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.