Illusionism or no?

[FrogReaver]

Suppose a GM has created an encounter based on what's in his notes. It quickly becomes apparent that the GM misjudged the encounter difficulty. The GM then modifies the encounter (buffing enemies/bringing in reinforcements/etc) to compensate for his misjudgment of the difficulty. After making that single modification he treats the updated encounter just as if he had prepped it in any other instance. Ultimately the players emerge victorious but it was a tough and challenging encounter.

The question essentially boils down to whether the GM should be free to correct planning mistakes mid-play and whether that's force, illusionism or something else. I think it's also important to consider playstyle expectations in relation to this question (compare sandbox play where players have alot of say over whether they engage a particular encounter vs a more linear playstyle where players mostly engage with what's in front of them)?

Also, is there a difference in using this technique as described and using this technique repeatedly, multiple times in the same encounter and in every encounter within the campaign.

My take. It matters why the GM is deploying this mechanic. It matters if using it is an outlier or typical. It matters whether the players are choosing to engage in encounters partially on their apparent difficulty or whether there's an expectation for balanced encounters where players fight what's in front of them. My take is that the example listed above is going to change from force/illusionism to not force/not illusionism depending on many of the specifics mentioned here. It's interesting to me that force/illusionism may not be universally applicable in the same ways to all games.

Thoughts?

 

[J.Quondam]

An interesting topic. For those of us not following the other thread (I assume it's spinning off from there?), would it be possible to give a quick definition of "force" and "illusionism"?

 

[Yora]

I have become a big fan of the approach that the GM places NPCs and creatures into the game environment and it us up entirely to the players if and how they want to engage with them. Without a scripted story for the campaign, even encounters the party stumble into by accident can be run away from, and there is no requirement coming from the GM that the players engage with any specific encounters.

In this context, you can't really make an encounter too hard. Too hard for what? Victory in a fight is not a requirement for the game to continue. Nor is getting an NPC to cooperate with whatever the players might hope to gain from the encounter. The only case I can think of where the GM can make an actual mistake is by setting up creatures that look significantly weaker in a fight than they actually are, based on what the players encountered before. But that's easy to avoid. Don't have a cave that is entirely populated by 1 HD goblins, except for one group of eight 6 HD goblins that don't look significantly different.

If the players engage in a fight and it turns out that they are loosing because they have bitten off more than they can chew, you could of course make on the fly adjustments to make the opponents fall much earlier than it would actually have taken the players. But once you start with that, when do you stop? When you start making it your choice that the players should not lose a fight because it wouldn't be satisfying in that moment, then under what conditions will you decide that it is satisfying for them to be defeated?

If the campaign does not hand the players automatic success without a chance to fail, you can't really start pulling them out of the fire. Because when you start, you can never stop. And then the whole exercise of playing the game becomes pointless.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Force is the GM causing an outcome that the GM prefers regardless of player input, action declarations, or the system outcome.

Illusionism is when you obscure or hide the use of Force from the players.

The OP example is Force. The GM is enforcing an outcome. I see no problem with this, though -- Force is a tool in the box and there's no inherent bad associated with it for everyone. People have different tolerances for Force. However, here the GM is changing an outcome because the GM wants to, and not considering player input, action declarations, or the system's say. To me, though, this is why I say you can't really run 5e without Force, because this kind of thing happens due to the way the combat engine is tuned -- sometimes you realize that what you've put into play is not good for play and need to use Force to change it.

If it's intentionally hidden from the players such that they never realize the encounter was overbalanced and was altered to be easier for them, it's Illusionism as well.

 

[TheSword]

Who is to know? I won’t lie, I’ve started an encounter with hill
Giants and then realized I meant to use elite hill giant fighters. I’ve amended the roll20 sheets in seconds on the fly and bumped the hp by 40, the AC by 2, upped the damage dice by an increment and added 2 to the static damage. Nobody knew, nobody died, it’s all fair game as far as I’m concerned.

 

[Yora]

But you know. It will affect how you will react to other things in your games that turn out different from what you had expected.

 

[BookTenTiger]

Whatever you call it, it's definitely what I do!

I will adjust encounters to be more difficult, less difficult, social, or exploratory based on the pacing of that session and what I'm reading from the players.

 

[Yora]

But for what purpose? That's the question here. What do you want to accomplish with that approach and what kind of experience do you believe it creates for the players?

 

[BookTenTiger]

But for what purpose? That's the question here. What do you want to accomplish with that approach and what kind of experience do you believe it creates for the players?

Are you replying to me?

The purpose for me is to create a well-paced session. I find if all the encounters are the same, it's boring. So I'll adjust the encounters to make each one unique.

 

[FrogReaver]

An interesting topic. For those of us not following the other thread (I assume it's spinning off from there?), would it be possible to give a quick definition of "force" and "illusionism"?

I don’t know any definition that isn’t either to narrow such that things we would normally speak of as force aren’t or too broad such that nearly everything including Scene framing could be called force.

if I was to give it an attempt I’d say force is an attempt to coral players toward a specific fictional scene that the playstyle expects to be able to be driven via player input. Maybe that last part is the key for ending the arguments about force and what it is or isn’t. Probably not but it’s at least something to consider.

illusionism is just applying force in such a way that the players aren’t aware