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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Faolyn" data-source="post: 9672718" data-attributes="member: 6915329">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 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.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!So? Decent GMs either shrug and move on or save the encounter to be reused later.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.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. 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.</blockquote>

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