Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Raven Crowking" data-source="post: 5303856" data-attributes="member: 18280">Cool if true, but I am now very skeptical of that position.  If they understood it perfectly well, they could have devised game rules (presumably) that both moved the game in a different direction, and which did not cause problems specifically associated with the things they rejected.If you remove a load-bearing wall, without putting anything in place to bear the same load, and then are dumb-founded when the structure collapses, I simply cannot agree that you understood what the wall was doing perfectly well.Then my answers to Mr. Myth may serve as answers to you as well.  Once more, you misunderstand.  Is this intentional, are you not reading my posts, or am I that poor a writer?1.  A creature's footprint is seldom hidden so that it is nearly impossible to find.2.  This implies that a creature's footprint can generally be found, not that it is "readily apparent".3.  Once a creature's footprint is found, it must be both recognized as a creature's footprint and the creature identified.  When I was camping last week at Elora Gorge, a print appeared on some of my gear.  I could not readily identify it, despite spending a lot of time in the woods.  Two photos were taken, and it took some time with my tracking books before I tentatively concluded that the track was either that of a pine martin or a fisher.  Since we were camping amid cedars with plenty of red squirrels around (which pine martins eat), I concluded that it was probably the track of a pine martin.  But I am by no means certain.Remember the examples from The Hobbit, above?  The "party" knew that there was a dragon at the end of their road.  They knew that there were goblins in the mountains.  They (or at least the dwarves and Bilbo) did not know about the trolls, the stone giants, Gollum, the giant eagles, Beorn, or the giant spiders.  The dwarves, or at least Thorin, knew that there were wood elves in Mirkwood.Nonetheless, each of those creatures -- except the stone giants -- are given very specific "footprints" by Tolkein.  Certainly, the dwarves and Bilbo could have predicted the giant spiders from the many webs strung between the trees and the enormous "insect eyes" seen at night.And also, frankly, for someone who has expressed interest in using "literary devices" in gaming, I am amazed that you would deny the value of foreshadowing in a game environment.  On another message board, there was a discussion about whether or not a dungeon can actually be made "scary".  I have certainly had that experience on both sides of the screen, and in all cases a dungeon is made scary by two basic principles:(1)  Tension between what you think you know and what actually is, and(2)  Tension generated from wondering exactly when and where a really big problem that you anticipate will occur.Both of these forms of tension require foreshadowing.  There must be the means to guess what will occur to think you know anything.  There must be the means to predict a major problem in order to anticipate it.  The highly-recommended Paizo module Carrion Hill makes great use of foreshadowing to build exactly this sort of effect.  I recently ran a slightly modified version of that module, and it was greatly successful.  When the "big bad" finally showed up, the players were so unnerved that the PCs skipped town!Obviously.  And spider webs between trees are not a footprint for giant spiders when there are no trees.  That isn't the point.  If there is nothing metal in the dungeon for the rust monsters to eat, what are they doing there?  A good GM builds "footprints" (both for creatures and environmental features -- a room with a huge pool of lava is going to affect surrounding areas, for instance!) based on what is in the setting.Change the setting, and you change the footprint.  You do not eliminate it.Obviously disagreeing =/= not understanding.  But telling me, over and over, what I mean, and ignoring every attempt to correct your understanding of what I mean, is a pretty sure indicator.RC</blockquote>

Verification