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<blockquote data-quote="Beginning of the End" data-source="post: 5478648" data-attributes="member: 55271">The format is also tailored for combat, which is why even adventures which have the potential for non-combat approaches instead turn into combat-combat-combat.The format also feeds into the My Precious Encounter school of design, in which every encounter has been carefully prepared and anything that disrupts the pre-designed encounter simply invalidates 90% of the prep work / 90% of the material in the module. You can't even do something as simple as having the orcs charge into the next room without invalidating most of the encounter.When it comes to miniatures, I've found that it doesn't take much realism in presentation before the imagination shuts down. If I put down a glass bead and say &quot;that's a troll&quot;, they see a troll. If I put down an ogre miniature (because it's the most generic Large miniature I have) and say &quot;that's a troll&quot;, they see an ogre.Perhaps the best example from my experience is the PC with pink boots: We'd played almost twenty sessions when the player got a new miniature for her urban druid. The miniature had pink boots. During the first couple of sessions, when the other players mentioned the pink boots, the urban druid's player would make a point of mentioning that her character didn't really have pink boots. About six sessions later? Her character had pink boots. (She hadn't bought new boots or anything... she just had pink boots now.)Same thing with terrain: If I chicken-scratch a couple lines on a Chessex map, they see the wizard's tower I'm describing. If I throw down some &quot;generic&quot; dungeon tiles, all they see is whatever the tile depicts.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Beginning of the End, post: 5478648, member: 55271"] The format is also tailored for combat, which is why even adventures which have the potential for non-combat approaches instead turn into combat-combat-combat. The format also feeds into the My Precious Encounter school of design, in which every encounter has been carefully prepared and anything that disrupts the pre-designed encounter simply invalidates 90% of the prep work / 90% of the material in the module. You can't even do something as simple as having the orcs charge into the next room without invalidating most of the encounter. When it comes to miniatures, I've found that it doesn't take much realism in presentation before the imagination shuts down. If I put down a glass bead and say "that's a troll", they see a troll. If I put down an ogre miniature (because it's the most generic Large miniature I have) and say "that's a troll", they see an ogre. Perhaps the best example from my experience is the PC with pink boots: We'd played almost twenty sessions when the player got a new miniature for her urban druid. The miniature had pink boots. During the first couple of sessions, when the other players mentioned the pink boots, the urban druid's player would make a point of mentioning that her character didn't [i]really[/i] have pink boots. About six sessions later? Her character had pink boots. (She hadn't bought new boots or anything... she just had pink boots now.) Same thing with terrain: If I chicken-scratch a couple lines on a Chessex map, they see the wizard's tower I'm describing. If I throw down some "generic" dungeon tiles, all they see is whatever the tile depicts. [/QUOTE]

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