What is it about this concept that is just too difficult for you to understand?

Here is what makes little sense to me:

*The game is not GM-centred / GM-driven; and yet,

It is supposed to make sense to talk about the players in that game having their PCs *bypass something that has no existence except as an idea in the mind of the GM.​

I don't see how both those propositions can be true of the same episode of RPGing.

Prepped game: I write down an encounter, or the clues that would lead to the encounter. If the players deliberately decide to not engage with the encounter or follow the clues, but instead go around, they bypass it.

OK, this seems to be a description of GM-centred play. Particularly in choosing to use the word "bypass" rather than simply "do not engage with" or even "avoid".

And relatedly: there is a contrast between the "bypass" terminology, and the way you (and some other posters) talk about it, and how Gygax talks about classic dungeon-crawl play. Gygax talks about the players avoiding traps and tricks, choosing which parts of the dungeon to explore, etc. But he does not talk about "bypassing encounters", in part because there is no expectation that any particular bit of the dungeon will be any more salient than any other bit.

Improvised game: I invent, on the spot and in response to player actions, either an encounter or the clues that would lead to the encounter. If the players deliberately decide to not engage with the encounter or follow the clues, but instead go around, they bypass it.

Again, this seems to me to be a description of GM-centred play.

Maybe when you GM, you’re able to shut off the parts your brain that thinks about what happens next. Maybe you’re able to happily put down tracks for the PCs to follow without giving a single thought as to what made them until the players actually follow them and get to the end.

That is pretty crucial to GMing some sorts of RPGs.

For instance, Apocalypse World says this (on pp 108, 143):

DO NOT pre-plan a storyline, and I’m not [mucking] around . . . Prep circumstances, pressures, developing NPC actions,
not (and again, I’m not [mucking] around here) NOT future scenes you intend to lead the PCs to.​

Here's a thing that happened in my TB2e game:

Fea-bella the Elven Dreamwalker went back in to try and loot the aptrgangr alcoves. Except then she decided that she would try something different - going to the seeing throne and trying to bend it to her will so it would show the location of her stolen, cursed Elfstone (inhabited by the dream spirit of Mim the Petty Dwarf). I said that this would require a successful Enchanting Nature test against Ob 4. Her Nature is 2, and she spent a point of persona to lift it to 4 (by channelling her Nature), and then got a dismal roll (I think zero successes, maybe 1) and so couldn't justify throwing more rewards at it to try and get over the line.

I told the others that they heard an Elven shriek echoing through the caverns up to where they were standing above the entrance.

<snip>

Golin, Korvin and Telemere thus went back into the caves.

<snip>

I told the players that their PCs heard an echoing noise, as of doors being shut (my thought at that stage was that Fea-bella had been dragged through the doors, but this was revised as I will explain below). The PCs found the doors with a successful test (I think on Scout, made for Telemere). Telemere's player then made a test, based on his Instinct, to see if they were being watched in the dark - and failed, so the aptrgangrs came for them, and they fled. The players succeeded at the Flee conflict, but with a compromise - so instead of arriving at their intended destination, the natural-light-filled room with the seeing throne, they ended up in a different room, stumbling over Fea-bella's body which had been dumped there. This roused Fea-bella from her unconsciousness, and she was able to light her lantern.

Fea-bella's player had revised her Instinct, from a camp/town/journey mapping instinct back to her "read everything I see" instinct. So when I mentioned the writing on the wall behind the 12' long sarcophagus with an icy lid, she started reading it. Of course these were cursed runes but the player succeeded on the Will test, and so realised that if Fea-bella kept reading she would free Duran, the trapped demon of the Outer Cark.

The PCs then worked out the demon was trapped in the icy sarcophagus in front of them, and was a larger-than-life-sized version of the strange idol at the entrance to the dungeon. As per his instinct, Golin identified the weak spot in the sarcophagus - its icy lid! And Telemere spotted the treasure chest at the feet of the demon. So the players came up with the plan of roping the demon down at the upper end, while breaking the bottom to extract the treasure. I checked the Hunter obstacles and learned that trapping a monster with snares or nets is Ob 6. Needless to say that check was not a success, and so when the Dwarf shattered the lid, out came the demon . . .

The players' (and their PCs') first response was to try and trick the demon into thinking they'd deliberately released it and so were owed a reward (ie the treasure in the chest). They won, but with a compromise - which, after a bit of back-and-forth that included me as GM taking some remarks made by them at face value, ended up being that they would sacrifice Megloss on the altar to the Outer Dark. The demon duly went off to procure Megloss from his house (which, as already mentioned, sits directly atop the dungeon).

Duran brought Megloss back pretty quickly, but not so quickly the players couldn't divvy up the loot from the demon's treasure chest, which first required Korvin to pick its lock; though in the course of this the Dreamwalker failed what was her first attempt to cast a spell (no successes from 4 Arcanist dice for an Ob 1 Mystic Porter), and d opted for a twist - a Wizard of Earthsea-style shadow coming out of her heart and scurrying off into the darkness (it seemed very fitting given she had just been party to an agreement to sacrifice a fellow Elf to the Outer Dark).

And then, some time later in the real world, a somewhat similar thing happened in my BW game:

Thoth wanted to go to the docks to find corpses, of those who had died at sea. Aedhros was concerned that the fire on the Golden Sow would have attracted undue attention - but mention of this only made Thoth more eager, as there must be dead bodies as a result of that blaze!

<snip>

A die of fate roll indicated that one corpse was available for collection, and Aedhros helped Thoth carry it off.

<snip>

When the body was back in the workshop, Thoth used his Second Sight to read its Aura, looking for traits. This test failed, and so Thoth learned that the corpse had been Stubborn in life - perhaps why this particular sailor had not evacuated the Sow - which is a +1 Ob to Death Art. I also made a roll to determine the state of the body, which determined that the fire had damaged it to the same degree as a year of death, which added a further +4 Ob penalty. Thoth successfully performed Taxidermy - against Ob 5 - to preserve the corpse, with a roll good enough to carry over +1D advantage to the Death Art test but did not what to attempt the Ob 7 Death Art (with his Death Art 5) until he could be boosted by Blood Magic. And so he sent Aedhros out to find a victim

<snip>

Aedhros followed one of the guards - George, as we later learned he was called - who also happened to be the one with the loot. Aedhros ambushed him from the darkness, and took him at knife point back to the workshop, where Thoth subject him to the necessary "treatment" (successful Torture test to inflict a PTGS 7 (Midi) wound), granting +2D to Death Art (and also sending George into a swoon, perhaps a blessing as it meant he did not need to witness the horrors of the Death Art performance). The dice were now rolled for the (careful) Death Art test, with 7 successes needed to raise the body from the ship as a Walking Dead. Only 6 successes (on 9 open-ended dice, with a Fate Point spent) were rolled, and so it failed. Looking at the GM advice for failed Death Art, I rolled an unwelcome summoning result, and something weird and creepy scurried out into the darkness.

And then, at that very moment - acting carefully, and failing, licenses a time-sensitive complication - there was a knock on the door. (How this door relates to the secret door onto the docks is not quite clear, but can be resolved in due course.) Serap, the maid servant of Lady Mina, had been told that Thoth was a surgeon whom she might be able to afford, to treat her mistress.

<snip>

The group arrived at Lady Mina's house, a grand one but past its prime. The staff were only an old watchman, and Serap. Most of the windows were in darkness. But a candle was lighting an upstairs window, and there in her sick-bed was Lady Mina. And sitting beside her, to provide religious comfort, was Father Simon. It was Father Simon who had suggested Thoth to Serap, and he now greeted him as a surgeon.

Father Simon is a NPC from earlier Burning Wheel play: the evil priest in Keep on the Borderlands, a death cultist who goes about disguised as an educated and erudite priest of the mainstream faith, who hears the confessions of noble men and women. Thoth is a Death Artist, a lifepath from the Death Cult, and he recognised Father Simon (as narrated by me as GM)

<snip>

Lady Mina passed away.

Thoth then declared his intention to take her corpse away for disposal, and this triggered an intervention from Father Simon. He wanted her to be laid to rest in the city catacombs, with her ancestors; and there was also a sub-text of imposing Death Cult discipline on Thoth. This was a Duel of Wits, and Father Simon - a 7-lifepath burn with a heavy social emphasis and a good range of FoRKable Wises, Histories and Doctrines - succeeded with no loss to his body of argument. In the denouement, he chastised Thoth for his cavalier approach to the collection and treatment of corpses, at odds with the teachings of the Dark Gods from beyond the stars - who promise eternal life - and putting them all at risk. Evidence of this included the shadow from the void waiting outside, should Thoth try and return home in the darkness rather than waiting for the sun to rise.

In both these excerpts of play, you can see me as GM narrating stuff - Fea-bella's scream, and other noises, echoing through the tunnels to be heard by the other PCs at the entrance to the caverns; Serap coming to the door of Thoth's establishment - but with no fixed idea as to what exactly it betokens. I settled on the location of Fea-bella's body as part of narrating the compromise in the other players' Flee conflict. I invented details of Lady Mina's house, and the presence of Father Simon and his role in sending Serap to Thoth, once Thoth's player had decided to accept Serap's invitation.

And in both accounts a failed used of magic causes a sinister shadow thing to go scuttling off into the darkness. In neither case, when I narrated this, did I know what it was, or what exactly its presence meant. Subsequent events in the TB2e game helped resolve, a bit, the implications of the shadow (first it possessed Krystal, and then a failed attempt by the PCs to remove it from her meant that it merged with Megloss). In the BW game nothing more has been established than that it is lurking outside Lady Mina's house, waiting for Thoth.

This is what @Campbell was getting at, at least as I read him, when he posted this:

That is the intended mentality for the playstyles Apocalypse World and Burning Wheel were designed to support. To stay present, focus on what is on-screen. Don't commit to anything off-screen. Think of possibilities, sure, but do not get attached to them. Because as a GM the job is maintaining the pace of play and keeping the focus on the premise of the game and the individual player characters.

We're still extrapolating, but only in the moment and always in service to the needs of the game.

 

[AlViking]

And that's where I disagree; I think both of those (though the first more than the second) can be made better by handling. If you don't, well, that's what it is.




And this makes an extremely optimistic assumption about how easy it is to find a group that works well enough without other efforts. Its the sign of people who've been unusually lucky.



And does, quite a bit.

Text in a book will never guarantee that all people at the table have the same expectations or that they will gel as a group. The 2024 DMG does delve into this quite a bit but games are just that, games. They're not designed to get everyone sitting in a circle singing kum-ba-ya, and I don't think they should be. I've left groups that had a decent GM but they just didn't want the same things out of the game I did and vice versa.

So I really don't know what you're arguing for. You can have pages on mutual respect and ensuring enjoyment for all. But if one person wants to play games with knights in shining armor fighting back the darkness and someone else wants to be the darkness neither of them is wrong but they're not going to fit together.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Text in a book will never guarantee that all people at the table have the same expectations or that they will gel as a group.

This is based on the usual all or nothing assumptions I've taken issue with every time it came up, so I don't see any point in addressing it again.

So I really don't know what you're arguing for.

And I don't think explaining that yet one more time is useful either.

 

[pemerton]

That’s not what @pemerton has been saying to me. He has very clearly expressed an inability to understand not engaging in an encounter—a very odd thing for someone who has actually played D&D to not understand. And this wasn’t the first time; several thousand posts ago, I off-handedly mentioned having signs of something spooky in the woods, to which a player said “I wave goodbye to the encounter and move on.” And pemerton acted as though both the player not biting the hook and me not railroading the players into engaging the encounter (but instead let them ignore it) were baffling, even completely alien ideas.

What is alien to me about that particular episode is the mis-match between what you as GM appear to think is interesting (this spooky woods thing you've worked out) and what the players appear to think is interesting.

He has also very clearly been unable to understand the idea of a potential encounter—that even in improv, a GM could tell the players “here’s some footprints” and also, at the same time, think “these footprints were left by bandits.”

No. I'm trying to understand what is meant by describing this potential encounter as having been bypassed. You can only bypass an actual thing - like a traffic jam, as per someone else's post upthread - and I'm trying to understand where this potential encounter "exists" such that it was bypassed.

The answer, so far, appears to be in the GM's expectation of what might happen.

Even though he’s done the exact same thing! Back in post 9047, he wrote about a game he ran, in which the following happened:


So here, there’s an area of water. The players deliberately didn’t look in the water. Thus, they didn’t see the stuff (coins, dead goat) that he decided was in the water. This is his players deliberately bypassing something that only existed in pemerton’s imagination, something that he claims can’t possibly happen! And he makes fun of them for doing it! And this—except for the taunting—is exactly what I’ve been describing.

The decision about what was in the water existed in my notes for the area. As I've posted repeatedly, TB2e uses map-and-key for some aspects of its scene-framing and its resolution. In that post that you refer to, I said this:

Because the players deliberately chose not to look in the pool, they did not prompt me to tell them about the gold and the goat. So this is something that the players missed, because of the way their action declarations were resolved by reference to the map-and-key.

The players chose not to examine the pool closely because they were worried about what might be in there. Let's suppose, just for the sake of illustration, that rather than gold and a goat the map key describes the pool as containing a water spirit who enchants and tries to drown anyone who looks into its eyes. In that case, the players' choice would have been a lucky one rather than an unfortunate one. Would that be an example of "bypassing an encounter"?

So your answer seems to be "yes, that is an example of bypassing an encounter". It only took 600 posts for someone to answer me!

In this case, the "encounter" (not a word I would use to describe missed treasure) "existed" in the GM's notes.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I've been in that game and played with those players and lost characters because of it. I know of what I speak.

You know of your group. Which you have made quite clear is full of ruthless exploiters.

Most groups aren't like your group, in numerous ways.

The other nice thing individual xp does is trend play a bit more toward high-risk high-reward, and away from low-event plodding. Nothing extreme, but it does move the needle.

But that ignores the possibility of other tools filling the gap. For example, 4e's quests, which can be individual, or for the whole group. That actually pulls double duty; it rewards individuals for pursuing the stuff that matters to them, AND rewards the group for caring about one another's interests. Purely individualistic XP may avoid devaluing totally individualistic risk-taking, but it actually does devalue something else: group-centric risk-taking. Under individualistic XP, especially in the old-school paradigm where GP=XP, you are rewarded for abandoning your allies to die so you get a bigger share of the treasure and thus more XP. Having group rewards when individual characters succeed on their personal goals, on the other hand, means everyone is rewarded for looking out for everyone's interests, not just their own, and thus they're encouraged to take risks that help their allies. One path rewards one kind of risk-taking and devalues the other--and vice-versa. It's not a strict gain of rewarding risk; something is paid so something else can be bought.

Surely that, too, moves the needle a bit more toward high-risk high-reward, and away from low-event plodding?

It's the same as a typical refereed sport such as hockey or football: the players have to trust the referee to act in good faith while the referee has to assume the players will do their best to get away with stuff until-unless said referee does his job and they're caught.

And I fundamentally reject this perspective. Maybe in your games, the players are inherently disingenuous jerks actively engaging in bad faith. That's not how I play, and I consider it both openly insulting and utterly unacceptable to argue that even most players act like that, let alone ALL players.

If I'm expected to presume that GMs are always participating in good faith, I absolutely demand that we presume--unless evidence has suggested otherwise--that the players are also participating in good faith. If I am expected to presume the players (whether all or merely some) will participate in bad faith and must thus be subject to a bunch of controls to prevent that, then I absolutely demand that we presume--unless evidence has suggested otherwise--that (whether all or merely some of) GMs will participate in bad faith and must thus be subject to a bunch of controls to prevent that.

You cannot have it both ways. You cannot demand a presumption of total innocence (unless rigorously proven otherwise) for GMs and a presumption of guilt from players (unless rigorously proven otherwise). It's both, or it's neither. Your choice; I don't care which you pick, but you have to pick one. Nothing else will ever be acceptable. Period. (Edit: And to be clear, I would find it just as unacceptable to presume that GMs are guilty until proven innocent but players are the reverse. All should be subject to the same standard.)

 

[Micah Sweet]

You know of your group. Which you have made quite clear is full of ruthless exploiters.

Most groups aren't like your group, in numerous ways.


But that ignores the possibility of other tools filling the gap. For example, 4e's quests, which can be individual, or for the whole group. That actually pulls double duty; it rewards individuals for pursuing the stuff that matters to them, AND rewards the group for caring about one another's interests. Purely individualistic XP may avoid devaluing totally individualistic risk-taking, but it actually does devalue something else: group-centric risk-taking. Under individualistic XP, especially in the old-school paradigm where GP=XP, you are rewarded for abandoning your allies to die so you get a bigger share of the treasure and thus more XP. Having group rewards when individual characters succeed on their personal goals, on the other hand, means everyone is rewarded for looking out for everyone's interests, not just their own, and thus they're encouraged to take risks that help their allies. One path rewards one kind of risk-taking and devalues the other--and vice-versa. It's not a strict gain of rewarding risk; something is paid so something else can be bought.

Surely that, too, moves the needle a bit more toward high-risk high-reward, and away from low-event plodding?


And I fundamentally reject this perspective. Maybe in your games, the players are inherently disingenuous jerks actively engaging in bad faith. That's not how I play, and I consider it both openly insulting and utterly unacceptable to argue that even most players act like that, let alone ALL players.

If I'm expected to presume that GMs are always participating in good faith, I absolutely demand that we presume--unless evidence has suggested otherwise--that the players are also participating in good faith. If I am expected to presume the players (whether all or merely some) will participate in bad faith and must thus be subject to a bunch of controls to prevent that, then I absolutely demand that we presume--unless evidence has suggested otherwise--that (whether all or merely some of) GMs will participate in bad faith and must thus be subject to a bunch of controls to prevent that.

You cannot have it both ways. You cannot demand a presumption of total innocence (unless rigorously proven otherwise) for GMs and a presumption of guilt from players (unless rigorously proven otherwise). It's both, or it's neither. Your choice; I don't care which you pick, but you have to pick one. Nothing else will ever be acceptable. Period.

Come on now. You know you can't legitimately claim anything about "most players" any more than @Lanefan can.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Ok, so what do you call it when the PCs meet with an NPC or event in a way that calls for character action?

It depends on the nature of the interaction. I just recently posted about an assault in my BitD game, and a town-wide feast that led to a dark ritual that enthralled most of the townsfolk and the PCs then exorcised the evil entity and banished it, at the cost of one of their lives, which was at the end of my recent Stonetop campaign.

The characters meet with people, talk to them, fight them, negotiate with them, befriend them… I just use the words that make sense to describe what’s happening. There’s no reason to label them all as encounters except for the purposes of game expectation.

Encounter is a word that I might use occasionally… a chance encounter, the soldiers encountered resistance, and so on. It’s not a word I’d use to describe every time I interact with other people. I spend time with my wife, I coach my kid’s soccer team, I meet with co-workers, I play games with friends… I don’t have an encounter with my wife or my coworkers.

We only describe things that way because of D&D and its influence.

It’s clear you think the term is based in trad games, meaning D&D, meaning combat. But that’s not true. Yes, there are a lot of combat encounters out there, but if you haven’t realized by now that there are other types, you’re being willfully blind to what I write.

I don’t know why you’re insisting on assuming that I’m talking only about combat encounters. I’m not.

The term was used in D&D. Because that’s the case, its use is greater than it otherwise would be. However, it makes some amount of sense in that structure… where play is often broken up into discrete chunks. It makes sense to have a label for those chunks. This is often how play is paced… by encounters. Whether its X number of rooms in the dungeon or X encounters per adventuring day.

But that same label doesn’t apply to all games. So using it for those games doesn’t make sense.

 

[zakael19]

@AlViking uses the stick, I prefer to use the carrot.

How else can a DM gently encourage some risk-taking?

A Player Agenda/Best Practices that calls for that you can refer the players back to as needed helps .

I like that Daggerheart starts with "Embrace Danger" as its #1:

Along the way, you’ll face difficult choices and life-threatening peril. It’s important as adventurers to embrace this danger as part of the game.
Playing it safe, not taking risks, and overthinking a plan can often slow the game to a halt.

Don’t be afraid to leap in headfirst and think like a storyteller, asking what the hero of a novel or a TV show would do here?