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That would rather blow up the whole "what's around the next corner" exploration piece, which is IMO and IME a key element of dungeon crawling. Fairly recently I ran an adventure where the players did get the map in advance...or what they thought was the map. The premise was that due to some...

Particularly for those not playing 5.xe.

It's for this exact reason I tend not to put any time into prepping player-side maps and have never got into the whole Dwarven Forge diorama thing: I don't want that meta-thinking to affect play. I'll just scribble a map on the chalkboard when needed. The other thing I really hated the few...

When we see an RPG rulebook that quotes verbatim the entirety of Robert's Rules of Order we'll know the end is nigh.

Boring? Taking reasonable steps to help lower the likelihood of your character getting killed is boring? If I'm watching a hockey game I want to see the whole thing, not just the highlight pack. If I'm playing a character who is part of a party planning an expedition to a dangerous place I...

Technically those are all encounters, albeit of fairly widely varying levels of significance and-or danger. 5e wants "encounter" to mean the resource-draining kind - usually combat - that a DM is supposed to plan 6-to-8 of per adventuring day; which really makes no sense to me given how easy...

To a point, yes it would. That point arrives if-when one moves away from seeing the game as a series of more-or-less-set piece events or highlights and toward seeing it as a continuous [can't think of the term for it - in a movie when there's one long unbroken shoot from the same camera]. Put...

"In the rule book" is what I meant by baked in. It (perhaps over-)formalizes the sort of sliding-scale results some of us have been informally using for years if not decades.

They throw you out of the pub on your ear.

And yet without any real effort at all you can use D&D (at least, TSR-era D&D) for all of these things. That's what makes it so flexible. Never mind that in the earlier editions the rules themselves were relatively easy to tweak to make the game more bespoke to what you wanted. And it's...

The sense I get is that some other games might call them "scenes" instead of encounters. Same thing, though, in the end.

How is there a conflict between need for prep and player agency? They seem largely unrelated to me.

Is it worth noting here that PF2 has baked in a 4-tier sliding scale for check results?

Which is fine as long as they also suggest or request a bigger than usual failure on a Nat 1.

Do you (or does anyone) see a problem with a pre-written adventure including the following: ============== Castle defenses If an alert is sounded, or if any untoward disturbance occurs, the following will happen unless prior or ongoing events interfere: Within 15 seconds --- the alert will be...

I think I've lost the plot (pun intended) here a bit. If the character would remember something significant from two days ago that's been a month for the player, I'll usually remind the player about it (or suggest the player read the game log; if it's that significant it would, ideally, be in...

I gotta say, this one has me confused as well. If someone asked me-as-DM to say yes or no to if I have a desire that a path is not further pursued in game I can't think of any non-extreme instance where my answer would not be, in effect, "What you guys do in-game is up to you". And if we're...

Scale. On the small scale individual encounters are often prepped, either as part of a canned adventure module or something homebrew. Unless it's a far more linear dungeon than I'd like to run, that the encounters are prepped doesn't force the PCs to engage with them, nor does it force the...

I see it as pretty much universal that one of the skills a good DM needs to have (or, over time, acquire) is the ability to hit whatever curveballs the players throw.

I guess I don't see it as being an encounter until-unless the Orcs also become aware of the PCs. Before that, it's just a potential encounter that can - maybe - be bypassed. They bypassed the Orcs but didn't actually resolve anything; the Orcs are still out there as a potential threat and that...