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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5261313" data-attributes="member: 42582">I was talking about my experiences. If you enjoy exploration based play, great! But in my experience, for most players it's just a legacy of the old rulebooks. If I wanted to run a search for an oasis in a desert, the number of waterskins written on the character sheets would be a relatively minor consideration - it would affect the colour of the Nature and Endurance checks, but not alter the underlying DCs.As for the relationship between "fakeness" and not bothering with tracking ammunition, that is simply at odds with my experience. What makes my gameworld a rich and "genuine" one, to the extent that it is, isn't the need for the players to track their ammunition. It's the history, the ruins, the lost temples, the secret cabals. I want my players to ponder on the aesthetic or religous or political significance of the faded tapestries they discover, not to spend all their time poking behind them for secret doors and caches of loot.  As Hussar said, if encounters are random then there's no functional difference between randomising the time and randomising the PC, except  that the latter cuts out the need for the players to faff around setting a watch list.For me, this highlights the ultimate issue (and this might be the issue for Hussar also) - it's a mostly zero-sum game. In a four hour session there is time for at most four hours of PC to PC roleplay, and I would rather that roleplay be about interesting things - both inherently interesting, and tending to propel the game forward - than about the watch order. Every minute spent searching for secret doors, or describing in detail the steps taken to look for the secret heel in the dead gnoll chieftain's boot, or spent drawing up a watch list, is a minute that is not available for (to give an example of actual and interesting PC to PC roleplay from my game) the drow sorcerer to argue with the tiefling paladin of the Raven Queen about the merits of carving patches of skin off the dead demon, as one of the steps to become a Demonskin Adept at 11th level. It's this latter sort of thing that I think is more interesting in a game, and I've got no reason to think my players have very different opinions.</blockquote>

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