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General Tabletop Discussion
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How were these "rules" supposed to work, anyways???
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6923407" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>The flipside of this, which I think can be an issue, is that it tends to work well only in pretty Spartan environments.</p><p></p><p>Which means it's reasonably well-suited to traditional dungeons, which have little furniture or other trappings of habitation - though even then there can be issues (does the player have to say "I check for loose stones in the rear wall", or is it enough to say "I check the rear wall for anything unusual"?).</p><p></p><p>But I think it tends to break down in less Spartan environments (eg city adventuring). Just looking around the room I'm currently sitting in, there are filing cabinets and other sets of drawers, two walls of bookshelves, piles of papers on chairs and desks, and stuff scattered on the floor. Imagine a Cthulhu game, or a AD&D game in which the PCs are in the library of the Greyhawk Wizards Guild: no GM is going to describe every article in the room, so what action does a player have to declare in order to have a chance of finding the secret letter? Is it enough to say "We ransack the office"? Do they have to mention pulling books of shelves and rummaging around on the desks? If the GM's notes say that the letter is in a folder at the bottom of a filing cabinet drawer apparently filled with city exchequer records, what do the players have to say: "We empty out all the filing cabinets"? Or, when the GM mentions the exchequer records, do they have to expressly say that they're looking for something out of the ordinary in that pile of records?</p><p></p><p>I don't think there are any clear answers to these questions - hence the tendency, at a certain point, to abstract at least some of the action out to a die roll. Which then gives rise to all sorts of headaches and, as you say, a failure of the players to actually <em>engage</em> with the ingame situation.</p><p></p><p>And that's before we even get to the issue of whether finding the secret letter is a <em>reward</em> - and hence something that the players should only get as a result of good effort or good luck - or is a necessary premise in the game proceeding, in which case why are we approaching it in the same way as we would a search for treasure in Against the Giants?</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 6923407, member: 42582"] The flipside of this, which I think can be an issue, is that it tends to work well only in pretty Spartan environments. Which means it's reasonably well-suited to traditional dungeons, which have little furniture or other trappings of habitation - though even then there can be issues (does the player have to say "I check for loose stones in the rear wall", or is it enough to say "I check the rear wall for anything unusual"?). But I think it tends to break down in less Spartan environments (eg city adventuring). Just looking around the room I'm currently sitting in, there are filing cabinets and other sets of drawers, two walls of bookshelves, piles of papers on chairs and desks, and stuff scattered on the floor. Imagine a Cthulhu game, or a AD&D game in which the PCs are in the library of the Greyhawk Wizards Guild: no GM is going to describe every article in the room, so what action does a player have to declare in order to have a chance of finding the secret letter? Is it enough to say "We ransack the office"? Do they have to mention pulling books of shelves and rummaging around on the desks? If the GM's notes say that the letter is in a folder at the bottom of a filing cabinet drawer apparently filled with city exchequer records, what do the players have to say: "We empty out all the filing cabinets"? Or, when the GM mentions the exchequer records, do they have to expressly say that they're looking for something out of the ordinary in that pile of records? I don't think there are any clear answers to these questions - hence the tendency, at a certain point, to abstract at least some of the action out to a die roll. Which then gives rise to all sorts of headaches and, as you say, a failure of the players to actually [I]engage[/I] with the ingame situation. And that's before we even get to the issue of whether finding the secret letter is a [I]reward[/I] - and hence something that the players should only get as a result of good effort or good luck - or is a necessary premise in the game proceeding, in which case why are we approaching it in the same way as we would a search for treasure in Against the Giants? [/QUOTE]
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How were these "rules" supposed to work, anyways???
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