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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...

I think there's a lot of ideological elements in discussions of sandboxes that obscure what's actually going on. In your traditional Hex Crawl you will often have safer areas and more dangerous areas with different types of encounter tables and different elements of risk. And the dangerous...

The thing about the Quantom Ogre is that it is an informed choice. It's not that the players know about the ogre, but the information they have suggests that there is at least a chance they will encounter the thing they are looking for (which is not an Ogre). So it's less about having a choice...

As so often in these discussions it feels like you are assuming certain things to be the case here which haven't been explicitly stated.

I don't know. I think meaningless choices should be avoided, but choices can have meaning regardless of a specific encounter. If you decide to travel north there will be some fixed things that can only be north (eg cities, climate etc). But there might be a good bandit encounter (And I don't...

To be clear, people think this sort of thing is what the Quantum Ogre situation is about, but it's not.

I'm bemused by this idea, because, while I quite like Goliaths, we've had quite similar threads to this about Goliaths.

Yes. That's basically what I had in mind when I said it wasn't necessarily impossible. I didn't mean that the contradiction didn't exist, just that there were certain approaches that can sort of work. Notably I think 3 and 4 while they can somewhat work, are what I had in mind when I was...

Personally I think it's time they renamed humans to make the connection between humans and halflings clear. Call them either "wholelings" or maybe just "lings"

My personal take on dwarves in recent years has been to make them both a diaspora and cursed. They have lost their old mountain home and dispersed through human lands but there is no agreed Thorin Oakenshield as the heir awaitng. Instead there is acrimony and bitter blood feuds. "Every dwarf...

The example I gave was definitely not intended to be an X card sort of situations (although I guess it could be). It was purely about the direction of the fiction in the game. The concern was more about the game going in a direction that players or GM might not want. If Bob's character starts...

I didn't say solely. I have no interest in who's responsible theoretically. I'm interested in how these things are best dealt with practically. I still think it's better if the GM acts first in this kind of interest regardless of whatever else has been agreed upon. For the simple fact that...

I've mostly stayed out of this side-argument because it's been going on for twenty years and it bores me at this point. But I do feel the need to point out that the example I gave of lack of GM leadership was not a social situation outide of the game. It's not as if it was about the GM...