NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 6058178" data-attributes="member: 6696971">@<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/member.php?u=20323" target="_blank">Quickleaf</a>I echo the above sentiments by @<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/member.php?42582-pemerton" target="_blank">pemerton</a> almost exactly.  I'm not sure I get the jargon that you're using nor its juxtaposition.  But I would say yes to telegraphing as well.I think I would need to know the metagame elements of your groups' Creative Agenda.  My table seems to play a lot like pemerton's.  We do not try to hide metagame elements and we are all very overt about our usage of them.  Given that our Social Contract has been firmly hashed out, our table has considerable transparency with respect to what we are trying to accomplish and how we are going to accomplish it.  I don't know how explicit these things are at your table.  My guess is that, perhaps, there you guys may be more averse to overt metagaming at the table for the sake of maintaining absolute attention (at all times) to your collectively Shared Imaginary Space.  For instance;- You as a GM have the metagame interest of "kidnapping a PC" for the sake of inspiring fear (NOW) and layering tension throughout the course of the lair exploration culminating in the confrontation with Infyrana.- How do you accomplish this?  Loss of Exploration Skill Challenge equals abstraction within that lair exploration such that said failure means that a singular PC has gotten lost, fallen prey to some kind of trap which separates them from the group, <something else> that creates the circumstances for a potential kidnap to take place.  This isn't DM Force.  The resultant failure of the Skill Challenge leads to this conflict.  However, you're not going to have a perfectly constructed time chronology and linear coupling of the result of the last Skill Check in the challenge to the scene of the potential kidnapping.  Perhaps the Skill Challenge failure is bookended with something as innocuous as a failed Dungeoneering check to determine the origin or significance of some Dwarven architecture.  Skill Challenge lost.  An hour later the scene unfolds in whatever fashion is most functional or most fun.  Perhaps the PC fiddles about and pulls a lever...WOOPS...down a chute they go, without so much as a sound, into somewhere not so good - kidnapping Combat Encounter ensues.- Now how do you handle relaying the information of this scene to the PCs at the table?  You could:A)  Hint at them beforehand, ominously through foreshadowing, what a horror getting lost could be in a place like this...and how easy it would be due to the disorienting nature of the tunnels, the bad lighting, etc, etc.  Here, however, you still run the risk of trying to make your own Creative Agenda implicit (READ BETWEEN THE LINES YOU IDIOTS) and your players either not "getting it" or you not conveying information "on their current wavelength."  This is where you will run into the problems that pemerton describes above.B)  Before the session, you brief your players on what is before them.  You could vertly advise your players of this metagame interest that you have and what the stakes are in these exploration Skill Challenges (kidnapping combat encounter).  They are firmly understanding of the stakes and what you're driving at when these things happen.  And they can buy-in and understand that there is no DM Force going on here, thereby having both the tension of the stakes in the Skill Challenge and the resultant tension of handling the stakes if a failure ensues.  Now that the metagame interests have been firmly and clearly established, you can then use A throughout the course of the game to establish tension/anxiety/fear within the framework of your fiction.In the course of this thread, you've hinted at several things that would indicate that B may not work for your group.  As such, you may be forced to go with A (and hope for chemistry, awareness, good communication skills and no mental fatigue from life to carry the day).  Finally, when you say "subdual tactics" do you just mean "narrating their attacks as efforts to subdue?"  4e doesn't have any "subdual damage" rules like 3.x.  You don't have to go with poison or "hit to knock out" (although you can certainly narratively describe the kidnap combat encounter as such) as mechanical resolution of knocking out a PC.  The rules are straight-forward:Simple enough.  You can use "knockout" poison damage and describe the attacks as "effort to subdue", if you wish.  In this scenario, HPs are just "consciousness points".Also, Awesome maps!  You've done an excellent job here.  I hope your players know and appreciate the effort you've put into this.  It is most admirable.  You're clearly a good friend/DM.</blockquote>

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