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Respect Mah Authoritah: Thoughts on DM and Player Authority in 5e
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8444796" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>You've misread. The petty details on which we didn't dwell were the lack of obvious motivation for the monk and warrior-mage to enter the dragon.</p><p></p><p>I imagine I suggested it. I doubt it was very controversial - three of the four players are old hands (for the fourth this was his first time playing non-4e D&D) and know the difference that dloubling from 1 to 2 HD makes to survivability in classic D&D.</p><p></p><p>The title of the thread is "Played AD&D yesterday (using Appendix A for a random dungeon)". The very next line after the one you quote about not wanting a TPK is "I rolled the dungeon using Appendix A: Random Dungeon Generation, and Appendix C for wandering monsters and room inhabitants". The dungeon was created during play.</p><p></p><p>The players could absolutely provide this detail! I told them something to the effect of <em>I'll roll up a random dungeon</em> and they could see me rolling my dice and looking at my Appendix A charts and drawing my map as we went along.</p><p></p><p>How do you know? For all you know, I expressed a complaint to the players about not going near my ear seekers! It's certainly the sort of thing I would do, either once the moment had passed or at the end of the session.</p><p></p><p>I'm assuming that the reader has some basic familiarity with AD&D. The rules for bend bars/lift gates checks are stated in the PHB, p 9:</p><p></p><p style="margin-left: 20px">The attempt may be made but once, and if the score required is not made, the character will never succeed in the task. ]There follows an example of rolling percentile dice against a 10% chance, which makes it clear that <em>bending</em> is a different task from <em>lifting</em>.</p><p></p><p>The players rolled their dice, as they would for any declared action that doesn't expressly dictate the GM make the roll.</p><p></p><p>l did say when it happened - I ad libbed it! As to why, the post does explain that:</p><p></p><p>That is, having rolled an octagonal room I adlibbed the chaos symbols because they fit with both the octagonality and the PC backstory. I think it's in the Elric/Stormbringer stories that eight crossed arrows are the sign of Chaos. (And <a href="https://stormbringer.fandom.com/wiki/Chaos" target="_blank">a quick Google just confirmed this</a>.)</p><p></p><p>I don't know if they could tell what I was or wasn't taking off the random tables, but I'm pretty sure that they would be able to guess that the tables don't have a chaos sigil entry. I may even have said as much at the time!</p><p></p><p>It seems that you have missed that this was a real-time random dungeon generation.</p><p></p><p>I also get the impression that your norms for communication between the GM and the players are very different from mine. Most of the stuff that you think players wouldn't know, I'm pretty sure would have been obvious to my players.</p><p></p><p>As a player in this game, I would be able to report the process of PC gen, and also that the GM rolled a random starting point for the dungeon, and then used the Appendix A tables to generate encounters. I would probably be able to tell that monsters in the corridors, or that turn up in rooms after a time, were wanderers. I would know how the bend bars rolls were resolved, and how the combats were resolved, and that a reaction check was called for. I would know or at least be able to have a good guess that flavouring the octagonal room as a chaos room is not something found on the Appendix A tables. Not very much would be opaque - or, better, not very much <em>was</em> opaque.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 8444796, member: 42582"] You've misread. The petty details on which we didn't dwell were the lack of obvious motivation for the monk and warrior-mage to enter the dragon. I imagine I suggested it. I doubt it was very controversial - three of the four players are old hands (for the fourth this was his first time playing non-4e D&D) and know the difference that dloubling from 1 to 2 HD makes to survivability in classic D&D. The title of the thread is "Played AD&D yesterday (using Appendix A for a random dungeon)". The very next line after the one you quote about not wanting a TPK is "I rolled the dungeon using Appendix A: Random Dungeon Generation, and Appendix C for wandering monsters and room inhabitants". The dungeon was created during play. The players could absolutely provide this detail! I told them something to the effect of [i]I'll roll up a random dungeon[/i] and they could see me rolling my dice and looking at my Appendix A charts and drawing my map as we went along. How do you know? For all you know, I expressed a complaint to the players about not going near my ear seekers! It's certainly the sort of thing I would do, either once the moment had passed or at the end of the session. I'm assuming that the reader has some basic familiarity with AD&D. The rules for bend bars/lift gates checks are stated in the PHB, p 9: [indent]The attempt may be made but once, and if the score required is not made, the character will never succeed in the task. ]There follows an example of rolling percentile dice against a 10% chance, which makes it clear that [i]bending[/i] is a different task from [i]lifting[/i].[/indent] The players rolled their dice, as they would for any declared action that doesn't expressly dictate the GM make the roll. l did say when it happened - I ad libbed it! As to why, the post does explain that: That is, having rolled an octagonal room I adlibbed the chaos symbols because they fit with both the octagonality and the PC backstory. I think it's in the Elric/Stormbringer stories that eight crossed arrows are the sign of Chaos. (And [url=https://stormbringer.fandom.com/wiki/Chaos]a quick Google just confirmed this[/url].) I don't know if they could tell what I was or wasn't taking off the random tables, but I'm pretty sure that they would be able to guess that the tables don't have a chaos sigil entry. I may even have said as much at the time! It seems that you have missed that this was a real-time random dungeon generation. I also get the impression that your norms for communication between the GM and the players are very different from mine. Most of the stuff that you think players wouldn't know, I'm pretty sure would have been obvious to my players. As a player in this game, I would be able to report the process of PC gen, and also that the GM rolled a random starting point for the dungeon, and then used the Appendix A tables to generate encounters. I would probably be able to tell that monsters in the corridors, or that turn up in rooms after a time, were wanderers. I would know how the bend bars rolls were resolved, and how the combats were resolved, and that a reaction check was called for. I would know or at least be able to have a good guess that flavouring the octagonal room as a chaos room is not something found on the Appendix A tables. Not very much would be opaque - or, better, not very much [i]was[/i] opaque. [/QUOTE]
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