Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 6172088" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Quite the interesting paradox here for me.  Yes, I want to focus on the story details, rather than fiddle with math.  You know what makes me more inclined to fiddle with math rather than focusing on story or the non-mechanical dynamics of the situation at hand?  Poor resolution encounter budgeting; eg zoomed-out encounter budgeting at the adventure level rather than the inverse of precision at the encounter level.The tighter, more predictable, the math is at the encounter level, the less focus I have to put into "massaging" encounter difficulty on the fly in real time and the more I can focus on the story/dynamics of the conflict in front of us, and pressuring the PCs to the fullest with the resources I can bring to bear (which, with respect to encounters, are both what is fun to me as a GM).  The less * predictable the encounter outcome is for me (the GM), the less I can focus on the story/challenge dynamics of the encounter and playing out the challenge full tilt because I don't know what n is in 2 = 2<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f44e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt="(n)" title="Thumbs down    (n)"  data-smilie="23"data-shortname="(n)" />.  Maybe its 1 (hopefully)?  Maybe its 2?...worse yet, what if its 3 and I expect it to be somewhere around 1?  Big problems.  Now I'm worrying about fiddling with the math of future encounters rather than focusing on story, setting, situation.* In terms of total resource ablation and or TPK > Cakewalk continuum specifically with respect to the challenges (monsters, traps, hazards, stakes) I put before my PCs...not in terms of the actual dynamics of the outcome as dictated by anomalous PC strategy or tactics.</blockquote>

Verification