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

[Maxperson]

But the town exists.

When the encounter is "bypassed", where does it "exist"? What road did the players divert from, so as to "bypass" it?

Road 1. The point is, the DM set up an encounter and the players bypassed it.

Where does route no 1, and the bandits on it, "exist"?

This is a sandbox where prep happens, since that's the context of the thread. So clearly route 1 and 2 are on the map, and the DM set up an encounter on one of those. If the players take the other route, they have bypassed that encounter just like bypassing a town on the highway.

I see two possible answers: in the GM's notes; or in the GM's imagination.

Or shared imagined space, since it's possible for the players to discover the encounter in such a way as to not start an interaction and then bypass it.

 

[Maxperson]

Another way of looking at it is that it’s kept alive by posters who clearly have expectations about how the players will proceed, but who won’t admit that they’re directing the game.

Speaking for myself, it's because I'm not willing to lie and say that I am.

 

[Maxperson]

The players have to trust the referee. The referee has to assume the players will cheat unless she does her job.

Yeah. That's a very major departure between myself and @Lanefan. I can't disagree with him more that players will try to cheat unless the DM stops it somehow.

 

[AnotherGuy]

On a slightly different point, it seems like it is the GM who is deciding that the tavern defaults to a social encounter, or the library to investigation? Again, that is something that is reinforcing my impression that this "bypass encounter" way of speaking is describing GM-driven play.

Sure if I had planned it then yes I would definitely be guilty of GM-driven play, although planned social encounters which are missed is not something that really is common enough to speak of.

Honestly the library example in my mind was if I thought about it during or after play as something the PCs could have done in the fiction and the players never thought of it (i.e. it wasn't planned beforehand). There are times when that happens when I think of something while they're declaring actions and the rest of the table doesn't it and I offer them up after the session with "you now what you guys missed?"
Other times I may hint at it during play, maybe it happens through a check.
I cannot say I have a set way of dealing with ideas that spring to my mind during play. Most of the time I want to reward the players ofc. This is an interesting tangent.

When it comes to PCs brainstorming for ideas, do you offer input or is the advice in the rulebooks to rely strictly on the player's imagination?

EDIT: Thinking about it published material may lead to missing opportunities (social or explorative).
When I homebrew I'm never as detailed as an AP/module - I have a few set scenes in my mind or on paper but the rest I wing it as the players take lead of how the story unfolds or how those scenes come to be.

 

[Maxperson]

I struggle to imagine anyone ever having described themselves as having “encountered a town”.

I struggle to take this statement seriously. Clearly "encounter" is in D&D terms. It doesn't matter if nobody would describe a town as encountered in normal conversation. In D&D terms a group who crests a hill and finds a town is encountering that town.

 

[Faolyn]

M

You said that, if the players choose to have their PCs ignore or not follow the tracks, there is an encounter that they have bypassed.

@Campbell, @hawkeyefan and I have all replied that this is not how we think when adjudicating a "don't prep plots", player-driven RPG.

If the GM tells the players who made the tracks, great! "The tracks look like those of the giant Grom." This doesn't change the fact that, if the players have their PCs do something other than follow the tracks, they are bypassing an encounter with Grom. Nothing "exists" to be bypassed.

I’ve explained this before. And you’re still misunderstanding what “don’t prep plots” means. It doesn’t mean “don’t think up stuff” it means “don’t come up with stories the players have to follow.”

My computer broke so I don’t currently have AW to refer to in order to double-check, but I know it uses clocks and I think it uses fronts—and if it doesn’t, then DW and many other PbtA games use them. Monster of the Week uses countdowns, which are similar but formatted differently. These are things where the GM establishes events, even chains of events—but they’re not plots or stories. it’s perfectly OK in this type of game to say that tracks exist. It could be a one-off or it could be an indication of the start of a front or countdown.

Anyway. If you tell your players that there are tracks, you have caused something to exist—those tracks are now real (in the game’s universe). Thus, someone or something made them. They just didn’t make themselves, after all. It doesn’t matter if, at that moment, the players or their characters don’t know what made them. It doesn’t even matter if you, the GM, don’t know what made them at that moment. Something did, and that something now exists within the game’s universe.

Now, that something may not be important. Maybe it never shows up again in your game. No biggie. Or again, it could be a major threat. These things also exist in PbtA and player-driven games.

And because your players choose to avoid the tracks, they choose to avoid the encounter with the thing that made them. Which could mean that the clock, front, or countdown ticks down.

If you want to say that’s GM driven, go ahead. But that’s how the games work. The GM doesn’t write a plot involving this threat; they introduce it and let the players figure it out. So if that’s GM driven, then PbtA games are GM driven.

 

[hawkeyefan]

We use the term encounter because it’s handy terminology, just like scene, session, adventure, arcs, and so forth,

And believe me, I had plenty of encounters with my coworkers. But that doesn’t matter because we’ve been discussing it as a game term—a term that uses the real-life meanings, instead of terms that have more abstract meanings, like harm track or stress boxes or magic points—but a game term nonetheless. Nobody expects you to use gaming terms in real life.

See I think you’ve been confused in how you’ve approached this topic. You said before you were just using the word per its natural language definition. You even quoted the Dictionary at me.

Now here, you’re saying that you’re talking about it as a “game term” which I earlier described as jargon.

Perhaps the confusion you see others displaying has to do with your confusion about the way the word is being used?

Perhaps the fact that there is how it’s used outside of gaming and then also a jargon usage that is part of the problem? I mean… this tangent is all because you could not accept that someone could be confused by this. And yet you aren’t even consistent yourself… and that’s before we even bring others’ comments into it.

Because if you weren’t, you’d stop talking about encounters as combat encounters only.

I’m literally not doing that.

See what I mean? You’re not talking about social encounters here. You’re talking about dungeons and adventuring days. That means primarily combat and traps.

If you stopped thinking of encounters that way, you’d be more amenable to the word.

I didn’t say anything about combat. I said “X number of rooms in a dungeon” or “X encounters per day”. I said nothing about those rooms or encounters being all combat.

You are fabricating that entirely. I’ve now clarified this for you three times.

It always makes sense to use it.

This is the problem. It doesn’t always make sense to everyone in every game to use it. That’s what I’m saying.

Look back at when “scene” was mentioned… several posters said that they didn’t like thinking of their game that way. That term doesn’t work for them.

I didn’t say to those folks “Well you may not like it, but your game is made up entirely of scenes”. Which is what you’re doing here… although I’d say you go a step further.

I think part of your problem is you think I’m saying “here’s an encounter!” or words to that effect at that moment, at the table. No, of course not. I don’t even use that word when I prep a game or when running a fully improvised game. But when I look at the game afterwards, when I consider what goes into a game, that’s when I can point out the encounters we went through.

That’s fine. I accept how you use the term when you look back on play. I even do so myself for some games.

However… I’m asking you to accept that I do not do so for other games. I don’t look back over play and describe all the bits as a series of encounters. I don’t say “oh the encounter with Madame Eva les to the encounter with the werewolves. Then we went to the Amber Temple and encountered the Arcanaloth.”

I don’t do that. It feels odd to me to do so for games that don’t have encounters as a basic part of their structure.

Can you truly not accept that?

 

[AnotherGuy]

Following on from my recent conversations with @pemerton which touched on GM-centric play I thought the below may help with others to define/analyse their game.
The below are different sandboxes each with their own level of GM-centric play. There are probably others feel free to add - I'm not sure if @robertsconley's game falls into Homebrew prepped or something different. He would do better justice to his style as to where he lands.
It is my opinion the looser homebrew content sees greater player-driven play.

APs/Modules
APs/Modules + Homebrew prepped
AP/Modules + Homebrew loose
Homebrew prepped
Homebrew loose

I define our table's play as the bolded option. I try mitigate the GM-centric story that comes with AP/Modules with a little bit of player-facing mechanics here and there but we are not at 50/50 yet IMO. As the AP/Modules comes closer to finalisation, I expect the homebrew content to increase based on the direction/story the players want to engage in.

 

[Gimby]

On the subject of Encounters and Bypassing them - instinctively as a GM I think of "bypassing" to mean avoiding a fight - there's an assumption that I don't think is uncommon that we are generally referring to combat by Encounters.

It might be worth considering an example.

Let's presume we've got a fairly standard D&D party of Rogue, Bard, Wizard, Fighter and Cleric. And for the sake of this example, they've also got a large cask of wine that they've picked up as they had been reliably informed it would be a good bribe for the monster.

The party, for whatever reason, wishes to enter a cave guarded by a monster.

Let's consider two cases.

In the first case the monster is an Ogre (so for 5e, CR2)
In the second case the monster is a Hill Giant (so for 5e, CR5)

Let's also assume that for our purposes that the two monsters have the same overall senses, mental statistics and overall personality (which is why this pair - I know they aren't in 5e but they are fairly close and are overall similar in default personality - the 3e ones are closer)

We can then suppose a number of methods for the party to get past the monster - they could both be bribed with the wine, distracted by an illusion in the same way, persuaded or deceived with the same difficulty (it'd be reasonable that the Giant is harder to intimidate, but we could imagine a slightly bolder Ogre or more cowardly Giant if we like). The point is that the difficulty of getting past the monster is identical in all ways aside from combat.

So, if we assume that the system we are using gives xp rewards for getting past the monster (as all 3+ editions do) then how much should we award? Should it be dependant on the method chosen? Should we have a Combat CR and a non-Combat CR? (4e sort of does this - we might class getting past the monster without fighting as a lower level Encounter and use that to determine the appropriate DCs and rewards, it's not really well spelled out in the text though)

Let's say the character party successfully bribes the monster (they've done their research, come prepared and this is very plausible for what we know of both monsters) with the cask of wine - the actions they take are the same, the costs are the same, the risks are broadly similar (we could assume the monster would be angered by the characters entering their cave and might be a problem in future, but that's hardly a given). Is this Encountering the monster, or Bypassing the Encounter?

 

[Maxperson]

It's interesting that 1e talks about encountering locations, obstacles, and situations in the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide. It was not written by Gygax, but was approved by him.

"Three types of caves are commonly encountered: limestone caves, sea caves, and lava caves."

"Geothermal heat is a feature that can be encountered in deep caves of any kind, although it is particularly likely in a lava cave, since the lava itself is a carrier of geothermal heat."

"This heat can be encountered by underground explorers in a number of ways."
"
"Some dungeons begin as buildings whose ruins are later buried by new buildings, until the original layer seems to be well underground. Dungeons can be encountered long after their construction, and may in fact be well on the way toward collapse-or they may be newly excavated or even in the process of construction when characters encounter them."

"Characters who spend much time exploring the unknown reaches below the earth’s surface are sure to encounter many situations requiring climbing skills."

"Underground obstacles such as chasms and pits are also frequently encountered by subterranean explorers."

"If a character encounters an obstacle while moving in darkness, he must make a Dexterity Check."