D&D General No Fixed Location -- dynamically rearranging items, monsters, and other game elements in the interests of storytelling

[The Mirrorball Man]

Honestly I find this sad. I feel that there is one way of playing the game as promoted by prominent personalities but there are other ways that are equally if not more engaging and rewarding. But like anything in popular culture, the pop personalities run the show. Maybe the game is forever relegated to the Critical Role style and my approach is antiquated and obsolete.

I’ve been playing role-playing games for 35 years and the last time I’ve met someone who played in the style you’re describing was 29 years ago. I’m not even sure what Critical Role is. Again, there’s nothing wrong with your approach if that’s what you enjoy, but people who play differently are not a band of clueless iconoclasts who can’t think for themselves.

 

[Charlaquin]

And if they just kill him, what then?

Hopefully they have Speak With Dead? Or I suppose they could hire someone else to cast it if they don’t. Not really a huge concern IMO, and as I said earlier, I typically have a couple proactive elements at play. Haven’t yet had players bungle all the static clues and all the proactive ones.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

[JMonayuris, post: 7907407, member: 6859536"]
Good point. Maybe I am approaching the game from an antiquated style. But your description is what I want out of the game. Maybe that is not what the game is about anymore. It would explain a lot of the confusion here.
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Sent from my phone and it messed up the quote markup. If someone sees the error let me know so I can fix it.*
I wanted to pop in to say that you just became the unicorn! You are that rare person who, on an internet message board, takes a non defensive pause and actually absorbs what the other side is saying. Then you used that newfound (maybe better to say newly understood) knowledge to view something in a totally different light. Kudos sir/madam.

I have been playing RPGs since the early 80s. I have played all manner of systems with all manner of themes. I have been playing on a weekly basis for the past 20 years.

The last time I played a session of an RPG that could be described as "Here is the dungeon, you guys go explore and I will be the NEUTRAL IMPASSIONED ARBITOR of your actions was probably in the late 80s. This type of game would be better served by you and your buddies playing a videogame and letting the computer be the NEUTRAL IMPASSIONED ARBITOR so that you could play too.

I have zero interest in being a NIA. I view my job, as DM, to be the conductor of the symphony of game. I write the music (create the world) and they players play their parts. When the rooms mood is silly, the adventure becomes funnier. The tone is lighter. The NPCs match the mood. On a later session when the rooms mood shifts to serious, the stakes go up. The danger increases. The jokey goblin jester has an edge to him.

My job is to keep the game moving, enhance the things the players like and fade back the things the players find boring or frustrating because, as others have stated here, my goal is to have an awesome game, not to be a NIA.

And with that goal in mind, I sure as shift am going to move rooms around, swap monsters in and out, add or subtract clues, double a villains HP or any other infinite tweaks I can do behind the screen to make my story riveting and a blast to play through.

 

[Iry]

I do everything. The majority of the time I create scenes and move them around to wherever would be most dramatic, though they become locked in place once the party has discovered them. But sometimes I run murder mysteries and lean heavily on three clues. Sometimes I run a single dungeon as a neutral arbiter. Sometimes the adventure is episodic, leaping from one important location to the next. And other times it is blow-by-blow because I think it fits the story better at that moment.

I definitely lean much more towards event-based than location-based, but they are all tools in my belt.

 

[TarionzCousin]

Not that anyone on the internet ever apologizes for wrongdoing, but there it is.

I apologize for drinking all of Evan's grape juice when he went back to get a brownie.

 

[TwoSix]

Honestly I find this sad. I feel that there is one way of playing the game as promoted by prominent personalities but there are other ways that are equally if not more engaging and rewarding. But like anything in popular culture, the pop personalities run the show. Maybe the game is forever relegated to the Critical Role style and my approach is antiquated and obsolete.

If that is the case, I would just abandon 5E and focus on OSR games that better suit my style. I would focus my efforts towards the subculture that has a different approach to the game... an approach that I feel is worthwhile and relevant.

I mean, it's hardly a new thing; running games focused on plot over world exploration have been prevalent since the late 80s. '90s games, especially WoD and most of the play advice from 2E, were heavily focused on the idea of the DM using illusionist mechanics to maintain a single, consistent storyline.

I think most games running nowadays tend to towards the middle. There's still a strong desire for coherent storylines that direct the campaign (see the popularity of Paizo's APs and WotC's 5e adventures), but more players do want a sense that the particular location they're exploring has the chance for failure and that the plot can be diverted.

It's also fair to note that low or no-prep games can provide a high degree of freedom in terms of player advocacy precisely because there's no map to deviate from, it's understood by the all participants (players and DM) that the world is going to be created by free association between the participants. You don't normally see this type of play in high-concept sims like the D&D family of games (non-4E), but in plenty of other more narrative games (Dungeon World, other PbtA engine games, Blades in the Dark).

 

[Arilyn]

Even right after the first D&D rules came out, there were groups looking for story over dungeon crawls, and making things up on the fly, ignoring dice rolls, etc. which is why Gygax initially opposed role playing in his game. He was looking at it still from a tactics/miniatures point of view, with the neutral judge, and players using their own brains to figure out the puzzle of the dungeon. This divide in playstyles is as old as the game itself.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Whether my players win or lose doesn't matter. How they win or lose does. So I do anything I want as the DM to make their victories feel earned and cool, and their losses tragic and memorable.

Am I ever going to TPK the group on a random encounter heading towards a dungeon just because I underestimated the power of the monsters I chose and the state the group was in? Nope. Never. Stupid way for the entire group to die is stupid. And I don't give a rat's patootie if others think I don't "respect" my players for doing that. I don't DM for my players respect... I DM to make the couple hours they've given to me cool and memorable.

 

[Imaculata]

Am I ever going to TPK the group on a random encounter heading towards a dungeon just because I underestimated the power of the monsters I chose and the state the group was in? Nope. Never. Stupid way for the entire group to die is stupid.

So what do you do? Do you not throw a random encounter at the party when they are weakened? Do you give them an easy victory when the fight with the random encounter goes bad? How would you handle it?

 

[Xetheral]

Tell me [the PCs] can fail as well as succeed. Tell me they can come back to the King and report they didn't rescue the Princess because (unknown to them, of course) they missed the main clue to her kidnappers' location due to searching the Duke's desk instead of the Chamberlain's. Tell me they can't get to the Throne of Antioch because they didn't find the throne room key in the haunted cavern and the door won't open any other way.

In my games the PCs absolutely can fail, but it's a very different kind of failure than you're talking about. At my table the PCs fail at a particular goal as a result of making informed (or apparently informed) strategic decisions. So, for example, they might fail they when they don't or can't devote sufficient strategic resources (e.g. time, money, influence), when they're operating on faulty or incomplete information, when they prioritize other goals, or when they rely on a strategy with a probabilistic outcome (e.g. combat) and chance doesn't go their way. I find these kinds of failures have a positive impact on the game, because seeing the game world consequences of their high-level decisions emphasizes the importance of the players' choices.

But when the PCs prioritize a goal, formulate a plan using accurate intelligence, devote more-than-sufficient resources, and don't engage in fights that they might lose, I'm not going to let them fail just because it didn't occur to the players to search the Chamberlain's desk instead of the Duke's desk. They're either going to find what they're looking for in the Duke's desk, or (if there is enough time remaining in the session) they're going to find something that points to the Chamberlain's desk. In my opinion, failing because they didn't think to engage with the right environmental feature(s) of the setting has a negative impact on the game, leading to the players getting frustrated and a sense of a wasted session. Instead, I'll give the PCs the success that they "bought"--after all, it came at the cost of failing (or at least delaying progress on) other competing goals.

Of course, success isn't all-or-nothing. If the PCs did all of the above except they were acting on inaccurate intelligence, they're going to succeed at getting information from the Duke's (or the Chamberlain's) desk, but maybe it's information exonerating the Duke, rather than revealing the location of the kidnapped Princess. The PCs "failed" at their goal of finding the Princess (possibly permanently if there was a tight deadline), but it was the strategic decision to go after the Duke that caused the failure, not a failure to correctly interact with the environment.

To briefly apply that point to your other example, at my table the PCs might fail to get to the Throne of Antioch because they searched the wrong cavern for the key, or because the right cavern was too expansive and they didn't bring enough help to search the whole thing in time. They're not going to somehow fail to find the key despite looking in the right location and devoting enough resources to the task.