NOW LIVE! -- ZEITGEIST: Death of the Author for D&D 5E on Kickstarter! Murder. Conspiracy. Secrets. A remote manor. An adventure for D&D 5E.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8263814" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, things are a bit different for the players. They're restricted to knowing and doing what their PCs can know and do. However, there is an analogous thing going on. I mean, it might be reasonable for a PC to suspect the orcs have a spy in town. Or is it? I mean, the PLAYER thinks that, but it is hard to say how the character might think. Beyond that, there are a million possibilities, most of which nobody has even thought about. I mean, does the GM describe regularly, or even know, what sorts of large birds fly over the town? So, if the orc shaman uses them as spies, would anyone even have the means to ask about it? Presumably the GM might consider whether certain PCs (the druid, the ranger) might notice such a thing, but it is only one of 1000 things the players might think of and ask about on their own initiative. So, yeah, you can certainly make the town vs orcs war, in which the PCs are a significant factor, play out in a way that has a 'feeling' of what people might do in an actual war of some analogous kind in the real world (give or take, lets not quibble overmuch about any differences between fantasy and reality for now). But the action itself, and what factors turn out to be important, how ploys and plans and strategies turn out, will be largely in the hands of the GM to invent narrative reasons for. He's likely to reward some creative, fun, thinking by the players with some successes, etc. OTOH IME a lot of the time the players have a quite different view of what is going on, and their actions may make no sense at all to the GM, and appear to be ridiculous and bound to fail, yet be utterly logical and coldly rational in the players minds. I think that last bit actually probably encapsulates a large part of the reason that most games tend more to the tone of a certain degree of 'heroic play' where the PCs are active, the monsters are largely passive, and whichever ploys the players come up with, they may fail, but they can just try something else unless whatever they did was really incredibly dangerous, or when the GM decides to turn the tables and create a tense situation like taking hostages, or an attack on the town by the orcs. Even then, most games will resolve the situation with a symbolic fight or rescue, which is more narratively satisfying vs downright plausible if you start to think about it too much.I mean, even back in the days of Gygaxian dungeon crawl there were conventions. The monsters in B2 don't set up watches and alarm systems and all swarm out of their caves to gang-bash attacking human parties, although that would make a lot of sense for them to do (there are a few perfunctory guards around, and I think in the notes for the module it talks about maybe if the monsters get shellacked a few times they might all clear out). I mean, probably realistically, given the scale of the Caves of Chaos, as soon as anyone came visiting the whole place would be in an uproar, and the party would be fleeing for its lives! But there's a convention, if you pay lip service to being discrete, the DM doesn't pile 10 encounters worth of monsters on you at once. Otherwise the dungeon crawl just doesn't really work. OK, you can stock all your dungeons with skeletons and zombies, insects and such, and traps, plus maybe an ooze or a jelly or two, that might be a bit more plausible. Nobody does that much though, because it gets old fast...</blockquote>

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