NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 8284893" data-attributes="member: 6785785">Well no written scenario is really going to be a perfect fit for all GMs. And I'm not sure what you mean by bad GMing; I know we discuss this kind of stuff a lot, so we may apply bad more broadly as we do, but to me the only truly bad GMing is when the GM is doing things against players expectations and what has been agreed upon. Even a pure railroad where the players do little more than declare attacks in combat and roll to see what happens isn't bad at all if that's what everyone is expecting. Now this I absolutely agree with. I mean, I think that it's tough because they don't really commit that strongly to a set of procedures, so they'd have to offer multiple takes on good advice. If you want to run this type of game, do this....if you want to run that kind of game, do that! But the general idea that they should offer more advise on how to GM, and how to actively promote what you want in play, and how to avoid the things you don't want to see in play, yeah, I absolutely agree.For sure. It's funny because when 5E came out, it worked for me and my group. But largely because everything that it's missing was stuff we were already comfortable with providing ourselves. I didn't immediately realize how incomplete a lot of parts of the game really are....or if not incomplete, then poorly or vaguely defined. The DM in B/X could ignore morale rules, sure....but then they are making a conscious decision to ignore rules, and that will have an impact on play. They could also ignore encumbrance....and many did, and then didn't realize that having limited carrying capacity forced certain decisions on the players, which then in turn impacted other decisions, and so on. So if we're talking about 5E and its "blank spots" where it leaves things entirely up to the GM instead of having mechanics or processes in place....this would be one of them. When does an NPC or monster retreat? If there is a mechanic in place, then it's the dice deciding, and the story is simply emerging from play. If it's the GM deciding, then there's really two ways of approaching it: 1) the Gm can decide based on the NPC/Monster's established motives/needs/wants, or 2) the Gm can decide based on what may be the most fun or memorable.Neither 1 nor 2 is good or bad, except that they match or don't match the group's expectations of play. So there may always be risk that the GM can make a call that goes counter to the group's expectations....unless there are mechanics in place to make it a non-decision. *********So something similar that I was reminded of recently is how in the Alien RPG, when a xenomorph or one of the other creatures acts on its turn, the GM rolls a d6 to determine the action it will take. So it may make an attack with its tail (which ignores armor) or it may make a bite attack (which can insta-kill!) or it may hiss threateningly (which may cause a PC to panic). Having this mechanic in place allows the mechanics to be structured to have a variety of effects, and to take the decision from the GM. Otherwise, it's nothing but bite attacks all around...and then it's a GM being a bloodthirsty jerk! The die roll determining it absolves the GM of that. Essentially, the idea is that the more a game says "this is for the GM to decide" then the more the GM is going to be curating the results.</blockquote>

Verification