Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6159314" data-attributes="member: 42582">Here is my take on some of these issues.First, take a step back and ask, "Why are we playing this game?"If the answer is, so the players can show off how clever they are in playing their PCs and beating the GM's challenges, then why would you tell the players what to do? That defeats the whole purpose.If the answer is different, though - maybe it's something like "To find out together what these PCs are about, what makes them tick, how their future will unfold as heroes"  - then you need to ask yourself, as GM, What is the point of sticking to your guns and resolving a situation like the undead or elemental fight in a rigid way, as if there's only one right answer, and if the PCs suffer a TPK then c'est la vie? This is what games like Burning Wheel, Marvel Heroic RP and now 13th Age talk about as "fail forward" ie when you resolve a situation, the PCs might succeed or might fail, but if they fail the game (and the story of the PCs) doesn't come to an end. Instead, things go on but with the PCs at some sort of disadvantage or having paid some sort of price. This sort of adjudication requires flexibility as a GM, coming up with interesting ideas for failure on the spot as the players tackle the situation in whatever way they think makes sense, and you as GM adjudicate those actions and tell them what happens.So, for instance, if the PCs deplete their resources fighting the undead or the elementals you don't frame the next fight as one that will kill them - but you frame things so that other consequences of that resource depletion become clear to the players (so, for instance, in your example they can't stop the village being burned down). Now this can be harder to do in D&D, which has very specific and highly silo-ed mechancial resources, rather than in a more abstract system where spending resource (eg Fate Points) on fight A leaves you without enough Fate Points to achieve goal B (like stopping the village burning down). In 4e D&D healing surges can pick up some of this slack as an all-purpose resource for effort/exhaustion as well as fighting. I don't know how exactly you would do this in earlier editions of D&D (in classic D&D gold is something of an all purpose resource for paying for goods/services and escaping monsters, but that doesn't support the "fight too much and so weren't able to stop the town burning down" trade off very well).Yet a third reason for playing D&D is for the players to experience the thrill of "being there", and of playing through the GM's story. For those players, maybe telling them "You recognise the runes as Arcane. They were probably put there by the Archmage" or "You can tell this trap isn't a dwarven one" would do the job. Because that helps those players get the feel of being there, immersed in the situation of their PC. It prioritises "being the PC" over making choices for the PC.TL;DR - there's no right answer here, but different techniques are better suited to different playstyles.</blockquote>

Verification