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!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6829660" data-attributes="member: 2067">I'm glad you're here for a player perspective,    [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]! From my perspective, there's a lot of plans that work. Spidery ambushes of buildings in a ruined village? Sneaking around a roadhouse while one character goes in and distracts the enemy? Impersonating new cultist recruits? Pitting lizardfolks against bullywugs and neutralizing most of a castle's fighting force? Just walking around an evil creature's lair messing with their stuff only to then demand MORE when she's ready to form an alliance with you? That your enemies talk to each other (escaped villain from Place 1 winds up at Place 2, lets folks know that there's a band of nosy adventurers screwing up their plans), that rooms often have windows to let out smoke (I don't run from my apartment complex when I over-cook a pizza and the vent's broke), and that a dragon that lives in a giant's castle also speaks Giant are some of the ways plans have gone awry, but they should hardly be surprising. Some plans don't work. Of course, if you would've hunted down escapees, lit the house on actual fire room by room, or talked Elven instead of Giant, those plans would've worked, too. It's good to hear you're feeling shut down, because I can certainly bridge that gap better. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> I tend to err a bit on "sit and wait" when you're discussing plans to keep that meta-game divide. But ultimately these don't have a lot to do with the escalation stuff specifically. Those seem from where I'm sitting to live at the level of an individual encounter. Walk in through the front door and trigger a fight in a room with like 3 other exits, and let enemies leave through two of them...what's a fanatical cultist to do?Disturb a wizard's lair by triggering a trap and are the loyal creations of that wizard supposed to NOT go tell their master what's going on?PC announces to NPC-of-Questionable-Intent that the group that's been annoying the cult for weeks now is here on the flying castle and the NPC's are supposed to ignore that?(That one even took a few turns to escalate entirely - there was a whole chain of like three actions where one PC was talking with an NPC, and the other one just hid out and watched it)It's curious because I'm definitely not looking for ways to shut down ideas, I'm just flowing from where your ideas take me. Speak giant in front of a dragon living in a giant's castle? Yeah, it knows that.Try to smoke out someone on the second floor of a mansion with giant windows? Yeah, there's better ideas available to those guys than running out the front door.Surprise a group of cultists making dinner? Yeah, they're going to just leave through the other entrances to the room....and that just hasn't been the case, really. Multiple rounds pass for the enemy where they are moving between rooms or down coridoors, or telling folks about what's going on (the most recent scenario involved three rounds of NPC's alerting each other before a general "OH NO" went up - spent respectively talking with a dragon, talking with an NPC, and waiting invisibly). It's interesting that this feels like the case, though. I can probably telegraph this better.</blockquote>

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