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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Faolyn" data-source="post: 9673726" data-attributes="member: 6915329">That’s not what [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER] has been saying to me. He has very clearly expressed an inability to understand not engaging in an encounter—a very odd thing for someone who has actually played D&D to not understand. And this wasn’t the first time; several thousand posts ago, I off-handedly mentioned having signs of something spooky in the woods, to which a player said “I wave goodbye to the encounter and move on.” And pemerton acted as though both the player not biting the hook and me not railroading the players into engaging the encounter (but instead let them ignore it) were baffling, even completely alien ideas. He has also very clearly been unable to understand the idea of a potential encounter—that even in improv, a GM could tell the players “here’s some footprints” and also, at the same time, think “these footprints were left by bandits.” Even though he’s done the exact same thing! Back in post <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/rant-the-conservatism-of-d-d-fans-is-exhausting.712674/page-905#post-9670540" target="_blank">9047</a>, he wrote about a game he ran, in which the following happened: So here, there’s an area of water. The players deliberately didn’t look in the water. Thus, they didn’t see the stuff (coins, dead goat) that he decided was in the water. This is his players deliberately bypassing something that only existed in pemerton’s imagination, something that he claims can’t possibly happen! And he makes fun of them for doing it! And this—except for the taunting—is exactly what I’ve been describing.Sure, ok, he doesn’t use the word encounter, but so what? He uses terms like “ob 2 test” and I can translate that into terms that are meaningful for me, like “requires a smallish number of successes to pass”, even though I’ve never played Torchbearer, the game that example is from. Is he incapable of doing that with a term he knows from having played D&D in the past? Unwilling? Just trolling? What?If the only thing you think of when you hear the term “encounter” is “kill monsters for XP”, that’s a you problem.I don’t, my D&D DM doesn’t, I haven’t had a D&D DM do that since the late 90s, and it isn’t even a thing in most games that aren’t D&D-inspired, and that lack doesn’t devalue encounters at all (except, perhaps, completely random encounters, which I don’t use, nor does anyone else at my table). If I have an encounter, it’s there for a reason. That reason may only be of importance to the NPCs involved, and the PCs chance upon it, but it’s a reason.</blockquote>

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