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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5261333" data-attributes="member: 42582">Well, you can call shenanigans all you like. It doesn't change my experiences. They are what they are.I don't agree with this. In my experience, many RPGers are prepared to put up with quite a bit of nonsense and tedium as part of their gaming, if they accept that it is an ineliminable part of the game.And this isn't true only of RPGs. It can be true of boardgames and wargames also, at least in my experience. You put up with the annoying stuff because you don't know a way of playing the game without it. Thankfully (for me at least) there are more recent gaming publications that set out alternative ways of playing, of the sort that I described and that Hussar has also been describing.Now to the best of my knowledge we've never overlapped in our gaming circles - you being 23 in Wisconsin, and me being 38 in Melbourne, Australia - and so your experience may be different from mine. Great - that means legacy-style D&D play will excite rather than infuriate you!I'm not a very good game designer. In my case, I figured it out by reading rulesets and commentaries written by people who are better designers than me.I never denied that some like it. Presumably Gygax and Moldvay liked it, or they wouldn't have written their rulebooks that way. But in my experience there are many players who don't particularly like it (nor necessarily hate it) - they just do it because that's their understanding of how to play, but when shown a different way of playing which can increase the payoff-per-session-hour they are quite happy to embrace that.I think you may mean retconning rather than retconjuration, given that there is no one in the gameworld who has the power to undertake the retcon. But anyway, retconning is always part of RPG play. What is your PC's mother's older sister's name? Your PC has always known the answer to that question (assuming no dark secrets in the family), but the players at the table won't know until it becomes relevant to play.Likewise for who's carrying items that are jointly owned by the party. Mine can't be the only group where this is often indeterminate until a need to specify it comes into play!And as to the suggestion that if no watch order is set by the players, then none is set in the game - why not? My players never talk about their PCs urinating, but it's never occurred to me to suggest that, like Tycho Brahe, they're dying of burst bladders. Similarly, if they say "We set up camp" I'm happy to assume that they're setting up a watch also, and to make ex post facto calls if it becomes relevant.One of my favourite action movies - heck, it's one of my favourit movies full stop - is John Woo's "Hardboiled". And it has what is, in my view, a very powerful reflective scene when the two main protagonists are locked in a room together and talking about their lives and their futures. The same film also has some nice vignettes of Chow Yun Fat playing his saxaphone in the club as he reflects (one gathers) on the pointlessness of his partner's death at the hands of the criminals.I don't remotely object to these sorts of moments, either in a game or in a film. But they have nothing to do with searching the bodies for concealed copper pieces.I want PC-to-PC roleplay. I'm happy to have PC-to-NPC roleplay. But I want it to be thematically rich and engaging. For me, searching for secret doors doesn't usuallly fit that description.Fine. But I'm not particularly interested in GMing or playing a game of adventurer survival (and even if I was, a "crazy adventurer who keeps all his equipment well-stashed in his backpack" attribute might do the job). I'm interested in a game that explores what it means to be a hero in the D&D world with an epic destiny ahead of you. I won't pretend that that's a very sophisticated aesthetic or thematic goal. But searching bodies isn't a big part of it.And to the extent that I enjoy seeing my players play their PCs, I want to see them engage with their histories, their religions, their political and moral choices. Do they fight to free the slaves, or pay the slave traders to buy them back? (They chose to pay.) Do they take the hobgoblins prisoner, or massacre them in revenge? (The wizard massacred them while the other PCs were out of sight behind a ridge - the other PCs were a bit shocked, but opted to let it pass, given that the wizard's city had been destroyed by goblins and his own mother murdered by them.) Does the would-be archmage try to rescue his companion from the enemy cult, or allow her to be sacrificed as part of a play to turn the energies of the cult to his own purposes? (He allowed her to be sacrificed, and turned the cult into a useful ally in his climb to greater power.) Is the paladin prepared to sacrifice his own future to replace a god he loves in the eternal and soul-destroying fight to keep an ancient evil it bay? (By tricking a fallen Lord of Karma the paladin managed to invest a simulacrum of himself with a replica of his own soul stuff, thus having the simulacrum take the place of the freed god in the eternal battle.)This is what I want in my game, and frankly tracking ammunition is just not a big part of it.For my answer, see the previous paragraph above.</blockquote>

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