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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="the Jester" data-source="post: 5753098" data-attributes="member: 1210">The problem here, imho, is the assumption that the pcs can be led by the nose through a certain sequence of encounters, yielding a certain number of xp, in a predictable fashion.Is it a problem when the party leaves the dungeon and goes to take care of that local thief who has been aggravating them since level 1? Should the dm not reward xp for engaging with the campaign in preference to keeping an artificial pace? What if the pcs find the secret back entrance that takes them to the lower levels of the dungeon first? Oh noes, my artificial pacing is off!Some dms do award xp that way, or simply tell the party when to level. Which is fine if that's the style you want- but in that case, xps are extraneous to the discussion.All great ideas.This is a game we're talking about. The story is what you tell about how the pcs interacted with the adventure. I'll suggest (my playstyle preferences are showing here!) that if you have to have a certain pace in your story, you're best off writing a book and not running a game. Even so, the suggestion that the organized inhabitants of a dungeon won't proactively seek out the guys who have been killing their friends for the past three days also sacrifices "story concerns" (which I would term "verisimilitude" in this case) for the sake of some spectral idea of fairness/taking it easy on the players/not being mean/let's not mess up the "story" that inevitably has the bad guy encountered in the same room, no matter the time of day or night or what has happened in the interim.Again there's a lot of reference to plot, progress, etc. The problem with story-based games is keeping the story flowing, and if that's your main problem, maybe the campsites idea is right for you. Personally, I find that the flow of the story of my games comes after they are played, and the pcs drive that flow in the game. They aren't 2nd level by the time they find the stairs down? Well, that's okay; either they'll get greater dangers and treasures for heading down or they'll do something else. They reach 2nd level well before they find those stairs? That's okay too. Beyond that, wandering monsters certainly can make for interesting combats, as well as be interesting from a "plot" perspective. I'll give you an example. The party imc had a wandering encounter with a group of yuan-ti cultists. Several games later, they learned about a group of yuan-ti in a nearby swamp. Lo and behold, the random encounter led to a cool adventure in a half-sunken yuan-ti ziggurat! Random encounters aren't just monsters that wander the world looking to attack pcs; they are creatures with their own goals too. When the players ask, "Why are these guys here?", a good dm will come up with an answer, even if the players don't know what it is.Oh, absolutely. I'll add that wandering monsters make a lot more sense if the dm thinks about what to put on his wandering monster charts and why they are on it. A long-lost desert tomb shouldn't have a dire boar on the table, but a gray ooze or handful of skeletons make perfect sense. The social adventure where the pcs need to slip away from a dinner party and search the host's office in secret shouldn't have ghouls and giants, it should have the house dog and servants. Using "just any ol' chart" to generate wandering monsters IS a huge problem if you want to maintain verisimilitude.</blockquote>

Verification