Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9791198" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I mean, sure, but let's dig up that specific quote I referenced earlier, which (supposedly) I have an unfair interpretation of.The quote is as follows, from the 2014 DMG. This is the complete entirety of its guidance for how to give XP for non-combat encounters.[HR][/HR]<h3>Noncombat Challenges</h3>You decide whether to award experience to characters for overcoming challenges outside combat. If the adventurers complete a tense negotiation with a baron, forge a trade agreement with a clan of surly dwarves, or successfully navigate the Chasm of Doom, you might decide that they deserve an XP reward.As a starting point, use the rules for building combat encounters In chapter 3 to gauge the difficulty of the challenge. Then award the characters XP as if it had been a combat encounter of the same difficulty, but only if the encounter involved a meaningful risk of failure.[HR][/HR]It...literally doesn't tell you anything. At all. It gives zero guidance for what it means to gauge the difficulty of the challenge. You are simply instructed to pretend that it's a combat encounter, and then use those rules instead. Nothing else is said. At all.The rules for building encounters are entirely based on combat-related statistics. They have nothing--diddly-squat nothing--to do with the difficulty of the social task. The authors seem to think that it is a completely trivial task to do this translation into combat-centric rules. It is not. It is nothing of the sort, in fact. But I'm apparently the horrible awful jerk for asking for rules that lift even a finger to explain how on earth you'd translate "this is a difficult negotiation with a clan of dwarves" into COMBAT RULES so that you can somehow magic up XP for it. For goodness's sake, they don't even tell you what part of the chapter! Just plonk the entire Chapter 3 rules in there, you'll figure it out, you're a smart cookie!!!!Whereas for me, ease of the GMs using the rules that are already there is the #1 requirement. Tailoring is going to occur no matter what you do, and while it is good to try to help that, you cannot do anything to stop it, and even things you do that might slow it down aren't going to slow it down very much.Folks who want the system to be something other than what it is will take a sledgehammer to it either way. Folks hoping for a system that actually works out of the box are SOL if you give them a system that doesn't.</blockquote>

Verification