I’m not claiming everyone does it. However, anyone can do it. You are refusing to acknowledge it as an option because it being an option makes your argument weaker.
Fine, my argument is weaker because I made a single example that cannot cover every single possibility in the game. Next time I'll be more specific and account for every single possible build.
Bully you? Seriously? That’s what you think is going on here? My friend, I’m just rebutting your arguments.
No, you aren't. Because the argument is "I shouldn't assume more than necessary for the example" and "I shouldn't change the example after establishing it" and your "rebuttal" is, "you should include feats because it is possible to assume feats might apply". That isn't a rebuttal, because there is nothing in it to challenge either of the two arguments.
If you instead think that your rebuttal is to the example itself, I already acknowledged that adding feats would make it easier for the Fighter and the Bard. But the example didn't include feats and I wasn't going to change it to start adding in the possibility of every feat in the game needing to be accounted for (because it would need to be every feat, not just the perception feats, because what if they took Chef instead?)
Switching gears mid-conversation isn't something I'm good at.
It’s certainly worthless if you ignore all the things players might need to spend it on. Do your players ever have to pay lifestyle expenses? Do you track light sources, rations, ammunition, expensive spellcasting components? Can they buy magical items? This is one of those things, like choosing travel tasks, that a lot of DMs ignore because they don’t see the immediate utility of, and then complain that there’s no use for money, or that the game has no exploration mechanics. These things are part of an interconnected system, and I have found that when you actually utilize all parts of the system, they work together harmoniously to create fun, challenging gameplay that generates emergent stories.
If they can afford to, probably; it’s a pretty efficient strategy.
You are off-base with the argument. No, I don't use lifestyle expenses, or track basically any equipment. I don't have people buying magical items either. But none of that is the point, it is just a consequence of the choices we've made to begin with.
The point of money is to buy things. Even in the real-world, money itself is pretty worthless. No one wants a million dollars if the only thing you can do is set it on a table and watch it mold over the decades. Every post-apocalypse story starts off the same way, by acknowledging that money is worthless, it is just a medium of exchange. And, as such, very very few people make characters who have money as a goal. They may need money to achieve a goal, but money itself is never the goal.
And most of the people who sit at my tables, they rarely realize that I almost never give out coin or gems as treasure. Because they don't care about it, especially after they've gotten the mundane equipment they want. They have other goals, other concerns, and none of them involve money. They are here for a heroic story of their characters accomplishing their goals, they don't really care if the chest has 2,000 gold in it, because they don't care about the gold. It is useful, but it isn't worthwhile. And sure, I could force it to be necessary, I could force them to need to spend 10's of gold to simply exist in the gameworld and keep playing, make them desperate to have enough coin to buy the supplies they need... but everyone is very tired of the corporate rat race as it is, we don't want that in our game.
So, we get things through barter and trade, we find things that they need or want, and money just slowly slides from our consciousness until someone remembers we are playing DnD and supposed to care about money and asks for some, and I toss a few hundred extra gold or some treasure to hawk in the next section of the adventure. Or they find a task that requires them to have money, and that money becomes a good way to track progress on that task.
I mean, yeah, if the help they hire is faceless merc #3, that wouldn’t make for a very good story. Part of the DM’s job is to make NPC hirelings more than faceless mercs.
Sure, but I'm only human. Get enough NPCs floating around, and becomes really hard to put any level of care into all of them. And these aren't people anyone cared about before they put out the wanted ad, they literally just want eyes and combat ability, and the rest is window dressing.
I'd much rather have NPCs join the group organically than because the rules demanded it.
Unsurprisingly, when the search consists of saying “I search” and rolling a die to see if you found anything. That was also my experience, until I tried DMing a different way. And you know what I’ve found more and more often since then? When the search itself is engaging, people are excited by it too.
Maybe, but I've played in games where we end up searching like that, and it never once felt more interesting than doing chores. Not saying it isn't possible that you can make it interesting and exciting, but after a decade it is still the case that people are most engaged with figuring out what to do after they have the thing, than trying to tear apart the room to find it in the first place.
If the players can’t perceive the monsters through the secret door, how on earth are the monsters supposed to perceive the players through it?
By being in a well-designed secret room. Small sounds are far harder to hear through stone and wood, but a peephole is still incredibly useful for things like seeing what's in the other side of the wall.
If that’s where you think 90% of traps are going to be found, then it should be pretty easy for you to come up with a reasonably specific description of how you search for them.
I thought I had made myself pretty clear that I want to avoid making any assumptions at all about the players’ actions.
Yes, such as assuming I don't look at the ground when looking for traps. Because I didn't specify and thus I should have said. Which is only one step removed from having to say "I grab my weapon and armor when I leave the inn", so the DM doesn't declare a week down the road that I left my gear behind because they "didn't want to assume"
And I know that sounds hyperbolic, but in one of my first full campaigns ever? We were playing Darksun and were given a task by the Sorcerer-King to investigate something in the deep desert. We were part of his government, more or less, level 13 or so, and we immediately agreed and said we headed out. DM said that after about a week of travel our water and rations ran out, we asked why, because we clearly would have brought enough for the mission. He informed us that we said we "left immediately" which meant we had not purchased any supplies for the journey, only the stuff we'd had on us. We pointed out that would have been suicide and we would never have done that. He shrugged, but did relent and allowed my character to use the ritual for create food and water (this was 4e by the way) with just money and no supplies, to make sure we didn't die from dehydration as we hurried back to the city.
He then had the Sorcerer-King pissed at our incompetence because we had done what he had said and "left immediately" to our near deaths, because it turns out growing up on Athas and being high-level adventurers wasn't enough to assume that we would buy supplies to actually survive a trip into the desert. He probably thought not assuming was the proper thing to do, but to me? It just showed that we couldn't ever make any assumptions ourselves. Had to state everything in the clearest terms possible, or we'd go for a month long desert trek with 7 days worth of water.
Looking for traps was your goal. Giving it as your approach too is redundant. “I look for traps by looking for traps.” That doesn’t convey any information about how you are looking for traps. “I look for traps by slowly walking forward looking at the floor” does convey information about how you’re looking for traps.
All of that is infinitely more interesting to me than “I check for traps” clatter. Now, I get it. If you don’t have enough information to make meaningful decisions, you end up going through laundry lists of pointless SOPs just trying to eliminate any conceivable danger, and yes, that gets boring. That’s why a key part of doing this style well is giving good information, both directly in your description of the environment, and indirectly through good level design. If this style done poorly is a pixel-hunting point-and-click adventure game, then this style done well is Portal.
All the information it conveys is that my character isn't an idiot. Since I suspect traps, I don't go running forward, I move slowly. This is just... beyond basic. And I'm looking at the floor, because again, where else would I look? "I don't want to assume" isn't a real stance, because all you end up doing is assuming the character in question is too stupid to do something in a logical way.
Now maybe you are right that to do this well requires a degree of information that is just impossible to put into a forum post. However, if you can at least acknowlege that with little information we end up pixel-hunting and magic-wording, then you can understand that when we have little information to go on... that's what we assume the players have as well. You can say "well, I'd do it better in person" but that doesn't mean anything. Everyone says that. No one thinks their style isn't working as best it can. We picture ideals when we imagine ourselves doing something.
But it does matter to me, because comparing the goal to the approach is an essential part of my action resolution process. I figure out whether or not to call for a roll by imagining the action and asking myself if it could result in bringing about the goal, if it could fail to do so, and if there would be a meaningful consequence for it failing to do so. I need both pieces of information to do that process.
Because none of that is relevant to the question of if the approach can succeed in the goal. At least not usually. I mean, I suppose if the goal is like… to woo the Dwarven ambassador with a song or something, maybe then the song being from Dwarven culture might be relevant. That’s why I need to know both the goal and the approach.
Let us say that you compare the goal to the approach, and you come to the realization that is has no possible chance for success. We are in the moments before you ask the player anything, and I want to pause. Do you imagine the player purposefully chose an approach with no possible chance for success? Or do you imagine the player proposed their approach because they thought it gave them the best possible chance for success? Ignoring for a moment those players who chose to fail because it is funny or in character.
Obviously they think it will succeed. Now, I may ask for clarification because I need more information to narrate. Or I may be really curious how they think "that" could work. But the hardest thing? The hardest thing is realizing that I am working with "perfect information" and they aren't. Trying to picture what they are, with the lack of information I have, is very difficult. But when I can, then it suddenly becomes much clearer what they were thinking when they proposed that path of action.
With the goal, I usually have enough, because I know how difficult the goal should be to accomplish for someone who is working with all the information I have, and I assume the players are making the best decisions possible.
That’s what you think! Until I put a trap in the adventure that triggers when a hidden mechanism resonates with the right musical frequency! Muahahaha!!!!!!!
(I kid, of course. Trying to bring some levity to what has been an exhaustingly serous discussion.)
I cracked a smile
Only that the former conveys the information diagetically, which keeps the gameplay rooted in terms of the fiction. I don’t know about you, but I find it easier to imagine the fictional space as if it were a real place and make decisions about what my character would do within it when it’s consistently described in terms of what my character perceives, instead of addressed to me directly in “meta-game” terms.
But it doesn't have to be meta-game terms. I can describe the scorched skeletons, the diagonal lines of the burn marks on the stone, and finish with "the conclusion is inevitable. There is a trap that spits fire up ahead." None of that uses "meta-game" terms, that's all information that is rooted in the fiction they are being presented with. It just takes that last step.
The crossbow trap pieces would indeed just tell the players that there are crossbow traps somewhere in the dungeon. On its own, it doesn’t give the players enough information to make meaningful decisions about how to find and avoid those crossbow traps. Accordingly, it shouldn’t be the only telegraph. It can be one piece of the puzzle though. First introduce the fact that there are crossbow traps in the dungeon. Then, maybe include a sprung crossbow trap, so they can see where it’s set up and how it works. Maybe later have a very obvious and easy to avoid crossbow trap, so they can confirm that there is a consistent pattern to where and how they’re set up. Continue to use these traps in gradually subtler and/or more complex ways, so the players can apply what they learn about these traps in the early, relatively risk-free contexts to help them succeed in more difficult, dangerous contexts.
You've said this a few times, but why would anyone set up the same trap in the same manner, multiple times? That just seems like asking people to bypass it.
