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

[pemerton]

Alternatively: you're wrong that we all run games the same way. I've never used map-and-key and while sometimes there's a timeline other times there isn't depending on the scenario, at least not on a scale that matters. Some people do use those techniques and they're open about it and not coy at all.

OK, then I'm back to not understanding what you mean by "bypassing an encounter".

The goal for the group was to stop some hags from poisoning a feast that would turn the town's inhabitants into monsters. The guards were there because the hags had charmed them to keep nosy outsiders out until the feast was done. Nothing more, nothing less.

<snip>

I figured out what potential obstacles would make sense that would prevent anyone from interfering. I had overall outline of what the hags had prepared which gave me a quick list of probable encounters for my notes. In this case it a simple fight with a number of constructs that would have been activated if they had not figured out a way to avoid it.

So the encounter that was bypassed was the constructs?

 

[pemerton]

why do you require the players to make choices about how their knights errant respond?

Because that's the point of the game. It's a game of Arthurian adventure.

If you didn't want to do that sort of thing, you wouldn't play Prince Valiant.

It’s like visiting Greece: you can take a tour bus from your hotel straight to the Parthenon, or you can walk the streets of Athens, talk to locals, and experience the life of the city. The first is efficient and curated; the second is more physically demanding but immersive. Neither is better. They’re simply different ways to experience a place and have their respecitve upsides and downsides.

Your Prince Valiant sessions aren’t about the players living in King Arthur’s world as their characters, they’re about testing how they respond as their character to specific dilemmas within Prince Valiant's version of that world.

And this is just wrong.

 

[pemerton]

Who here has claimed that traditional play is the only gaming worthy of the name?

I make assumptions.

Asked and answered!

 

[Lanefan]

I'd like to see other games grow without D&D "commercially capsizing", myself. It's not a zero-sum game in that manner.

Indeed; and the risk inherent to D&D commercially capsizing is that it drags the entire hobby down with it, taking it out of any sort of mainstream view and plunking it back in the niche closet from which it emerged.

Some might not mind this. I, though, wouldn't want to see it happen.

 

[Faolyn]

This is not very clear to me.

The PCs are imaginary characters in an imaginary world. They have the same sorts of choices that anyone else in their circumstances in that world would have. And things happen to them, or not, just as they do to anyone else. If the PCs turn up to the docks hoping to meet Tolub the priate, and Tolub is not there, then they will not encounter Tolub. If the PCs want to enter Megloss's house, but don't want to be caught, then they might sneak in through the back, thus avoiding an unwanted encounter with Megloss or his housekeeper Krystal.

At the table, these are player action declarations - we go to the docks hoping to meet Tolub, or we sneak in through the back of the house, so that no one notices us. And those action declarations are resolved in the usual fashion.

But there is no "encounter" that is "missed".

So yeah, this is what I mean, and why you’re getting pushback. You’re either willfully ignorant or baiting people. We know it’s all imaginary. That has nothing to do with anything else we’re talking about.

You’re wrong; the failure to meet Tolub is a missed encounter. If Tolub was planning on doing something, then the PCs missed the opportunity to join in or stop him. If the PCs sneak in through the back, they miss having an encounter with Megloss and/or Krystal.

You can call it whatever you like, but it’s still a missed encounter.

Consider an analogue: I am playing chess, and I choose to advance my queen pawn, when it was equally open to me to advance my king pawn. I've made my choice, and the game unfolds. I haven't "missed" or "bypassed" the game where I advance my king pawn.

Bad analogy. There’s no encounters in chess.

Suppose that I am walking through the streets of Rome - wonderful streets to walk through! And I see a fountain in a plaza to my left; and a basilica across a small square to my right. So I choose to go left, and admire the fountain. And while I'm doing that, I notice something else - say, a food vendor - and go and buy some food, and then see something else, and go and look at /do that. Had I gone right to check out the basilica, I would have had a different set of experiences. Or, suppose that having seen the fountain and eaten my food I go back to the basilica: well, that means there's something else that I'm not doing; and of course the basilica experience will not be identical now to what it would have been then - different people, maybe there's a mass being said (or not), maybe the sun has moved and so the windows present a different experience, etc, etc. Ultimately, my time in Rome being finite, and my life being finite, when I die there will always be things that I didn't see, experiences that I didn't have.

But it hardly makes sense to say that I "bypassed an encounter" with the basilica; or with the fountain. I just chose one possibility over another.

That is exactly what encounters are. The only difference is that in a game, there will be more to do at a location than sightsee and take photos. Missions and deals and combat and the like. And due to the various constraints of the game, it’s less likely that party will be able to go back to those areas—and even if they do, the things they could have encountered may no longer be there. NPCs have moved on. Events may have been triggered already. The PCs could have burned the city down.

If we are talking specifically about map-and-key resolution, then I can see that "bypass an encounter" might be a way of saying "didn't go to a particular place on the map". Or something like that. Is that what is meant?

I explained this: you can miss encounters for things that are not tied to a map. I gave you two examples.

Here is a write-up for a short Torchbearer scenario, which includes a map-and-key for resolving action declarations pertaining to geography, architecture and what stuff is in what place. In the scenario write-up, there is the following:

I can’t help but notice you cut off my two other examples of missed encounters to focus on one that, as you have said earlier, is tied to GM prep—which, IIRC, you have indicated as being a Less Than Ideal way to play.

So go back and read my examples again.

Also, please learn to sum up: “The party passed by a pool and didn’t look in it. Therefore, they didn’t see the stuff that was in it. Is this a bypassed encounter?” Nobody wants to read ten lengthy paragraphs when a couple of short sentences will do. Not in this context, at least.

(And no, that’s not a bypassed encounter. They had the encounter. They just didn’t get everything out of it that they could have.)

 

[AlViking]

OK, then I'm back to not understanding what you mean by "bypassing an encounter".

So the encounter that was bypassed was the constructs?

I find it truly hard to believe you don't understand the reference to an encounter in D&D. Nor do I understand why the multiple explanations at this point don't make it clear.

I had a potential encounter planned where the characters could have been attacked by constructs if they tried to force their way past a pair of gnomish guards. They avoided the encounter, bypassed it, did not fight the constructs however you want to term it. I didn't set up the encounter as some kind of test, the construct guards were there because it made sense for the enemy they are trying to stop.

 

[pemerton]

The core issue with using D&D as a generic toolkit system is its magic system. D&D has an incredibly specific, bespoke magic system.

You can strip it out fairly easily, sure, and use the remaining resolution systems as a core chassis. But to do that, you've stripped out so much from the game that the question becomes "What's left?"

What's left is hit-point based combat, which is pretty poor for anything "modern" or "gritty". Hit points are already a tenuous fit for archery - whereas the nick and scratch and exhaustion narration works well for a sword-fight, it works less well for archery; hence the well-known image of the high level fighter pin-cushioned with arrows - and they become even weaker for gunfights.

 

[Faolyn]

This takes us back to an earlier conversation.

I can tell you how all this occurred.

It was early 2022. Me and my friends with whom I play RPGs had met at R's house - this was the first time we'd all met in person for quite a while, given the intensity and duration of pandemic lockdowns in Melbourne. My TB2e books had fairly recently arrived following the Kickstarter, and I had brought them along hoping to play some Torchbearer. So while R cooked food on the barbecue, I talked others through the system, a bit at a time, and thus persuaded everyone to have a try of the game. I talked everyone through PC build, and they built their PCs:

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As you can infer from that account of the PCs, when the players chose their PC's home towns, we talked about where these were located on the NE part of the Greyhawk map that I had pulled out - for instance, the Wizard's Tower was in the Bluff Hills, and the Forgotten Temple Complex adjacent to the Troll Fens and the Griff Mountains.

Having done all that - established PCs, backstory, some basic geography - I then described the situation, as per my post to which you replied:

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You can see how the goals chosen by the players for their PCs connect to the scenario backstory that I read out, and also in some cases to PC backstories - eg Telemere is looking for clues about his brother; Golin is looking for ingredients for explosives.

With all that established, if at the point of narrating the approach to the tower, and the rough-looking individuals, the players had indicated that they weren't interested in the game, or weren't interested in the setting, or weren't interested in the scenario I'd presented, (1) that would have been pretty weird, given the time and effort spent so far (over an hour, from memory), and (2) that would have required a conversation about what to do instead.

To make it more concrete: what sort of anti-social weirdo lets the GM read out the scenario backstory, and then chooses a goal for their PC related to that backstory, and then - once the GM frames the first scene - says "Oh, actually I want a different scenario?" As I posted upthread, that would be weirdly dysfunctional.

This completely failed to answer my question. Wanna try again?

 

[Faolyn]

Does a game still count as "surviving" if the setting remains the same but the system changes? Take L5R. It had a bespoke d10-based system for its first two editions, then switched to d20 for a while when WotC bought the IP (including a long stint where both systems were active) before AEG bought it back, switching back to the d10 system (with updates of course) for its third and fourth editions. Now the most recent edition uses a completely different mechanical system (and a somewhat changed setting) along with the new IP owner. And there's a D&D 5e version as well. So does L5R "survive"?

I don’t know from L5R at all, so my question is, does the newest edition or editions try to continue the game presented in the original? Ignore the base mechanics (d10s vs d20) and focus on the parts that make it “feel” like L5R to you. Do they line up?

My first Star Trek game was FASA. I never actually got to play it, but I read it. Currently, I own Star Trek Adventures (1e). The two games to me feel very different, with very different goals and ways to play even beyond the mechanics. I wouldn’t consider them to be the same game, even though it’s the same setting.

 

[pemerton]

My groups have been quite unusual outliers here, but our trad games tend to be extraordinarily light on violent conflict and tend to have several days in the fiction between significant events quite often.

I've already mentioned upthread, I think, that between 1990 and 2008 (inclusive) I GMed two long-running RM campaigns.

At the start of the second, we made some adjustments to the PC build rules, and also I tweaked some of the combat rules, so that a spell-casting PC going nova in one encounter was roughly equivalent to what a non-casting PC could bring to bear in the same encounter.

The changes worked: the long running PCs in the game included two full spell-users, three semi-spell-users, and two non-spell-users (with a third non-spell-user making an occasional guest appearance after that player moved to the UK). One of the non-spell-users did develop a bit of magic ability in the last stage of the game (some Open Mentalism buffs), but still played essentially as as non-magical warrior.

Whereas in the earlier game play was heavily dominated by full spell-users, and there were almost no non-spell-users (I can think of two over probably 20+ PCs played in that game).

I've never tried to put in the work to make daily-recovery-based D&D (for me that would be AD&D) work in a similar fashion.