D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[AlViking]

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As you said, you asked for examples that can be used in D&D. You can use fail forward in D&D. You can use rolls to resolve conflicts rather than tasks. These things can be done in D&D.

That you don’t want to use them or don’t like them doesn’t mean that they cannot be used. Your request was granted.

True to an extent. But then when I give a concrete example of picking the lock and the quantum cook, I get "What the goal and approach?" which is just not a thing in D&D or "That's not how it works in <some other game>. Then we get told that we're wrong about <some other game> and we try to explain we're talking D&D and on and on. Others claim that they do it all the time but the specific details and examples in a D&D game are vanishingly rare. Don't want to talk about quantum cooks? Cool. Provide a different example. Just don't make it yet another BW example which, while well intended, is in a game with such a different approach that it doesn't really show me how I could incorporate it.

 

[Maxperson]

Best I can tell, this is the 4th longest thread on the site. The longest is 28,759 posts. These are rookie numbers.

There have been many threads over the years that were longer, not just 3.

 

[Maxperson]

Like the cook!

Except not. The monster will be there in that location at that exact time whether or not the PCs are there. The cook is both in the kitchen and not in the kitchen based on the sleight of hand skill of the PC combined with a roll to open locks. Oh, and whether or not the PC has thieves' tools. That impacts whether the cook is there or not as well.

 

[hawkeyefan]

What type of rolls would you use to resolve conflicts in D&D? I assume you're not just talking about combat. Opposed skill rolls? What changes would you need to make mechanically to do what you're talking about?

So the lockpick roll… I’d use one roll to determine the outcome overall. I wouldn’t require a lockpick and then a stealth roll to pick the lock quietly, and then a stealth roll to open the door, and another to move quietly over to the cook.

I actually ran a 5e oneshot this weekend because I travelled to meet up with some friends for a birthday. I used several alternate techniques than standard 5e ones.

I let the rogue lead a group stealth check. I had the other two players roll for their characters. Success on their roll would give advantage to the rogue. Failure would give disadvantage. If they split, the rogue would roll normally. The rogue’s roll then applied to all members of the group.

I had a situation where they needed to climb a cave wall, and there was some time pressure. The cave wall was 80 feet. I didn’t have them make multiple checks based on climbing movement rate. They just had to make one roll. One of the players failed, so the penalty was not that he failed to climb the wall, but that it took him a long time. This mattered for the next encounter, due to the time pressure.

I used clocks to handle a couple of complex skill challenges, and made them player facing. There was a ritual being performed and when the clock filled, it would be completed. Another was for reinforcements to show up. An argument could be made that both of these things were beyond what the characters would know… but it was trivially easy to tick the clock and then narrate something that the characters observed (first tick was a goblin yelling down a side corridor, obviously calling for help; next was howls and growls echoing down the corridor in response; finally torchlight and shadows of additional enemies seen on the tunnel wall).

It all went well. The game ran fine… arguably smoother in some ways, though I can’t say that for sure. But one of the players… the birthday boy, who is easily the most trad-minded player in my longtime game group, commented about the “rulings” I made and how he thought it really enhanced play. In particular, he really liked the way the clocks helped portray the tension of the mounting threat of reinforcements and the ritual progressing.

Now… having said all that, I realize that not everyone would love these changes I made. To be honest, I was a little nervous to use them in a game with the birthday boy. But that doesn’t mean they can’t work. It doesn’t mean that there was anything more quantum about this game compared to others. It didn’t result in a bunch of “metagaming”.

What it allowed me to do was run a game with no prep, and to challenge the players and their characters in a way that worked and which didn’t need to be done ahead of time.

 

[AlViking]

Several years ago my mother and a bunch of her girlfriends(about 10 in total) went on a women's retreat to a ranch in Central California that one of them owned. Towards the end of the retreat, they took a group photo along the ranch fence along one of the local roads. It wasn't until the photograph was developed that anyone noticed the mountain lion behind them staring at the backs of 10 elderly women. If they hadn't had those numbers, that situation might have gone very badly.

I've come across mountain lion scat (bits of rabbit fur in obviously fresh poo) and I'm sure the cat knew we were there. Been in grizzly country with something on the other side of the bushes that was really big but if it had been a moose (which we also saw on that trip) we would have seen it. Had a wolf approach to within 30 feet or so on the boardwalk in Yellowstone last winter. None of those were encounters I could have predicted.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Except not. The monster will be there in that location at that exact time whether or not the PCs are there. The cook is both in the kitchen and not in the kitchen based on the sleight of hand skill of the PC combined with a roll to open locks. Oh, and whether or not the PC has thieves' tools. That impacts whether the cook is there or not as well.

So the wandering monster roll determines the PCs’ location not the monsters? That seems weird. I would think if the roll indicates a wandering monster or random encounter, then the monster or NPCs are in the location of the PCs and they meet one another. If the roll indicates no encounter, then the monster or NPCs would be elsewhere.

No?

How are the monsters or NPCs in the same location regardless of the outcome of the roll?

 

[Maxperson]

True to an extent. But then when I give a concrete example of picking the lock and the quantum cook, I get "What the goal and approach?" which is just not a thing in D&D or "That's not how it works in <some other game>. Then we get told that we're wrong about <some other game> and we try to explain we're talking D&D and on and on. Others claim that they do it all the time but the specific details and examples in a D&D game are vanishingly rare. Don't want to talk about quantum cooks? Cool. Provide a different example. Just don't make it yet another BW example which, while well intended, is in a game with such a different approach that it doesn't really show me how I could incorporate it.

Not to an extent. It's completely true. You can in fact play D&D like that.

This is in my opinion most of what makes D&D so popular. With a few tweaks(optional rules and homebrew), you can play pretty much any playstyle out there. It isn't truly great at any of them, but it's decent to very good at all of them, with the afore mentioned tweaks.

You can even combine styles to an extent to take into considerations the primary goals of the various players in your group.

That means that it will have broad appeal to the most players and will often be selected just for that broad appeal, even though a more minor RPG designed for a specific playstyle would be much better than D&D at that particular style.

 

[Maxperson]

I've come across mountain lion scat (bits of rabbit fur in obviously fresh poo) and I'm sure the cat knew we were there. Been in grizzly country with something on the other side of the bushes that was really big but if it had been a moose (which we also saw on that trip) we would have seen it. Had a wolf approach to within 30 feet or so on the boardwalk in Yellowstone last winter. None of those were encounters I could have predicted.

About 15 years ago I was at Yellowstone when the tour bus stopped at a bunch of cars to see what wildlife everyone was looking at. I was at the very front of the bus directly across from a park ranger. A few seconds later a black bear came walking down the street and when it got to the ranger, it turned directly across the street towards me. The ranger wasn't worried and didn't give me any direction, so I wasn't particularly worried. The bear walked past me so close that I could have reached out and touched it. All it did was swing its head towards me like bears do, casually note, "Oh, hey. It's a human." and then swung its head back forward and walked across the field into the woods without ever looking back.

Yellowstone is fantastic for wildlife as long as you respect it.

 

[Maxperson]

So the wandering monster roll determines the PCs’ location not the monsters?

Nope. It doesn't do that, either. The monster is there even if the PCs never go that direction is all. If they do, then the roll is just to see if at someone point the party traveling through intersects with a monster already present.

 

[Lanefan]

The tall grass ambush is a perfect example. The question that needs to be asked is, "Why is the grass tall?" After all, it wasn't described as particularly tall until the ambush occurred.

It wasn't? You sure about that?

The players had no chance to react to the idea that something might be hidden in tall grass until the ambush occurred.

In other words, the only reason the grass is particularly tall here is because the DM retroactively needs to justify how the party got surprised. After all, the grass could be short, sparse, or any other thing than tall. Lots of places don't have tall grass. So, why is this, specific place filled with tall grass?

Because the completely arbitrary die rolls - a random encounter roll, a perception roll failure, etc - need to be retroactively narrated in order to make the scene make sense. After all, if the ground was rocky with little or no cover, then the ambush couldn't occur.

And had the ground been thusly described then one would think there wouldn't have been an ambush set-up there to begin with. Maybe the Orcs just charge across the open ground and remove all possibility of anyone being surprised. Maybe the Orcs have a shaman among them who has made them invisible. Maybe (etc. etc. etc.) - what it comes down to is that if the DM isn't following his own fiction then it's going to fall apart no matter what.

There is absolutely no difference between the cook being in the kitchen after a failed lock pick roll and the grass being retroactively made the perfect length. The only difference is which die rolls generated the result. And, note, the die rolls are completely divorced from the narrative. The dice say that an encounter will happen at point X. The dice also tell us that it's an ambush.

I'm not familiar with tables that specify encounter type, only encouter occurrence and with what. That said, once the dice say there's an encounter it's on the DM to make that encounter make sense within the fiction. If you're crossing an open-ice frozen lake and "encounter" gets rolled your odds of being ambushed are near zero - perhaps the only possibility is if a camouflaged Frost Giant on the shore chucks a boulder at you and you don't notice it coming.

Nothing the players have done have anything to do with any of these things. The terrain is then rearranged around the party so that it becomes the location for an ambush.

Or, far better, if he's hell-bent on an ambush then the DM waits for the party to reach some ground where an ambush makes more sense, and then narrates it: "After crossing the frozen lake the trail continues up on the other side, quickly plunging into deep thick forest." Now you've got an ambush site, so once they get into that forest let 'er rip.

The trick is, some people really, REALLY hate it when you shine a light on what's actually occuring in the game because then all those little lies and tricks that we play on ourselves to maintain our suspension of disbelief come crashing down.

Again, it's not a difference of substance but a difference of perception. As usual. The exhausting thing is that we've been having this discussion for decades because people absolutely will not let go of their illusions.

Funny - I thought the whole point of playing a game of make-believe was the illusions.