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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fanaelialae" data-source="post: 8275882" data-attributes="member: 53980">I disagree that skilled play is necessarily about second guessing the DM. I think it can be about doing so, and that's perfectly fine as long as everyone has agreed to that kind of game (even if only by tacit consent). IMO, making it about second guessing the DM is legitimately bad DMing if the group hasn't agreed to this. For example, that DM expected us to be in character, not metagame, and approach his setting as a real place (as opposed to say, a video game). But then he did this thing that was extremely discordant to those goals. This was a gotcha, pure and simple. It was just him showing off how "clever" he was. The pits weren't deep, or difficult to get out of. They weren't there to kill anyone. It was literally there to get one over on the players. To get a laugh at our (my) expense. It wasn't a rational addition to the game world. There was no way to anticipate it, short of something like tapping every square with a 10' pole, or searching for traps everywhere (but this guy had vehemently objected to that approach when we tried it because they slowed down game too much and made it boring).Don't get me wrong, in the sense that the setting comes from the DM's imagination there will always be an element of second-guessing the DM. However, if the DM constructs the setting to be a well-reasoned place, the players aren't second-guessing the DM in the same sense as they would be with a gotcha DM. They might be second-guessing what the DM considers logical in a given circumstance, but that's a far narrower scope than playing 'what gotcha will the DM try to pull on us today'. In the case of a logical world, players should be able to make logical deductions about the world, and this is itself an important aspect of skilled play as I see it. Unsurprisingly, I enjoy skilled play in a logical setting. I can't stand it in an illogical gotcha setting. And flagrantly mixing-and-matching the two is IMO very bad DMing, because then your players never know what to expect. Such a game devolves into a bait-and-switch.</blockquote>

Verification