D&D 5E Resting and the frikkin' Elephant in the Room

[Ovinomancer]

Yeah 'levels,' alone make it weird. But, since D&D tropes are also rooted in D&D mechanics & tradition (they're certainly, many of them, not rooted in genre!), isn't that already impacting 'world building,' then?

(Wait... which side of the rest-guidelines-do/don't-impact-world-building digression are you on?

... for that matter, which one am I on?)

Every time I have an exchange with [MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION] I wonder this. It seems like were saying the same things, but it's just one special pleading away from agreement.

 

[hawkeyefan]

The "NPCs' Random Encounters" are purely hypothetical, no actual NPC has to actually have a random encounter rolled by the DM, in play. For actual play, a random encounter table is a tool for generating random encounters (circular, yet tautological, buy I don't think controversial), but for purposes of world-building, a random encounter table is a set of demographic statistics, painting a picture of what the diversity of the local hungry-for-humanoid-flesh community is like.

So you can look at it and see that adventurers frequenting the Howling Wood are likely to get attacked by wolves. So when the party meets a retired adventurer from the area, he tells them how he lost his leg to a pack of hungry wolves. (And they're left wondering who applied Oil of Sharpness to the wolves' teeth.)

Yeah, I get all that. I asked for a specific example because Ilbranteloth said "And should our focus shift to an NPC, then I might very well roll on the random encounter table for them."

My stance is much like yours....no encounters for NPCs. So I am curious under what circumstances Ilbranteloth may decide that a roll on a random encounter table for an NPC might be in order.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Second verse, same as the first....

 

[Maxperson]

This is an interesting viewpoint... I wonder if I and my friends have the same deadliness and frequency of encounters in the U.S. as a group of friends in say Syria... I don't think so but then if I don't does that mean our actual world wasn't built "correctly"?

Watts, Chicago slums, Baltimore, and pretty much every city in the US with a bad neighborhood(which is all of them). The US is incredibly deadly. You should also be comparing the US to a country not in a state of war, or else comparing it to say the US during the Civil War. Fair is fair after all.

 

[Maxperson]

Oh, duh, I just realized: and, of course, Adventurers have 6-8 encounter days while non-adventurers do not, because that one day the non-adventure might have had 6-8 encounters, the first one kills him (or sends him runnning for safety), while it just whet's the Adventurers' appetite (wonder what this ogre was doing here, we should track it back to its lair and see if there are more... the correspondence we found on that ogre-mage leader suggests there's a terrible plot coming to fruition soon, we should do something about it... as opposed to "OMG! an Ogre!" :CRUNCH: )

It's no different for the PCs, though. Bad luck could kill the PCs in the first encounter or send them running for safety, and they also would not have the rest of the encounters. I've seen that happen too many times to discount it.

Funny, I feel the same way about experiencing the world through the PCs, and not caring for the novels, but feel the opposite way about NPCs with class levels. The PCs could be the only PC-classed characters in the world, as far as I'm concerned - the classes & PC status don't just model their abilities, but their protagonism. That's why I quite liked the NPC Classes from 3.x - and, contrarily, like the way 1e, 4e & 5e use stat-blocks for monsters and NPCs rather than PC-style 'builds.'

But, you mean that in an after-the-fact way, I assume? Not that the PCs are special at first level because that's going to happen, but that they prove to have been special at 15th after it has happened, because, at any prior point they might have been TPK'd and some other NPC party finished the AP?

No, not after the fact. Their special fate begins during character creation with their backgrounds as far as I'm concerned. There might be 20 1st level characters in the city, but the PCs are the ones chosen by the local lord for the special task at hand. Even if they TPK at 7th level, then that was the end of their fate. The journey there will be more memorable and wondrous that other characters who achieve 7th level. That's how I look at it anyway.

 

[Lanefan]

I've honestly never thought of it that way but if I'm playing or running D&D I do tend to expect the game world to be a world (for the most part) based on D&D tropes. But I honestly am trying to fathom a world where you can gain the amount of XP necessary to go from levels 1-20 that wouldn't be dangerous... and honestly I'm having a hard time.

The world in general need not be all that dangerous at all to its ordinary inhabitants provided that the places where the PCs do their adventuring are generally very remote from civilization (or even off-world) and that neither the PCs nor the game design expect a simple walk through any forest to bleed xp to the characters.

Lanefan

 

[CapnZapp]

Man what an odd feeling it is to see a thread you started freaking out with tens of new pages, and I don't even have a clue where the discussion has gone...

(No complaint, just sayin')

Sent from my C6603 using EN World mobile app

 

[SkidAce]

The mechanics dictate that during a day with encounters, there are 6-8 of them. It's called an "adventuring" day. It's ludicrous to think that only adventurers have them. In a wide world, there will be such "adventuring" days all over it.

People go to work and back home everyday in real life. No "encounters" per se.

A group goes hunting in the wilderness, explores the Amazon, climbs Mt Everest or other mountains. They have encounters.

Why would this be ludicrous?

 

[SkidAce]

After all...things are "civil" in civilization.

And "wild" in the wilderness.


Barring the Temple of the Wand running an orphanage for the poor and downtrodden waifs of the fantasy world. An orphanage that is a front for the Cult of Orcus!!!!

Wand? Orcus? Get it?

...my players didnt....

 

[Maxperson]

People go to work and back home everyday in real life. No "encounters" per se.

A group goes hunting in the wilderness, explores the Amazon, climbs Mt Everest or other mountains. They have encounters.

Why would this be ludicrous?

PCs have them in towns, outside of towns, on patrolled roads, in the wilderness. They have them everywhere, which means that they ARE everywhere.

Like @Lanefan said, if they only happens in the middle of nowhere, that's fine and creates a different kind of consistency. Non-PCs who go to those same locations would also have encounters.