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

[hawkeyefan]

Then it's a you problem, not a problem with prep for anyone else.

Yes, that is my point… that it may be a problem. I never said it had to be a problem for you or any given person.

 

[hawkeyefan]

That's good, because there isn't. Despite your insistence that there is not, there are two kinds of agency, and the more you have of one, the less you have of the other. There may be conflict between prep and the agency YOU prefer, but there isn't any conflict with the kind we are using. Like your preferred agency, ours also goes up to 100%.

Pretty sure yours goes to 11, Max!

 

[Maxperson]

Pretty sure yours goes to 11, Max!

+89.

 

[SableWyvern]

I've posted sections of tables like this before, but this is a pretty typical series of encounters for my games:

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Those are excellent.

 

[hawkeyefan]

First those are horrible definitions of the types of adventures they are describing and it is a horrible definition of an encounter. WOTC generally hasn't been good at this sort of thing IMO (it is one of the reasons I was going back to the 1E DMG in the 2000s). But I would add, an encounter is not, in my mind, a scene. An encounter is simply any interaction that occurs during play with an NPC, monster or being. Being that, encounters can have more or less definition. This is why I was asking whether you felt all encounters meant the GM was acting as storyteller or planned encounters. But that said, throwing a group of orcs at a party is not the GM acting as storyteller in my opinion

Well, I was told that Encounter was not jargon and that therefore there should be no confusion as to how it’s being used. And I’ve also been told in this thread that D&D should be the baseline for starting conversation.

So I showed how D&D 5 e uses the word Encounter to mean something specific in the game. And now people want to disregard that!

As for scene, I didn’t being that word into the discussion. Someone else did, and I said it probably is a more sensible choice for what we’re talking about than “encounter”.

I said that the descriptions of Encounters that I quoted from the DMG were very much along the DM as storyteller. I then asked if you agree… but I’m not entirely sure you do. I think so…

As long as you are not prepping outcomes or paths, prepping locations and people, doesn't really impact agency (I would say it enhances agency to have an objective world prepared). If we are dealing with prep as planned scenarios that have a flow of events, scenes, or a path the players need to follow (especially if there is an understanding they can't get off of it) then agency is impacted by prep. But improv can also interfere with agency if the GM is trying to force the players in a certain direction.

Well, prep certainly can. And I didn’t say improv can’t. I didn’t mention it at all.

The reason prep came up at all was due to the prepared nature of encounters. When I GMmore trad games like 5e or Mothership, I tend to think of scenarios as encounters. Because I’m preparing them.

When I GM a game that doesn’t use that kind of prep, I don’t think of the game in that way. I don’t think of the PCs interacting with NPCs as an Encounter. I’m not entirely sure why that is… but it seems to me to have a lot to do with the planned nature of Encounters.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It does?

If you walk into a huge, ancient red dragon's den, and get into a knock-down, drag-out physical fight, and lose, you die.

If you walk into the Faerie Court, and get into a knock-down, drag-out political fight, and lose.... you die. Or wind up in servitude in Underhill for a century, or something equally fae. And gain, it doesn't have to be outright death - and as a practical matter usually won't be, because death is mostly boring. There are lots more interesting things you can do with a character who lost a conflict.

Also, I already noted that, at any time short of the final blow (or argument on the floor of the Unseelie Court, or whatever) you may Concede - which means that you don't get what you want, but you leave with your hide intact, largely in a manner of your own choosing.

If you want to meddle in the affairs of your betters, be ready for the consequences. If this is a world in which politics and social standing matters, this is how it goes.

I guess I have a hard time wrapping my simulationist head around social combat.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Well, I was told that Encounter was not jargon and that therefore there should be no confusion as to how it’s being used. And I’ve also been told in this thread that D&D should be the baseline for starting conversation.

So I showed how D&D 5 e uses the word Encounter to mean something specific in the game. And now people want to disregard that!

As for scene, I didn’t being that word into the discussion. Someone else did, and I said it probably is a more sensible choice for what we’re talking about than “encounter”.

I said that the descriptions of Encounters that I quoted from the DMG were very much along the DM as storyteller. I then asked if you agree… but I’m not entirely sure you do. I think so…



Well, prep certainly can. And I didn’t say improv can’t. I didn’t mention it at all.

The reason prep came up at all was due to the prepared nature of encounters. When I GMmore trad games like 5e or Mothership, I tend to think of scenarios as encounters. Because I’m preparing them.

When I GM a game that doesn’t use that kind of prep, I don’t think of the game in that way. I don’t think of the PCs interacting with NPCs as an Encounter. I’m not entirely sure why that is… but it seems to me to have a lot to do with the planned nature of Encounters.

Prepped encounters are largely not what is happening in living world sandboxes though. We could certainly get into that as an issue of agency as it is a topic of discussion in living world sandboxes though conversations. But I think whether agency is being impacted, planned encounters are less about agency. The real problem they can present in a living world sandboxes though conversations would be creating a sense of artificiality to the world imo (like anything else they could be used to thwart agency but depends on how they are used)

 

[Bedrockgames]

Those are excellent.

Thanks. That is from one of my more sandbox books

 

[Bedrockgames]

Well, I was told that Encounter was not jargon and that therefore there should be no confusion as to how it’s being used. And I’ve also been told in this thread that D&D should be the baseline for starting conversation.

Encounter is a very broad word. The issue I have with the definition in the 5E books iscit feels too specific and like it steers things towards set pieces. Granted WOTC D&D is all about tile maps and miniature and emphasizes planned encounters. But for D&D in general, for gaming in general, or for D&D and OSR loving world sandboxes I don’t think that definition is very good. Especially since what we are talking about is agency in Said’s sandboxes

 

[Faolyn]

I know the hints are not the encounter.

So… what is the encounter? To me, there doesn’t seem to actually BE any encounter.

If the party follows the tracks, they’ll almost certainly come across what made them. And that’s the encounter.

I never said it was the only way to define an encounter. I said that for D&D, “Encounter” has a specific meaning… as we can see by comparing what the DMG defines to the dictionary definitions you provided. The one the DMG provides is clearly unique to D&D. It is an example of the often maligned jargon.

But that’s unimportant, because anyone who has ever played a trad game knows what an encounter is, and anyone, even someone who hasn’t played such a game but who has internet access (and therefore can access this forum and be part of this discussion) should be able to find out what a bypassed encounter is. In fact, when I just googled those two words, the first thing that came up, after the stupid AI definition, was a link to an actual rule in Pathfinder 2e about how much XP you get for bypassing encounters.

And again, it’s not that all prep is “bad” or that all prep reduces or removes player agency. Just that there’s possible conflict between the two given their nature.

But again, the GM can ignore the players’ interests and push their own whether they’re improvising or working from notes. The player wants to do something, there’s any number of ways to thwart them, many of them using the game’s own rules.

So it’s kind of silly to say that there’s possible conflict when the reality is, a GM who wants to remove player agency will do so no matter the system.