This is all a day late thanks to IRL stuff
To reiterate the obvious, I'm not [MENTION=6779196]Charlaquin[/MENTION]. Still, I think my response to this question is consistent with what Charlaquin has said upthread: you, the GM, tell me. I mean, it's the GM's job to frame a situation that will be engaging for the players, and if that situation is going to be a lich's gauntlet of death than it's on the GM to find a way of making that engaging rather than just an experience in literalness.
If you, as a GM, want to keep threats and consequences hidden from your players well that's your prerogative. But you can't blame this on the fiction, given that you wrote that!
Why is it not engaging?
I'm not looking to rebuild the Tomb of Horrors, but sometimes my players will have more fun if I'm not holding back. Would they ask me to not hold back? I doubt it, they want to succeed, but they know I sometimes just unleash, and those can be some of the best fights and challenges they overcome. And sometimes that means catching them off guard, not telegraphing something.
I'm not
blaming the fiction, of course I am creating it. But, why is that fact being used to tell me I'm doing it wrong? That I should change the fiction to fit with someone else's style, because their style is better, because the only reason I'm saying something is impossible is because I determined it was impossible, and that is a bad thing?
See, now you’re talking about combat encounter difficulty, which is a different thing than trap/hazzard telegraphing.
Sure, but when talking about setting up a boss plus lair, they tie into each other. Especially when you insist that I must be fair. To be completely fair, I can't send them against overpowered foes in heavily fortified bases. That isn't fair.
It is also great in every other use of media, because it is compelling.
This is a false dichotomy. There is a whole spectrum of villain motivations between ineffable mastermind who foresees all possible ways the heroes could notice his traps and takes measures to cover them up, and the riddler. There are any number of reasons that the details that telegraph the presence of traps might remain intact. You have chosen to set this scenario up in such a way as to excuse your conscious choice to make the traps in your dungeon impossible to detect. That’s your prerogative if you think that will lead to an enjoyable play experience for you and your players, but personally I wouldn’t want to play that game.
You seem to think I'm working in reverse.
I imagined the villain, then looked at how they would obfuscate their traps, because it is what they would do. I didn't decide the traps were undetectable then create my villain.
Of course there is a spectrum, but you don't seem to think there is. To you, all traps must be telegraphed, the villain cannot have hidden a trap so well that it is not telegraphed, because that is me working against my players. Therefore, there is no spectrum that includes "not telegraphed" because every trap must be telegraphed, period, no matter what else is true.
Except, we haven’t been discussing realism vs stylization or challenge vs. ease. We’ve been discussing fair challenge vs. unfair challenge. It is entirely possible to design a campaign that is “realistic” (insofar as D&D can be realistic), challenging, and fair. Again, I point to Dark Souls as the classic example of difficult but fair game design. That is in fact exactly what I aim to capture in my games. You’re the one who said that a fair challenge isn’t always desirable. I disagree with that. And that’s fine, you don’t need my permission to run your game any way you want.
You realize, just as an aside, one of the major points of Dark Souls is that you have infinite lives right?
Also, you want to talk about “fair” vs “unfair” but you haven’t really explained anything beyond “the player not knowing all the information if unfair”. With that my only recourse is to assume that the only fair challenge is the transparent one, where the player knows all the pertinent information possible to know, which will be all of it, since you’ll design it so everything is available.
That is why I’m saying, that not every challenge that is engaging and fun is “fair” because the characters aren’t on a level playing field with their opponents. Their opponents hold the edge.
Well, sorry, I don’t think your elf’s identity needs telegraphing. If you thought I would think it did, now you have an example why I don’t think you actually understand my style.
Okay then, what doesn’t get telegraphed? What do you not tell your players when they are about to roll the dice. Because, you keep using vague terms, like “the consequences” and so I am left having to assume you what you mean.
Do you only telegraph clues in the exploration pillar, and never in the social? Do combat encounters get telegraphed? What am I getting wrong?
I literally do not care what you do. You presented my style as if I was telling players things their characters couldn’t possibly know, which I disputed. You gave an example of a consequence the character couldn’t possibly know (the chandelier with the rotten beams thing). I said that I wouldn’t have set it up that way, because I’m not interested in hiding vital decision-making information from my players like that. I’m not “taking you to task” for anything because I literally don’t care what you do, I am responding to misunderstandings and misrepresentations of the way I run the game.
Okay, then give a counter-example.
My example was bad because the I hid too much vital information and it was only hidden because I decided it was.
That would be far more productive than just constantly telling me “But it is only impossible to know because you decided it was impossible to know” which reads as a critic of what I am doing, not a defense of what you are theoretically doing instead.
Failing to dodge at the right time is a failed Dexterity saving throw, that’s not the same thing as what we’ve been talking about, which is letting the players know the potential consequences of their action (when said action has a chance to succeed, chance to fail, and consequence for failure) before making them commit to it. Rolling off the edge is something that can happen due to the game’s real-time physics, and pushing the button too many times and using up more of a consumable than you meant to likewise. These aren’t issues that arise in a pen and paper RPG, they are unique to video games.
Facepalm
Yes, those are mistakes unique to video games. Board games and RPGs have their own mistakes that can be made. Like going forward with an action whose consequences were worse than you thought they would be.
Yeah. Into thinking you were in fact attacking my choice of style. I assume you’re familiar with the idiom, right?
Yes
