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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9006488" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Okay. Question: Why would a party either (a) utterly blindly or (b) knowingly and willingly go into places where they know they're either wasting their time because there's nothing worth doing, or risking instant death because they're going to be in way over their heads?Second question: Why does everyone always assume that the existence of a system that tells you whether a particular fight is likely to be dangerous, typical, or cakewalk automatically means that the only use for that system is absolutely perfect-lockstep encounters? Seriously. It's like presuming that, because you have a more accurate measuring stick, everything must meet at right angles now. The two are entirely orthogonal. In fact...Not only am I with pemerton on this one, isn't this producing exactly the artificiality people are disclaiming? "I could just prepare whatever I want whenever I want, but that would be boring, so I prepare things that are interesting instead." Not only do I not see how that isn't pulling punches (because, as admitted, one could always punch with infinite force at any time for any reason!), I don't see how that is in any way different from using a system where you CAN provide balanced encounters, but do not HAVE to do so. (Noting, as I always do, that the poster-child games which provide such things explicitly tell the GM to make sure to keep up variety, re-use monsters to show progression, and make use of terrain, monster roles, synergies between monsters, traps, hazards, environmental effects, etc. to keep things fresh and engaging.)It circles back to the same baffling things I always run aground on here. This idea that, because you can know (with a reasonable degree of accuracy) what a fight's difficulty will usually be, you are now...somehow locked into only giving perfectly level-locked encounters forever. The idea that the GM's absolute latitude is utterly essential for stakes to have meaning and to prevent "pulling punches"...only to then immediately follow that up with "well I could just kill them all if I wanted, but I choose not to," which is a form of pulling punches. The notion that players are, for some reason, going to seek out locations without any regard for whether it is actually productive for them to be there. This implicit argument that a map populated by a GM's guesstimation of what makes sense--referencing nothing but the monster manual and tropes--is in any way less "artificial" than one constructed by, for example, presuming that the Royal Army keeps the areas near main roads and populous cities free of any but weak threats (say, less than level 3), deals with large threats in the deeper wilderness only when they can (read: levels 4-7), and can't really act in the deep caves, stolen fortifications, or rugged mountains where the nastiest things lie (=level 8+.)Why is it that having a functional system suddenly makes everything soullessly systematic? Why is it that being able to make good, generally reliable predictions somehow magically transforms everything into the worst, most hellish combination of "dry spreadsheets" and "mollycoddling"? And why is it a GM's invisible rulebooks (which are almost surely riddled with falsehoods and contradictions, because received wisdom is not required to be even remotely functional) are the one and only way to create "natural," "living and breathing" worlds, while visible rulebooks (where we can see what the biases are, out in the open) always and inherently lead to "artificial" worlds?</blockquote>

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