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

[Lanefan]

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

When we see an RPG rulebook that quotes verbatim the entirety of Robert's Rules of Order we'll know the end is nigh.

 

[Lanefan]

I prepared a gridded battlemap about 50 or so yards across and seeded it with a bunch of things to interact with, cover, terrain features, other minor critters to avoid/deliberately spook, that sort of thing.

Everything outside this 250 square yard area is by necessity far less detailed- the same sorts of features but with much less understanding of the spatial relationships between features.

While clearly as the GM I've defined all of the world, by presenting the map the players now have a small area of the fictional space they can interact with without requiring constant negotiation- they can act against the known geography using their own understanding of their character capabilities.

So here is the tension - within this detailed area the players can act with confidence and have lots of ways to interact with the environment. But I as GM have decided its location and properties. Outside of it they have more freedom to move, but every movement is a negotiation where my imagining of the scene is paramount. There's also some social pressure to make use of the maps and so on that the GM has clearly put a lot of effort into.

It's for this exact reason I tend not to put any time into prepping player-side maps and have never got into the whole Dwarven Forge diorama thing: I don't want that meta-thinking to affect play. I'll just scribble a map on the chalkboard when needed.

The other thing I really hated the few times I've used published battlemaps from modules is that they invariably show more than the PCs can actually see or know about.

 

[zakael19]

It's for this exact reason I tend not to put any time into prepping player-side maps and have never got into the whole Dwarven Forge diorama thing: I don't want that meta-thinking to affect play. I'll just scribble a map on the chalkboard when needed.

The other thing I really hated the few times I've used published battlemaps from modules is that they invariably show more than the PCs can actually see or know about.

One of my favorite pieces of advice from His Majesty the Worm is to just give your players the dungeon map. Sure, keep off secret rooms and keyed details - but the map itself doesn’t really matter unless you have a player that delights in mapping. What matters is the creativity and conversation the players deploy when they encounter obstacles (off a random encounter roll or keyed in), and how they overcome that. If anything, a pre-numbered map by level helps with backtracking and same-paging in a really enjoyable way.

 

[SableWyvern]

One of my favorite pieces of advice from His Majesty the Worm is to just give your players the dungeon map. Sure, keep off secret rooms and keyed details - but the map itself doesn’t really matter unless you have a player that delights in mapping. What matters is the creativity and conversation the players deploy when they encounter obstacles (off a random encounter roll or keyed in), and how they overcome that. If anything, a pre-numbered map by level helps with backtracking and same-paging in a really enjoyable way.

I don't necessarily agree that it doesn't matter -- the two modes of play (with a map and without) are different, and moving from one to the other will thus matter if those differences matter to you (and there is a lot more to operating without an existing map and needing to make your own than just the actual task of drawing the map).

I absolutely agree that providing a complete map, while different, is certainly not worse in any absolute, objective sense. It allows additional planning and problem solving along some avenues, while bypassing (am I allowed to use the word bypass? ) or eliminating others.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I find it interesting that D&D 2024, Daggerheart , and some of the other Heartbreakers that have come out/are in beta advocate more significantly for scene framing/montages and skipping past stuff the table doesn’t want to spend time on.

Did I already mention that Frieren is a master class in how to frame scenes and moments around moments that have impact? I love how much it does time skip montages in particular.

What’s Frieren? I think you may have already said so, but I want to be sure.

As for the shift… yeah, it’s not that surprising at this point. For many reasons, I suppose… but you mentioning Daggerheart may highlight one… the rise of Actual Plays as a mode of entertainment. More of a need to keep the game moving at a brisk pace when there’s an audience.

Although I prefer a brisk pace myself, audience or no.

Boring? Taking reasonable steps to help lower the likelihood of your character getting killed is boring?

If I'm watching a hockey game I want to see the whole thing, not just the highlight pack. If I'm playing a character who is part of a party planning an expedition to a dangerous place I want some say - about equal to that of each of the other players - in how we approach it, rather than just be plonked there.

I mean, if you just want to walk into the Caves unprepared and without any prior scouting then have at it, I guess. I'll keep the character roll-up page open for you, though, 'cause you're gonna need it.

Not all that stuff. It depends. Haven’t you ever skipped travel? Sometimes it’s just not a meaningful part of play… so why spend valuable table time on it? Just jump ahead and talk about the party arriving at their destination. Maybe montage a few things for the travel if there’s anything anyone wanted to do specifically.

There’s absolutely no need to go through every moment of every day with the characters.

In some cases, yes. Same goes for my being unable to fathom why some people enjoy eating things that to me don't even qualify as being fit for human consumption.

I mean… “different strokes for different folks” or “to each his own” or “there’s no accounting for taste”… these phrases just bewilder you?

 

[hawkeyefan]

Ok, first off, I know that I, and probably a lot of other GMs who need to improv and encounter probably already have some ideas in the back of their minds. I say there’s footprints—and since the players probably want clarification, I might specify human-sized bootprints. This would give me an idea about what would have left them, if not immediately then by the time the players were halfway down the trail.

And secondly, what actually left them does not matter in this case, because the players saw the prints and noped away, thus bypassing the encounter that would have happened if they had chosen to follow the tracks. It doesn’t matter whether or not the GM decided who or what made the tracks; the party went the other way.

This seems incredibly obvious to me. What do you do? Do you simply never come up with encounters and leave everything up to the players to decide?

No, I don’t leave it up to the players. What I do depends on the game. But if the players don’t follow the footprints, then I don’t create an encounter for them to run into. So it’s weird… to me… to think of something like that as an encounter. I haven’t come up with a location or even specified who it was (though I likely have at least an idea) or determined if it’s a situation that’s immediately hostile, like an attempted ambush, or if maybe there’s a chance for diplomacy.

Without any of those details, I just don’t think of it as an encounter.

No. i cannot imagine how “because you didn’t go there, you didn’t encounter what was there” could be even remotely confusing. I didn’t go to the grocery store today, so I didn’t see what sales they were holding.

What sales they were holding is not an encounter. Honestly, because you didn’t go to the grocery store today, you have no way of knowing who or what you didn’t encounter. At best, you might be able to guess, if you know the staff well or know friends’ or neighbors’ shopping habits. Or you could say something general like “I didn’t speak to a cashier today”.

You don’t have the details to say what you didn’t encounter.

So now we’re only talking about people who’ve never played anything but 5e? When did that happen? Are people who have only ever played 5e incapable of looking terms up or asking questions? Also, what makes you think that someone who has only ever played 5e has not only read the DMG—something that many dedicated DMs don’t even do—but also think that “planned, crafted encounters” are the only way to run encounters in a game that has an entire section on creating random encounter tables! You can’t have planned random encounters!

You said anyone who has played a trad game will have this broader idea of what encounter means. My counterargument is that is not true… someone only familiar with 5e, a trad game, would view an Encounter as described in the DMG, I expect.

As for planned random encounters, I disagree. Many random encounters are planned in some way… some consist only of a creature, but others have more elements included.

So? Decent GMs either shrug and move on or save the encounter to be reused later.

Well, I make attempts to not pass judgment on other peoples’s games or GM skills… I don’t make assumptions that because a GM expects players to engage with what he’s prepped that he’s a bad GM.

Many people play the game differently for many reasons, and I’m not going to assume those reasons are bad.

I think I’m going to need some citations about games that expect GMs to adhere strictly to the written material and not improvise. Off the top of my head, I can only think of Synnabar, which is notoriously bad. I’m also pretty sure that the only players who expect GMs to adhere strictly to the written material are those who cheat by reading along in the adventure book.

Oh I think that Adventure Paths are largely that. There will be some improvising needed, but it will be minimal. This is one of the dominant play types in the hobby.

As for players who want GMs to stick to the material… I think playing in a more gamist way… like a map and key dungeon crawl would have players who want and expect the GM to run the module as written.

On two common words that aren’t specifically gaming terms, that can be looked up or that they can ask someone else at the table? Doubtful.

Please. I’ve seen people confused about far less. It happens.

Agreed. And this has nothing to do with any of the things we’ve been talking about; it’s actually about being a decent person (not GM, person) who wants their players to have fun. Totally different discussion.

Well, it has to do with what I’ve been talking about. I don’t think it has much to do with being a good person, though.

 

[zakael19]

What’s Frieren? I think you may have already said so, but I want to be sure.

A wonderful anime that indulges and subverts a lot of JRPG tropes; which are of course deeply descended from early D&D tropes as well. Edit: while also reckoning with what it really means for Elves to be functionally immortal in a way that few media do.

There’s absolutely no need to go through every moment of every day with the characters.

I would say that doing this is in fact a deeply conservative mode of play that pretty much all modern games have drifted away from in some manner.

 

[jayoungr]

What’s Frieren?

An anime that can best be summed up by this bit of imaginary dialogue:

"Hey guys, I'm thinking of running a sequel to that epic campaign where you defeated the Dark Lord. This would be set about 80 years later."

"Cool! Can I play my elf wizard again?"

 

[zakael19]

An anime that can best be summed up by this bit of imaginary dialogue:

"Hey guys, I'm thinking of running a sequel to that epic campaign where you defeated the Dark Lord. This would be set about 80 years after that."

"Cool! Can I play my elf wizard again?"

… no, not even a bit.

 

[jayoungr]

… no, not even a bit.

Yeah yeah, I'm being facetious. I know it's all deep and about relationships and the fleetingness of time and all that. But it does take place 80 years after an epic campaign and the main character is an elf mage who was in the original party.