DM Expectations = One Solution?

[Haltherrion]

From where I'm standing, people just need to grow a thick skin. Failure is not some sort of irredeemable trait that dooms you for eternity. When I say "the DM fails", it means just that: it's a failure. Learn from your failure, use it to your advantage to change your habits, and you'll get better at it.

I think my post on another thread spurred this one and I'll admit I could have been more diplomatic. However, my intent was entirely from the "how can we do something different to avoid this" school of thought and not the "poster X is an idiot" school of thought.

While I have not to my memory created a campaign that died on the first session, I have killed a perfectly good campaign by creating a flying castle the PCs had to enter and designing it with no flaws that I could imagine. The players then spent an agonizing few hours trying to penetrate it and gave up, not just on the castle but the campaign. Live and learn

 

[Haltherrion]

That's the thing: there was no "plan". There was expectation. A DM creates a battle encounter, and he expects the PCs to make it through -- is this not the standard expectation? How many DMs create a battle encounter and then actually prepare for a dozen different options the PCs might take? That way lies madness. A good DM can handle the change by winging it, but winging it doesn't mean "let any old idea work" just because otherwise he's railroading or forcing the Players to choose the "one solution."

This is a matter of style so YMMV as they say but I find it useful to mentally anticipate several outcomes to any encounter. It helps me be open to outcomes I didn't expect. If I have just one expectation in mind, it can be easy to try to slant things that way (hey, we're all human).

Also, by anticipating some likely, multiple outcomes, I can usually provide a better game experience. For instance, in the situation we just referenced, player failure would likely mean capture. What do I want to happen there? I don't want the PCs to languish forver, I want the game to move on. How can they get out? Well, I can make sure there are some disaffected NPCs in the captors camp taht the players might be able to exploit. I can also perhaps have another faction attack, providing opportunity for escape, and so on. Each of these things could be winged but for me anyway, work better with a little thought and maybe some quick notes on these angles.

When reading your OP post (on other thread) it seemed that the sessions stopped when they were captured. For me anyway, it would help to have considered the capture case so that the session could keep going rather than stopping there and contemplating how to progress off line.

 

[Umbran]

It's fine. Just don't take my rebuttal too personally either, then.

No problem, especially because there's a part here that clearly didn't get across.

To me, the offense, if there ever was one, is entirely in the eye of the beholder.

The problem isn't that you hurt some poor widdle bitty DM's feelings.

The problem is that such analysis wedges a real world with multiple dimensions of continuous variations into an overly simplistic on-off switch, and then couches it in terms already known to engage people's egos instead of their intellects.

I'm sorry. I'm don't want to live in a world dominated by my fear of rubbing some person the wrong way

Yeah, well, there's approaching seven billion people on the planet. We're already constantly rubbing against people in our workaday life, so by the time folks get here, the thick skin's warn down. We have to learn to work with them, not butt heads all the time. Sometimes that means considering how we say things. It isn't always walking on eggshells - just taking your audience into account more often.

Are you interested in discussion? The black and white way we tend to say things is not very good at generating intelligent discussion - it lacks the nuance required for discussion. However, it is very good at creating argument.

If you came here for an argument, I think we should just go to the Monty Python sketch and be done with it.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teMlv3ripSM]YouTube - Monty Python - Argument Clinic[/ame]

 

[billd91]

Sorry, but

My thoughts on the encounter and campaign start was that the PCs would close on the enemy ship to fight man-to-man, and then have a fun battle with the enemy grunts. We’d get all the PCs involved in a grand battle. Then the PCs would capture the enemy vessel. When they got to Bral, they could pool their ship and the captured ship together and then buy a really cool ship that they chose for themselves.​

seems not only like a plan for the encounter, but a plan for how the encounter would sequence into the next incident (Bral).

My expectation is not that "A DM creates a battle encounter" but "A DM creates an encounter" that then becomes a battle encounter (or not) depending upon how it is approached (or avoided).

I have to agree with RC here, at least to a point. What your description above says is far beyond the simple expectation that the PCs will be able to defeat an encounter that you expect will be a combat one. In this case, the DM's broader expectations about the initial flow of the campaign were not met and probably contributed to the breakdown of the campaign. That's the kind of "expectation" to avoid.

Having a good savvy expectation of what your players are likely to do and how they are likely to play, that's a different story. If you figure your hack and slasher player will probably try to kill the orc with the pie because he likes combat, and that he'll succeed handily because the orc is overweight and has asthma, that's a fair expectation. But be sure to keep it to a limited scope. Don't add an expectation that they'll then eat the pie and thus gain the mystical knowledge encoded in the blueberry filling that they will need to defeat the BBEG's plans for global domination... or in the example from the other thread - capture the enemy ship and sell it in port.

The line between reasonable expectations and unreasonable expectation is occasionally a fine one, but most of the time, I think it really isn't. So, feel free to plan around what you expect the party to do in specific circumstances (fight the orc, win a drinking contest with incontinent kobolds, be the best knife thrower in a bar full of rubes). Just be careful about too much downstream expectation.

 

[Odhanan]

Are you interested in discussion?

I am interested in discussion. I won't however catter to a specific subset of people who are way too sensitive and really should know better in the first place. There are those who will take the argument how it was intended or ask questions about what I meant, and those who will misunderstand and get upset over it, and not bother to discuss it any further or block on it even though I explained it wasn't how it was intended. I'm not interested in the latter.

And no offense? But I'm an adult. I don't need anyone to attempt to "educate me" on this front.

 

[Ariosto]

There can be temptation to force events along lines one has put a lot of work into preparing.

I think I first ran into this (as opposed to a 'railroad' for its own sake) with Champions in the early 1980s. A lot of rpgs nowadays involve similar labors in constructing characters and encounters.

It's sort of like going from writing text adventures [You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully ...] to making animated 3-d models with texture mapping and ray tracing and physics and so on.

If that's the business you're in, then you're going to try to cut corners where you can to turn a profit and put extra effort into what gets people to buy. As a GM for friends, not only is there the possibility of running out of material if some gets bypassed, but players' appreciation may be all the reward you get apart from the pleasure of the creation itself.

That's not such a problem if you're doing an old-time dungeon and wilderness and town setup with 'stat blocks' like “silver-scaled serpent, MR = 90, save on CON to resist frost breath,” or “2-12 trolls, AC 4, HD 6+3, regenerate 3 pts/round from 3rd round after hit.” If you have multiple parties of adventurers tromping through year after year, even the Super Secret Stash and its guardians are likely to get found eventually.

 

[ExploderWizard]

DMs don’t usually expect PCs to make it through the encounters he makes? So you don’t make more than one encounter at a time (or maybe a small handful on the off chance they do make it through the first)? Or are you just being contrarian?

The comment was in regard to designing battle encounters not about making it through. I don't plan for the PC's to make it through nor do I plan their deaths. Either is a possibility.

I’m sorry, but I just don’t believe that you don’t ever make encounters that you know will be battles.

There are some encounters that happen that way, ambushes, traps, especially if it is an area that PC's have explored before and alerted others to their presence. In any event I do have some combat stats prepared for just about anything in case there is battle.

ExploderWizard, I’ve read a lot of what you write about your play style and D&D preferences, and I agree with a lot of them. But I think now you’re just putting on airs of being a zen master DM. You don’t have expectations, nothing the PCs do can throw you off, and you just go with the flow, baby?

So, just to let you know, I don’t believe anything else you say about your DMing style, at least in this thread.

Whatever. I don't recall making those claims but my players and I are happy with our campaigns and I consider that good enough for me.

I have expectations and even wild theories about what the PC's are likely to do next. I just don't put all my eggs into the " I'm right" basket. I get fairly close most of the time because I know my players. I think the task would be more difficult if I had to run a campaign for an unknown group.

Go with the flow? Thats the name of the game. Name lists and pages of generic statblocks make the task fairly easy. There are tools any DM can use to aid in winging it. Other than that just practice.

See, in my example in the other thread, (which I didn’t want to bring into this thread), I wasn’t laying blame for the failed campaign on anyone – DM or Player. I was offering it as an example of “naughty word happens.” Someone else wanted to analyze the scenario and identify who did what wrong, and give unsolicited advice.

Bullgrit

In that situation, the PC's were clearly outgunned yet decided to fight a battle on losing terms. As a result, they were wiped out. It might have been a bit of a letdown so early in the game but hardly an unexpeced outcome given the circumstances.

 

[El Mahdi]

deleted

 

[Beginning of the End]

Ah, English. You poor muddled, bastard of a language.

This entire thread, AFAICT, is based on the fact that people are interpreting "expectation" in mutually exclusive (or at least slightly dissonant) ways.

So let's ditch that word and try a couple of different words. And even go one step further and very specifically define what we mean by them.

(1) On the one hand, we have a prediction. By "prediction" we mean that the GM is anticipating that the players will be interested in X or do Y. Predictions are useful because you use them to guide your prep. After all, you can't prep every single detail of every single person, place, and thing in the entire campaign world. So you need to pick your battles. And you pick your battles by predicting the direction(s) that the PCs are likely to take.

(One great way to maximize the accuracy of your predictions is to simply ask the players, "So, what are you planning to do next week?")

(2) On the other hand we have a presumption. By "presumption" we mean that the GM, assuming that the PCs will pursue a particular course of action, prepares his adventure in such a way that the PCs are required to take that action.

What's the distinction? Generally it can be detected by the GM's reaction to unexpected input: If the PCs defy the GM's prediction, there's no problem. If the PCs defy the GM's presumption, the GM has problems.

Another way to look at it is the GM making a prediction is preparing a safety net: "I have put a locked door at point X and a key for that door at point Y. I predict that they will find the key and open the door." This is useful because it ensures that there is at least one valid solution for the problem, but if the PCs find some other solution to the locked door (teleportation, breaking it down, picking the lock, blowing up the entire building) the GM doesn't care.

The GM making a presumption, OTOH, is preparing a tightrope: If the PCs don't walk the rope that's been prepared for them, they're going to fall to their figurative (or literal) deaths. (This is the guy who will prevent the PCs from opening or bypassing the door in any other way and force them to find the key, either because some important event is keyed to the key; or they'll need the key for later in the adventure; or just because that's the way he designed the adventure and he doesn't want to "waste his prep".)