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Ha. You do realise that was my reformulation of the original situation the quantum ogre was meant to describe right?

Oh for gods sake. How exactly am I enforcing something by pointing out the term has a history? As for 'obvious' I think you will find if you see enough of these discussions that it is anything but obvious. People always talk past each other because the idea of the quantum ogre is just too...

When I said the original context I meant the original context of the Hack'n'slash blog of 2011 as I linked to earlier in the thread. The way it originally turned up in this thread was an example of the kind of misconception I was talking about.

There are of course a number of ways to handle travel. You can skip it, skill challenge it, montage it 13th Age style etc. You don't have to have a string of encounters random or otherwise. I only brought up encounters on a journey, because it seems to be an underlying assumption behind the...

Problems with Dwarves: They're almost univerisally depticed as male. They're highly (Northern European) culturally specific. They unnappealing aesthetically They're boring mechanically They've become highly stereoptyped in terms of character and behavior And finally. The last point above has...

Largely. Although there's other possibilties with the purple worm. For example, the players might not encounter the worm itself but merely signs of it's passage. This would allow them to track it back to it's lair should they choose to. Same with the red dragon. It doesn't mean the pcs...

By segregating them by location, making clear which locations are more dangerous and finally by not having an encounter necessarily mean a combat.

Part of the problem with some of these examples has to do with the issue of journeys in games. Journeys can become problematic because once the PCs have decided to make a journey they have already often made the most significant decision of the journey. If there's multiple routes from A to B...

There's a difference, but there's not really a difference on the level of player choice. There could be, mind. If the players are exploring knowing there is a chance of stumbling across something either extremely dangerous or extremely valuable, then the use of a randomiser is meaningful...

Yeah some players are never going to enjoy exploration under these circumstances. Although part of the art in doing this is working out as you go how it all interacts with every else that has already been established.

I think you're overthinking the trees and missing the forest here. It's always a mistake to focus on the ogre rather then what it's supposed to represent. Edit: 1) How much you can get away with reskinning depends on how much you reskin and what exactly it was the players wished to avoid. 2)...

There is perhaps a grey area here. If the players expect that everything has already been mapped out by the GM, and that they are exploring a fully mapped out area, then the GM should not be moving things around. But that's not always the case. In a procedurally generated hex crawl there may...

Well yes. That was my whole point!

Only if you can use it actively. Endurance was always a skill that was mostly called for by the GM. It is difficult, as I said, to use it to actively address problems. So if Endurance is in the game I now need to spend two proficiences to do what I could have previously done with one? No...

It's worth quoting this from the original Quantom Ogre Post "Palette Shifting Let's take just one moment and talk about palette shifting. There is some misunderstanding of what is meant by this term. This can be as simple as the bandit encounter (Bandits to the east - we go west! ack...

If the players know that one of the doors has the creek and the mushrooms, but the GM decides that the first door they open will have the wolves regardless of which door they choose, that's the quantom ogre situation.

So a haunted house is different to a monster just because? Do you use a different random encounter table every time the players make a choice of direction? Because if you don't the players choices of direction are meaningless in regard to what they encounter.

Ok. By corrollary then, everytime you offer a players a choice of direction you must also use a different random encounter table.

Well if there's exactly no reason to choose a direction other than the destination of the haunted house, then it is indeed meaningless and shouldn't be offered. But it seems an unnatural situation. Presumably if the players are choosing a direction it's because they want to go to a certain...

So they don't know there isn't a haunted house, and the haunted house doesn't replace another encounter they might have been expecting to have? If the GM rolled on an encounter table and it came up "Haunted House" would it still be railroading? What about if the GM rolls the encounter before...