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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ydars" data-source="post: 4693187" data-attributes="member: 62992">This thread just shows how important it is that the DM makes the players aware of his preferred playstyle before the game begins. Actually, both styles presented in this thread are valid and I shift back and forth between them, but only when I change campaigns I am DMing.  And when I do change styles, I ANNOUNCE that I am doing it and what that means for how they players should approach the game. Here are some issues you should deal with Up front, when you start a game: 1) Magic: are magic items bought and sold or are they rare and can only be swapped. 2) Detail: Is the game austere and gritty where encumberance matters and every gold piece accounted for, or is it epic and the details glossed over. 3) Game type: is it RIGID or REACTIVE. In a rigid game, the dice are never hidden and if a PC dies because of a roll, they die and the DM never changes his deisgn to satisfy a player (except if the players find a hole in the design: see later). In a reactive game, there is far more fudging going on, usually because of the needs of a story or situation and the game is usually not so tactical as a result, and is less about the mechanics. In fact, most games are somewhere in between (often the game is stated to be RIGID but is in fact more reactive than the players realise). The problem the OP posits is not a problem that the DM is right and the players are wrong or vice versa: it is that they failed to communicate and come to an agreement about how the world they are jointly exploring functions. The DM is working from the assumption that his world has some "integrity" and doesn't just exist to satisfy the player's whims. Such a world is fixed and only reacts to the actions of the PCs when it is logical to do so. So to the DM, the pipe exists because undergound cities have to have some way to get rid of waste, not because it is a cool way in. The players who went up the pipes were indeed working from the principle that anything in the world that exists, does so solely for them to interact with: Chekov's Gun. Also sewers are a common way of circumventing danger in fantasy novels, CRPGS and other media that deal with pseudo-medieval stories. Working from this premise, the mistake the DM made, from his point of view, was in DESIGN! Since the sandbox type of DM tends to adhere rigidly to his design, then his design had better be very good. It should be very flexible: by this I mean that there should be multiple ways of achieving any particular outcome/aim or getting to any particular place. Otherwise, sticking rigidly to the design combined with only a single path can quickly equal a railroad. If I were designing this adventure, I would have made it possible for PCs to enter via the pipe, at the design stage, as there is no particular reason for water pressure to be enormous in a waste pipe (in fact I can think of some good reasons why this is NOT a good idea).  If the DM had no other way for the PCs to enter the city, and this is his normal way of designing adventures, then I would say he needs to start with the "rule of 3": there should be at least 3 ways into and out of every important location that the PCs might visit and at least 3 ways of getting past any obstacle they might encounter or of dealing with every monster. The other issue with the rigid game is that, if the PCs try something where the DM has NO design: i.e they try to interact with something that has not been planned, the DM is NO LONGER justified in being rigid when dealing with that obstacle and should allow the players actions to succeed if they could reasonably do so. You cannot just make something up on the fly and then be rigid with it unless you are an extremely talented and quick thinking DM because you will likely make a mistake in adjudication unless you are incredibly careful. Rigidity is only justified in highly planned and prepared games, which is why everyone is now tending towards more reactive games, because they are so much easier to prep. Just my two pennies worth!</blockquote>

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