Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Imaro" data-source="post: 6809112" data-attributes="member: 48965">I think there's a few misconceptions about pre-authoring in your post above... First, in no way does pre-authoring necessarily force the Dark Elf to appear or not appear (this seems to be the biggest misconception about pre-authoring in this thread)... all pre-authoring has to do is establish him as a potential antagonist (which seems to be exactly what you did).  Some examples of ways pre-authoring can do this... there could have been a percentage chance he appeared (independent of success or failure of a skill check) in the dessert... there could have been a trigger action that caused the PC's to be noticed  the Dark Elf... there could have been a timeframe set out by the DM that determined when or even if the Dark Elf was present at the tower when the PC's get lost/fail their orientation check, and so on....  So if all the failure/success of the skills do (insofar as the chance of the Dark Elf showing up) is make it a go/no go decision then there are plenty of randomizers a pre-authored campaign could use to produce the same uncertainty.As to PC backstory being a part of a pre-authored campaign... I'm unclear how these two things are at odds??(unless we are speaking strictly about pre-made adventures, and even those can have selectable PC backgrounds that tie into the overall campaign).  In a pre-authored campaign a good DM is going to author things that tie into the PC's backgrounds into his campaign world... so I'm unclear on why there couldn't have been a mace or the tower... or is this more about how you chose to have it come into play (due to a failed check)??  Because if that's the crux of this "big" difference I have to say I don't see it as all that important (it's just a different randomizer... a percentage chance based on what skill is used vs. what the DM thinks the objective chances should be in the world.)Now what I do find interesting in the difference between procedures is that in the pre-authored method challenges can arise irregardless of success or failure of a skill check, thus tension can ramp up and new challenges can appear at anytime... while in your methodology it seems tension, new challenges, etc. only appear upon failure.  That's the biggest difference that I see...</blockquote>

Verification