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<blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8729401" data-attributes="member: 6779196"><p>You’re still ignoring feats, which are entirely possible to get at first level, either from variant human or custom lineage, or from backgrounds.</p><p></p><p>I’m not shifting the goal-posts, I’m saying that the fact that this particular party lacking a specialist in perception is not a flaw with my DMing style.</p><p></p><p>I don’t disagree that Perception has disproportionately more utility than a lot of other skills, and would be open to arguments that it should accordingly not be competing with narrower skills for character building resources. Sounds like a good argument for the What’s Wrong with Perception thread.</p><p></p><p>That’s a bit hyperbolic. Without spending gold to get more bodies they can’t do <em>everything</em>. They have to prioritize and make sacrifices. They might prioritize safety over navigation, as you indicate you would do, or they might risk the possibility of getting surprised. Or they might decide that not having to sacrifice one or the other is worth the gold expenditure. That’s a meaningful decision, which to me is what the game is all about. What do you sacrifice when you can’t have everything you want? What do you risk when you can’t avoid risking something? These are the questions that reveal the most about the characters who make them and what they truly value, and are accordingly the questions I’m most interested in answering through play.</p><p></p><p>The advantage of my approach is that it makes the very act of navigating the dungeon a part of the challenge. The dungeon isn’t just a backdrop for encounters to happen in, it is a hazard in and of itself. And as I get at above, it creates difficult choices, which to me is the most interesting part of the game.</p><p></p><p>See, that to me sounds like a telegraph. I would describe something like that if someone in the party was looking for danger and the monsters failed to beat that character’s passive perception with their dexterity (stealth) checks. Of course, to even set up such an ambush, the monsters would need to be aware of the characters’ presence - perhaps because the party was traveling at greater than a slow pace and therefore couldn’t attempt to move stealthy.</p><p></p><p>Yeah, that sounds consistent with how I would run such a scenario.</p><p></p><p>Yet you believe it to be the case that looking for monsters preparing to ambush couldn’t detect one being set up on the other side of a secret door?</p><p></p><p>Ok, I see where the confusion is coming from. In the portion of that quote of mine that you bolded, I noted that “trying to find out if there are traps in the room” as the <em>goal</em>, not as part of the <em>approach</em>. You seem to be treating the goal itself as communicating information about the approach, where as I am treating them as entirely separate things. To me, “I try to find out if there are any traps by moving to the center of the room” comes across as comparable to “I try to tie my shoes by shouting at them,” in that neither seems to be an approach that could reasonably succeed at accomplishing the goal. You read “I try to find out if there are any traps by moving to the center of the room” as something like “I move to the center of the room while looking for traps” and treat the goal as implied; more comparable to saying “I shout at my shoes while trying to tie them.” When you clarified that you intended for “looking for traps” to be considered part of the approach, it became clear to me that there wasn’t enough information because “I try to find out if there are any traps in the room by moving to the center of the room <em>and looking for traps</em>” is redundant. Comparable to saying “I try to tie my shoes by shouting at them and trying to tie them.” The point of asking for approach as a separate item from goal is so that I can evaluate <em>how</em> you’re trying to achieve your goal.</p><p></p><p>Well what you said was “moving slowly and carefully forward <em>while looking at the ground</em>.” The reason my answer to that is different than my answer to “move to the center of the room” is that it conveys what you’re doing to try to find the trap. I can imagine that as you slowly move forward, looking at the ground, you might notice something on the ground that you didn’t when you first entered the room, which might reveal the presence of the trap; I could also imagine that you might not do so before stepping on the trap. Therefore, a roll would be necessary to resolve that uncertainty. On the other hand, simply walking to the center of the room? Well if you did that, you would trigger the trap, because as established in the example, the trap is triggered by standing in the center of the room. There’s no way that would result in you succeeding in your goal of finding the trap, at least not without triggering it, which I do agree with you is obviously counter to the intent.</p><p></p><p>Ah, ok. Well, you’re incorrect about that. I only started playing this way in 2012 with the D&D Next playtest (so I guess that is <em>one</em> decade…) and I’d say it probable took me a good few years to actually get the hang of it, since up until then I had been playing much more like how it sounds like you do. I specifically changed to this style of play because it seemed to be what was indicated by the new rules (whereas I think your way is much closer in line with what’s indicated by the 4e rules), and it took me some time to really learn and adjust to. But I very quickly found myself enjoying it a great deal more than I had enjoyed the way I was playing before.</p><p></p><p>See, I don’t see any problem with that. What’s wrong with players deciding to wear plate gauntlets to protect from needle traps or opening doors with mage hand?</p><p></p><p>I disagree completely with this DM of yours. The players taking steps to avoid chest traps is something to be celebrated, not lamented. It means that they are responding to their environment and making decisions that their experience tells them will give them the best chances of being successful, which is a good thing! They are imagining the fictional space and making decisions about how to navigate it as if it were a real place, and succeeding or failing by those decisions, rather than the results of random number generators. That is only a good thing in my view.</p><p></p><p>And this is really what it comes down to. I find that kind of gameplay fun and engaging, and you don’t. And that’s fine, I don’t begrudge you playing in a way that is fun for you and not playing in a way that isn’t. I don’t think there’s really anywhere the conversation can go from here because it’s just a matter of taste. You don’r enjoy the same kind of gameplay I do, so you probably wouldn’t want to play at my table. I do suspect you would enjoy it more than you think you would, because it sounds like your experience with this type of play has mostly been with adversarial DMs, and I think it’s pretty universally true that this kind of gameplay sucks when you have an adversarial DM. But my experience has been that it’s a great deal of fun with a good, cooperative DM, and that has also consistently been the experience of players who have taken a chance on trying it with me as DM. Maybe your experience would be different, I can’t say. Regardless, there’s not much else to say here. You don’t like the gameplay style, and that’s perfectly ok.</p><p></p><p>Yeah, that’s a problem that can happen with this style, especially when the DM doesn’t make good use of telegraphing. When you don’t have enough information, you end up either having to blindly guess, or try to pre-empt any and every conceivable danger, which… sucks. This gameplay is at its best when simply by paying attention to the DM’s description, you have a good idea of what you need to be prepared for, and can come up with a good plan for how to deal with it. This can be difficult to capture in forum posts, because effective telegraphing requires a great deal of context that is simply lacking here. I can’t just pull out an example of it done well out of thin air, because doing it well relies on a great deal of environmental design and tutorializing. See my answer to [USER=762]@Mort[/USER] about how to handle the Stargate hidden door. I had to give four or five different possible clues, all of which would have to be sprinkled throughout a dungeon that made reoccurring use of such hidden doors.</p><p></p><p>This seems to be leaving the goal out of the equation. For what purpose is the character playing a sad song on their viol? If they’re just playing it for it’s own sake, there’s no need to roll. Can you succeed in the goal of playing a sad song by using a Viol? Assuming you’re proficient with it, yes. Can you fail to do so? I guess, sure. Is there a meaningful consequence for that failure? No, not really, not if you’re just playing it for its own sake. No further detail is necessary, the action can just succeed without need to roll any dice. Now, if the goal is to entertain a crowd, then playing a sad song on the viol is an approach they might take to try and achieve that goal. Depending on the crowd to be entertained, the mood in the venue, etc. a sad song might or might not have a reasonable possibility of entertaining the crowd, which might or might not have meaningful consequences. In either case, it’s enough to know that the song the character is playing is sad; the time signature, key, etc. are unnecessarily specific details.</p><p></p><p>I don’t follow.</p><p></p><p>My opinion is my own. There are other people who’s DMing styles might be similar to mine in some ways, but I am not responsible for what they say.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Charlaquin, post: 8729401, member: 6779196"] You’re still ignoring feats, which are entirely possible to get at first level, either from variant human or custom lineage, or from backgrounds. I’m not shifting the goal-posts, I’m saying that the fact that this particular party lacking a specialist in perception is not a flaw with my DMing style. I don’t disagree that Perception has disproportionately more utility than a lot of other skills, and would be open to arguments that it should accordingly not be competing with narrower skills for character building resources. Sounds like a good argument for the What’s Wrong with Perception thread. That’s a bit hyperbolic. Without spending gold to get more bodies they can’t do [I]everything[/I]. They have to prioritize and make sacrifices. They might prioritize safety over navigation, as you indicate you would do, or they might risk the possibility of getting surprised. Or they might decide that not having to sacrifice one or the other is worth the gold expenditure. That’s a meaningful decision, which to me is what the game is all about. What do you sacrifice when you can’t have everything you want? What do you risk when you can’t avoid risking something? These are the questions that reveal the most about the characters who make them and what they truly value, and are accordingly the questions I’m most interested in answering through play. The advantage of my approach is that it makes the very act of navigating the dungeon a part of the challenge. The dungeon isn’t just a backdrop for encounters to happen in, it is a hazard in and of itself. And as I get at above, it creates difficult choices, which to me is the most interesting part of the game. See, that to me sounds like a telegraph. I would describe something like that if someone in the party was looking for danger and the monsters failed to beat that character’s passive perception with their dexterity (stealth) checks. Of course, to even set up such an ambush, the monsters would need to be aware of the characters’ presence - perhaps because the party was traveling at greater than a slow pace and therefore couldn’t attempt to move stealthy. Yeah, that sounds consistent with how I would run such a scenario. Yet you believe it to be the case that looking for monsters preparing to ambush couldn’t detect one being set up on the other side of a secret door? Ok, I see where the confusion is coming from. In the portion of that quote of mine that you bolded, I noted that “trying to find out if there are traps in the room” as the [I]goal[/I], not as part of the [I]approach[/I]. You seem to be treating the goal itself as communicating information about the approach, where as I am treating them as entirely separate things. To me, “I try to find out if there are any traps by moving to the center of the room” comes across as comparable to “I try to tie my shoes by shouting at them,” in that neither seems to be an approach that could reasonably succeed at accomplishing the goal. You read “I try to find out if there are any traps by moving to the center of the room” as something like “I move to the center of the room while looking for traps” and treat the goal as implied; more comparable to saying “I shout at my shoes while trying to tie them.” When you clarified that you intended for “looking for traps” to be considered part of the approach, it became clear to me that there wasn’t enough information because “I try to find out if there are any traps in the room by moving to the center of the room [I]and looking for traps[/I]” is redundant. Comparable to saying “I try to tie my shoes by shouting at them and trying to tie them.” The point of asking for approach as a separate item from goal is so that I can evaluate [I]how[/I] you’re trying to achieve your goal. Well what you said was “moving slowly and carefully forward [I]while looking at the ground[/I].” The reason my answer to that is different than my answer to “move to the center of the room” is that it conveys what you’re doing to try to find the trap. I can imagine that as you slowly move forward, looking at the ground, you might notice something on the ground that you didn’t when you first entered the room, which might reveal the presence of the trap; I could also imagine that you might not do so before stepping on the trap. Therefore, a roll would be necessary to resolve that uncertainty. On the other hand, simply walking to the center of the room? Well if you did that, you would trigger the trap, because as established in the example, the trap is triggered by standing in the center of the room. There’s no way that would result in you succeeding in your goal of finding the trap, at least not without triggering it, which I do agree with you is obviously counter to the intent. Ah, ok. Well, you’re incorrect about that. I only started playing this way in 2012 with the D&D Next playtest (so I guess that is [I]one[/I] decade…) and I’d say it probable took me a good few years to actually get the hang of it, since up until then I had been playing much more like how it sounds like you do. I specifically changed to this style of play because it seemed to be what was indicated by the new rules (whereas I think your way is much closer in line with what’s indicated by the 4e rules), and it took me some time to really learn and adjust to. But I very quickly found myself enjoying it a great deal more than I had enjoyed the way I was playing before. See, I don’t see any problem with that. What’s wrong with players deciding to wear plate gauntlets to protect from needle traps or opening doors with mage hand? I disagree completely with this DM of yours. The players taking steps to avoid chest traps is something to be celebrated, not lamented. It means that they are responding to their environment and making decisions that their experience tells them will give them the best chances of being successful, which is a good thing! They are imagining the fictional space and making decisions about how to navigate it as if it were a real place, and succeeding or failing by those decisions, rather than the results of random number generators. That is only a good thing in my view. And this is really what it comes down to. I find that kind of gameplay fun and engaging, and you don’t. And that’s fine, I don’t begrudge you playing in a way that is fun for you and not playing in a way that isn’t. I don’t think there’s really anywhere the conversation can go from here because it’s just a matter of taste. You don’r enjoy the same kind of gameplay I do, so you probably wouldn’t want to play at my table. I do suspect you would enjoy it more than you think you would, because it sounds like your experience with this type of play has mostly been with adversarial DMs, and I think it’s pretty universally true that this kind of gameplay sucks when you have an adversarial DM. But my experience has been that it’s a great deal of fun with a good, cooperative DM, and that has also consistently been the experience of players who have taken a chance on trying it with me as DM. Maybe your experience would be different, I can’t say. Regardless, there’s not much else to say here. You don’t like the gameplay style, and that’s perfectly ok. Yeah, that’s a problem that can happen with this style, especially when the DM doesn’t make good use of telegraphing. When you don’t have enough information, you end up either having to blindly guess, or try to pre-empt any and every conceivable danger, which… sucks. This gameplay is at its best when simply by paying attention to the DM’s description, you have a good idea of what you need to be prepared for, and can come up with a good plan for how to deal with it. This can be difficult to capture in forum posts, because effective telegraphing requires a great deal of context that is simply lacking here. I can’t just pull out an example of it done well out of thin air, because doing it well relies on a great deal of environmental design and tutorializing. See my answer to [USER=762]@Mort[/USER] about how to handle the Stargate hidden door. I had to give four or five different possible clues, all of which would have to be sprinkled throughout a dungeon that made reoccurring use of such hidden doors. This seems to be leaving the goal out of the equation. For what purpose is the character playing a sad song on their viol? If they’re just playing it for it’s own sake, there’s no need to roll. Can you succeed in the goal of playing a sad song by using a Viol? Assuming you’re proficient with it, yes. Can you fail to do so? I guess, sure. Is there a meaningful consequence for that failure? No, not really, not if you’re just playing it for its own sake. No further detail is necessary, the action can just succeed without need to roll any dice. Now, if the goal is to entertain a crowd, then playing a sad song on the viol is an approach they might take to try and achieve that goal. Depending on the crowd to be entertained, the mood in the venue, etc. a sad song might or might not have a reasonable possibility of entertaining the crowd, which might or might not have meaningful consequences. In either case, it’s enough to know that the song the character is playing is sad; the time signature, key, etc. are unnecessarily specific details. I don’t follow. My opinion is my own. There are other people who’s DMing styles might be similar to mine in some ways, but I am not responsible for what they say. [/QUOTE]
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