NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 5419845" data-attributes="member: 26473">Because the adventurers are not adrift in a featureless void without meaningful options.In my game-world they are surrounded by the incessant buzz of activity, the players are encouraged to proactively involve their characters in those activities, and from time to time that activity may spill onto the characters unexpectedly, in the form of random encounters.The example of the ruined villa and the viper is a reference to the on-going discussion about whether or not encounters and events in the game are created to specifically challenge an adventurer or adventurers based on backstory - I introduced the example of Indiana Jones in a post upthread to explain my understanding of pemerton's approach to doing this in his game. My point with respect to the villa and the viper was, I don't introduce encounters to play on the adventurers' fears or backstory elements, so if they were to encounter a snake, this would be a likely instance when they would do so - I'm not throwing snakes at characters just to play on their phobias.Since my game doesn't include 'dungeons' and 'monsters,' encounters tend to be a bit less over-the-top than is standard in D&D, so hazards associated with a ruined villa or temple might consist of a nest of vipers, a dangerous crumbling wall, a collapsing floor over a cistern, a hive of hornets, and so on. Roman ruins feature in a number of the random encounters I generated; frex, if an encounter with 'bandits' appears in Languedoc or Provence, one of the possibilities is that the adventurers stumble upon a bandit lair in a ruined temple.(As an aside, one of the reasons I include ruined villas, castles, chuches, and so on throughout my random encounters is that they makes such great swashbuckling environments. Steps, piles of rubble, rows of columns, shifting slabs - a Roman ruin is a great place to stage a sword fight, should the encounter go that way.)But just for the sake of argument, let's suppose for a moment that in my game there is such a thing as random encounter with a Roman ruin and one viper, and nothing else, as you suggest. You've written about "pacing" several times on this forum: given the limited time which gamers have to play, 'shopping trips,' 'empty rooms,' and the like are a waste of those precious game-night minutes of adventure.I see a couple of problems with this approach. First, rising action isn't rising action without falling action, in my opinion - a well-paced game, in my experience, features peaks and valleys. I have this problem with movies quite often - Indiana Jones at the Temple of Doom ("Indiana Jones at the Tempo of ZOOM!") and Van Helsing come to mind, where the actions simply becomes mind-numbing and I stop caring at all about the characters or their world.'Exploring the world' in a 'sandbox'-y setting isn't just about 'filling in blank hexes on the map.' One 'explores' a world by interacting with its denizens and visiting its features, even denizens known to many and features which appear on a map readily available to anyone. Our last game night included a trip to the theatre - there was the possibility of a random encounter which might involve the adventurer, but nothing came up, so the five or ten minutes of real-time we spent on the show focused on the adventurer learning more about a couple of the npcs he met earlier on (including a woman he may be thinking about pursuing as a mistress) and the experience of visiting the theatre in 1625 Paris.This leads to the second point: part of running a 'sandbox'-y game is providing the adventurers with resources which they may or may not choose to use. The musketeer-adventurer in my game now has the theatre as a resource; he can look for someone he knows there, arrange a rendezvous there, and so on. A ruined villa discovered by the adventurers in the pays of Provence offers the same benefit - frex, should they need a place to stash Princess Pinkflower after rescuing her from the baron de Bauchery, this becomes one of the resources available to them.To use a more D&D-friendly example, that empty room the adventurers discover in the dungeon right now may become the Alamo where they make their last stand later in the game.Because my prep is intended to avoid exactly that.And I prefer the adventurers to be the ones making trouble, not waiting for someone to spring it on them over and over again.</blockquote>

Verification