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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9618050" data-attributes="member: 42582">What if some of the entrances are hidden (say, smuggling tunnels) or seem to be rusted shut, or . . . ? What if the GM doesn't have all the entrances written out for every warehouse in this particular town?Maybe we go back to dice rolls and so on, but that is what I thought we were supposed to be avoiding.That last sentence is true, yes. I'm someone who has made that point often and loudly.When does the GM draw the map? Make all the decisions about distances, sight-lines, etc?And how does the GM decide the point from which the assassin strikes? Do all assassins always strike from outside 20', worried about the possibility of otherwise triggering an Alarm spell?The claim that all this stuff can just be done, so that it is following by extrapolation of ingame causation rather than GM decision-making, I find to be belied by my own experience.In my Torchbearer game, the principle settlement that the PCs spent time in for the first part of the campaign, was the Wizard's Tower. This is a small-ish village clustered about the eponymous tower. I did not have a map of every building in the settlement. When the PCs decided to go and confront the NPC Gerda at her apartment, I had to make a decision on the spur of the moment as to what the architecture would be like. I decided that Gerda, as she was (i) a Dwarf, and (ii) was spending most of her time in her apartment brooding over her cursed Elfstone, would have set up a deadfall above the (obvious) front entrance. And then, once the PCs had made their way through that, I narrated the interior architecture which set the framing for (first) the Pursuit conflict (as Gerda tried to flee) and (subsequently) the Kill conflicts.If the resolution of the deadfall, or of the pursuit, was done via map-and-key tracking of distance and location, rather than tests against appropriate obstacles, play would not have been better. And fictional positioning would not have been enhanced - asking a player questions like "Where do you stand as you open the door?" or "How do you operate the door latch?" don't establish and enhance fictional positioning, in my experience - rather, they prompt the player to try and guess which squares/positions/methods are safe or hazardous. Which is less verisimiltudinous than the actual surprise that was generated when - the players not having had their PCs Scout the entrance to the apartment - I called for Health tests to avoid/resist the stones from the deadfall.I don't think I've seen you actually articulate what those elements are.The example of Torchbearer play that I just gave seems relevant here, too, at least to me. There are "objective" difficulties for various tests in Torchbearer. I just actually performed a little experiment - I checked my table of difficulties for avoiding traps/hazards, complied by reference to the examples in the rulebooks and other published scenarios:To not fall into a concealed pit: Health Ob 2 To leap to safety from a collapsing or false floor trap: Health Ob 2 or 3 To not plunge into a crevice that opens beneath you: Health Ob 3 To not slide down a slippery chute with treacherous footing: Health Ob 3 To avoid injury and being swept downstream, when falling into a stream from a height: Health Ob 3 To avoid a blade trap by moving away in time: Health Ob 3 To avoid a rockslide: Health Ob 3 To dodge the falling rocks from a tremor: Health Ob 4 To avoid being speared or slashed by a trap: Health Ob 5 To leap clear of the flaming liquid sprayed into the corridor: Health Ob 6 To escape a collapsing cavern before its ceiling comes down: Health Ob 6Which told me that Gerda's deadfall trap should be Ob 2. And then I went back to my session notes:In other words, I successfully replicated my reasoning from July 2023, based on the actually established fictional positioning. In making the decision about Ob 2 (rather than the more severe Ob 3) I would have had in mind not just the fictional positioning that pushes that way, but also a general sense of the mix of difficulties that make for a good Torchbearer session, and would not have wanted to set this early obstacle too high.The skilled play aspect was also preserved, in that Telemere's player could have used his Instinct, but didn't. And the player was able to recognise this. (This fits into [USER=7044566]@thefutilist[/USER]'s idea, upthread, of crossword puzzles + figure skating.)So to me, based on my experience, the Torchbearer resolution in this scene did not disregard fictional positioning - it had regard to it, and reinforced it. And the use of rolls (on Health, on Scout, etc) were part of that.If 5e D&D had a more structured system for framing and resolving skill checks, I think it would become more like Torchbearer! And then natural further questions would arise, like - what effect does the placing of an Alarm spell have on the difficulty of a Stealth check to ambush? Specifying the AoE as a 20' cube rather than (say) one campsite or room doesn't help with that - it hinders it. Why would the use of methods not be relevant to dice rolls?When a PC takes the high ground in a fight, that - presumably - helps their rolls that resolve the combat. Why would things be different for a PC (say) choosing a room with only one door as a precaution against being ambushed?Suppose the situation is you have upset this powerful figure (let's call them Jackson).At what point do the players learn that the resulting situation is you are being pursued by an assassin hired by Jackson? Or that the situation is Jackson's assassin will come for you this night?If the players don't know those things, and the GM is making "offscreen" decisions about what the assassin learns about the PCs, how the assassin approaches them, whether or not the assassin bypasses the PCs' Alarm spell, then to me it is getting closer to plot than to situation. Like, you are attacked by an assassin is a situation; but the assassin snuck past your Alarm spell (because that's what made the most sense to me, the GM, as expositor of the fiction) looks like plot to me.</blockquote>

Verification