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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pming" data-source="post: 6757583" data-attributes="member: 45197">Hiya!Well, as [MENTION=20323]Quickleaf[/MENTION] said...but in less words... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f635.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt="o_O" title="Er... what?    o_O"  data-smilie="12"data-shortname="o_O" />I read your post and came away with this: "The problem wasn't your DM'ing...the problem was your players".Basically it seems to me that your players don't want to "role-play characters in a fantasy world", they want to "be told a fantasy story through the eyes of their characters".First, you lament about spending 'all that time' on your maps...and then the players didn't explore or otherwise engage in it. Well, SURPRISE!, you drawing maps was FUN for you, wasn't it? It gave you a great sense of satisfaction, right? Your accomplishment made you WANT to run a game, correct? Great! That is the entire point of drawing your own maps. Well, that and you can have exactly what you want in them. You say, "Despite considering myself adept at handling these actions and adjudications quickly, we spent the majority of the night exploring boring space and standing outside of doors whose rooms had nothing exciting in them anyways". "Boring space" and "nothing exciting in them" are specifically there so that when the PC's do get to the so-called "exciting stuff", it actually seems exciting. It's like a horror movie. If it starts off with the killer smashing through a doorway, and then for the next hour and half the movie consists of nothing but variations of said killer smashing through things and the distraught teen screaming and running to the next room...well, that'd get awfully boring awfully fast...probably after the third of fourth "jump scare". All that time int he movie, like, the first hour of it? That's the "boring space" and "nothing exciting" part of the movie...so that when the killer does arrive on scene, it IS exciting!Second,Dude, you and I have vastly different ideas of "fun" in D&D. I like "encounters" as much as the next guy, sure, but all that stuff in between? That's where the real cool stuff happens in a campaign. That's where characters bond, NPC's become hated, cities take on a life of their own, and wildernesses become spectacular visions in your imaginations. Rolling dice to kill a monster with the primary focus being on how much DPS you can bring to bare is..."less fun" for me, lets just say. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Yes, those battles can have important/drastic effects on the campaign...but just saying "You head to the evil mages keep, fight some rats, walk down some halls and open some doors, and you find him in here [places battlemap on table]. Roll for initiative!"... um, no. Not fun in any form of the word, IMHO. But, according to you, it should be "fun" because, y'know, the players got to skip all that "boring stuff between encounters".Third, I could just as easily say "But in general, the only goal of the encounter phase of the game is to stop you from exploring one area to the next". Both statements would be misleading. You can't take one "aspect" of a story/game/adventure and just skip it without loosing much of the impact. The saying The whole is greater than the sum of it's parts? That applies to D&D adventuring as well. Without all the "boring stuff", as you put it, the game becomes nothing but a table top fantasy version of Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. One encounter after the next, with only a change of scenery to tie them together.Lastly, all the stuff you tagged as Player Perceived Encounter, False Encounter, Perceived Decision, etc...? I'll have to refer you back to my initial " <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f635.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt="o_O" title="Er... what?    o_O"  data-smilie="12"data-shortname="o_O" /> " comment. Reading your "fixes" for these supposed problems had me scratching my head even more. It seems that you don't want players, you want an audience...or, at best, a group of people willing to sit there and let you lead them by the nose from encounter to encounter. I'm not trying to sound harsh, really, but as I said, your experience and mine are VASTLY different! Any DM that effectively "shushed!" me if I tried to indicate what I want my character to do after just being narrated a bit of campaign lore about an old, huge statue in the forest, would find himself with one less player. IME, playing a PC in an RPG is basically a "what would you do if you were this character in this world in this situation?". If I think my dwarf character would be interested in spending a few hours making notes about the stonework and craftsmanship of the stone statue in the forest, I want to do that. Just because the DM has decided that this sort of thing is "boring" and nothing but a speed-bump on the way to the next "exciting encounter", doesn't mean that this sort of thing is "boring" to the player(s).Anyway, I'm not really trying to come off poo-poo'ing your revelation about what you want out of a game of D&D. If encounter-focused campaigning is your thing, go for it! What I'm saying is that maybe you've come to this conculsion erroneously because of how your players are playing. Maybe the learned it from some other DM that had the unfair-killer-DM complex, so now anytime the DM describes anything they are instantly on high alert. Or maybe they played with a DM who would have a note saying "The second door that they come to that they don't check for traps on will have a falling block trap on it". Or who knows? The point is, a group of players who check for traps on a merchants front door to his shop has some serious hang-ups that they need to address...as well as players who panic and go into hyper-vigilant mode when the DM gives a description of an old stone statue in a forest, fully expecting some sort of ambush because of a meta-game habit they learned from a bad DM, etc.Sorry, I pretty much disagree (in case I wasn't clear enough in my post... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> ), with just about everything you said. But, as long as you and your players are having fun, ignore me. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />^_^Paul L. Ming</blockquote>

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