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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 1892156" data-attributes="member: 7240">Before I get to responding specifically to Hong, I have to begin by asking those people who feel games always must end on a high note and that suffering a severe setback in your quest is equivalent to it being ruined whether they think the last chapter of the The Two Towers would have been a bad thing for a GM to do. (If you've only seen the movie, don't answer this question -- the movie ends at a different point than the book.)I think it's abundantly clear that the GM did not anticipate this "fallout." So the point you're trying to make here doesn't make any sense. I'm not talking about remembering whether an NPC has a mole on his left cheek; I'm talking about recalling who people are that you have had multiple interactions with. Every player in this game remembered who the gnomes were. So why are you arguing that it was unreasonable for the GM to expect them to recall this? Clearly it was reasonable for him to expect this because they all did.As for your movie-campaign comparison, you're now making a completely different argument than you were in the previous post and are accusing me of making the one you were. I suppose I could spend 15 minutes clipping and quoting here but as I've succeeded in getting you to change your position, I think I'll quit while I'm ahead.Yes. But you were arguing that the dungeon battle where they recovered the artifact was the climax of the campaign. We're not discussing pacing internal to episodes (or at least we weren't until you shifted your position again). You argued that it was without a doubt true that the battle they had with the possessors of the artifact was the climax of the campaign. I produced strong evidence to the contrary. You then argued that this wasn't what you were talking about at all. Oh yeah -- my players will all confirm I never tell stories.  <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/paranoid.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":uhoh:" title="Paranoid    :uhoh:" data-shortname=":uhoh:" /> Whereas your description of the last episode you ran seems o so story-oriented. The climax of LOTR is in Return of the King; there are climactic moments in the other two books but the campaign/story has the one actual climax. So, in your view Return of the King is a totally separate storyline from The Two Towers. The Two Towers should end on a high note because the reader deserves a payoff, right? Hong, I'm not going to belabour this argument any further because your shifting positions and terminology make you too much of a moving target. To produce an equivalent of the nonsense you just spewed in the above paragraph, let me offer some roughtly comparable phrasing. "Of course they've been waiting too long; obviously an hour/week/month/whatever you want to call it is too long a time to wait." Episodes, storylines, campaigns and adventures are all actually different things. In order to establish what the hell you are talking about, you have to decide which thing you are referring to. One moment, the unit of time under discussion is 35 episodes; the next, it's 1; the next, it's 50. I don't know what to do here. Yes. It's so important to prevent players from being surprised. God they hate that. Some people actually come to games because they enjoy surprising and unexpected things happening. Now maybe that's not what your players are into but I'd hazard a guess that the majority of D&D players kind of like it when there are plot twists and surprises. Right -- because when people lose the object of their quest, they "always" have to start over again. Hong, could you please name ONE story about a quest where people lose the object of the quest and are forced to "start all over again." I've now provided 5 different examples of the genre convention of people losing the object of their quest near the climax -- you have not provided one single counter-example. On that subject Hong, tell me: how many times have Ambrus or I suggested that the players are going to be "starting all over again"? So, you feel that it is a wrong and peculiar thing in a narrative for the protagonist to suffer a major setback? What kinds of stories do you read?You mean the reactions of the 3 players who agreed with the GM? Yes. That was quite a reasonable thing to anticipate.</blockquote>

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