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

EzekielRaiden said:

Party has been captured by bad guys. They've been left in a cell to rot. They must escape from the cell in order to accomplish any other goals (obviously, purely by the fiction). No one in the party is especially good at picking locks. Guards, if they are present, know not to let the PCs out, but more likely they're just being abandoned here with no guards at all because who cares, the PCs can starve. Digging out would take months, and the party has rations for at most a few days.

That's verisimilitudinous, perfectly in keeping with the rational motivations of some bad people, and contains a single point of failure. No story required.

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Why didn't the bad guys just kill them? Sounds like they're willing to let them die, and if the PCs could have done anything about it at the time of capture they would have. Your scenario as described seems strange to me.

Micah Sweet said:

Well it didn't sound like the sort of joke that wasn't at the expense of people like me.

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Expense?

It was as low-stakes as your typical RPG session!

hawkeyefan said:

Expense?

It was as low-stakes as your typical RPG session!

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Now that's a funny joke!

AlViking said:

I'm not playing D&D because I'm in love with the rules (although I do like them), I'm playing D&D because it still lets me tell new stories when I DM and enjoy new stories when I play.

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But... but... I thought that there was absolutely no story telling in Sandbox games. Especially no story telling by the DM. How can you enjoy something that has been repeatedly denied to exist?

Hussar said:

But... but... I thought that there was absolutely no story telling in Sandbox games. Especially no story telling by the DM. How can you enjoy something that has been repeatedly denied to exist?

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:sigh: Yes you are pedantically correct. I still enjoy the stories that emerge from play. Better?

EzekielRaiden said:

Party has been captured by bad guys. They've been left in a cell to rot. They must escape from the cell in order to accomplish any other goals (obviously, purely by the fiction). No one in the party is especially good at picking locks. Guards, if they are present, know not to let the PCs out, but more likely they're just being abandoned here with no guards at all because who cares, the PCs can starve. Digging out would take months, and the party has rations for at most a few days.

That's verisimilitudinous, perfectly in keeping with the rational motivations of some bad people, and contains a single point of failure. No story required.

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If the group has been thrown in a pit from which there is no feasible means of escape and they have been left to die, "points of failure" are no longer a concern. It sounds to me like this is describing a campaign end state, not a problem to be overcome.

Edit to add: I will agree that it is one situation where it's either forward or stop forever, but it must be built on a whole sequence of events and decisions that led to this point. If this ending isn't acceptable, it shouldn't have been allowed in the first place. As I mentioned earlier, if it was allowed when it shouldn't have been, I don't need fail forward to fix it, I just say, "Hey, it's not reasonable that the party was thrown in the Pit of No Return just for jaywalking, I was meant to say you get thrown in the Pit of the Overnight Stay" or whatever.

If the PCs have allowed themselves to be captured by Evil Overlord Literally Merciless, with a full understanding of the risks and potential consequences and have failed to utilise any chance of a escape leading up to this point and now they're out of options, then so be it. But there would have been a whole long sequence of events leading up to such a final ending and probably more than one, "Are you sure that's what you want to do?" from me before such a thing occurred.

Hussar said:

Of course I am. That's what level means. Your world absolutely is scaled to party. 100%. You are designing your world where you have areas that are "inherently dangerous" and areas (presumably) which are inherently less dangerous. That's 100% because of the level system. I am frankly baffled how you could even begin to deny this. It's right there in your example. Your low level party starts in a "safer" area. Becomes more "experienced" and then can move on to the higher dangerous areas.

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In the distant past when I designed worlds, there were indeed safer areas and more dangerous areas. And not at all because of level. Rather it was because of civilization. The farther from civilization you go, the more dangerous things get. Armies tend to keep the smart and dangerous things away.

Hussar said:

So your Blackmarsh area - the PC's presumably start in Castle Blackmarsh. That's the obvious starting point. Oh, look the closest adventure location - the bogs at 0814 - are filled with minor plant monsters. Then we have 0616, Ruchill Burn - an abandoned dungeon that can be filled with level appropriate monsters. Then at 1309, we have a truly dangerous location. Only accessible after the PC's have a boat. It's 30 miles off shore. Well distant so that the threats of the island are nicely contained. So on and so forth.

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Why do you assume that the plant monsters are minor. There are some nasty plants in D&D, and he could have unique plants there. And just because an abandoned dungeon CAN be filled with level appropriate monsters, doesn't mean that it is.

Micah Sweet said:

I did say in my opinion. I run a sandbox game.

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At that point you're doing the binary-view thing I've complained about again, since now there's only sandboxes and story-centric games. There's nothing about a naturalistic setting that precludes adventurers only having a limited number of options. In fact, to be blunt, it requires crafting the setting in a somewhat less-than-naturalistic way for the setting to have multiple worthwhile option in a short time period and local area.

(If this sounds like I think full-blown sandboxes aren't particularly simulationist from the get-go, you'd be right. I think to a large extent they're gamist--but remember I don't consider gamist an insult. I just think suggesting a game with a simulationist lean can't produce single-points-of-failure that create problems requires ignoring the gamist elements that are avoiding that).

hawkeyefan said:

No one can make anyone do anything.

I don’t think that telling GMs that the flow of time in their game is something they can control is in any way bad. They can choose to speed it up or slow it down as suits the needs of the table.

I consider it along the lines of the kind of universal advice you see in style guides… like “omit unnecessary words”.

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I think that if even the 5e.24 DMG is telling DM's to consider this, it's about as mainstream advice as you can possibly get. To posit otherwise is to grab the thread's statement and hug it close.

Again, the entire OSR play style/culture largely exists to be conservative in a rebellion against whatever they saw as new styles of D&D that didn't fit their desires based on nostalgia/memory/continued play. It's not like this is a new thing, and each edition of the game seems to drag it back out (5e was a conservative edition itself but seems to have wriggled free of that somewhat at least on the surface now).