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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celtavian" data-source="post: 6672436" data-attributes="member: 5834">Sure there is value in the player's choices. That's why you tailor the encounter to challenge them or let them shine. If you're always as a DM using the optimal options to design encounters, the players will feel overwhelmed. If you're always creating encounters straight out of the book and using suboptimal tactics, they'll steamroll everything. They'll get discouraged if every fight is a nightmare and bored if every fight is a walkover. Value in the player's choices? I don't even think about that other than to tailor my campaign to challenge them and make them shine as heroes. The whole game is an illusion. It's up to you make the player choices relevant in the context of the illusion. That is what tailored encounters do. The largest problem in games like 3E with the caster-martial disparity for example was DM's just tossing encounters together by the book and throwing them out there without regards to the PC's capabilities. Then the wizard just comes up with some spell combination he knows will defeat the encounter and the martial PCs stand around watching this happen because the DM didn't bother to account for the capabilities of the caster. Casters always have the ability to set up circumstances in their favor be it terrain or attacking the weak area of an enemy. If you don't take this into account when designing encounters, you'll create a game with martial characters that feel disempowered and bored. Why would I want to do that because I think that somehow validates player choices? Player choice is for the most part an illusion. The game designers decide what each class can do. They do so based less on balance and more on what they feel is appropriate for a given archetype. It's up to you the DM to allow a player to make that archetype according to their view of it and create for them a fun, challenging, and meaningful story based on their character including their combat capabilities. That is how I make the game fun for my players. A DM that can't accurately assess their players' capabilities would have a hard time running a fun, challenging, long-term campaign in my opinion. DM's are illusionists. Part of the illusion is making PC choices meaningful regardless if they are optimal or suboptimal. Learning the game is up to the player's tastes. I know some players that know how to make an optimal character, but choose not to because they have fun role-playing something different. So should I force that player to choose better options by punishing his choices?As a player, I would hate that. One time I myself made a priest of Ilmater, a broken god. He had broken limbs on a rack. He was dedicated to peace. He was a cleric that only healed and wouldn't do harm to anyone, even monstrous enemies. He was seeking a death as a martyr. I had a blast playing the character. If the DM had run the campaign in the standard fashion, he would have been too much of a weakness to a standard adventuring party. The DM tailored the encounters so they weren't so difficult that I needed to be an optimized healer and provided opportunities for me to exercise my beliefs. I found it entertaining and the party found it amusing. He eventually gave his life to save the party slowing down a demon by holding a doorway against it and preventing it from teleporting while it killed him. I know people play the game for different reasons. I play the game to construct story using the combat resolution system and player choice to add randomness to the plot elements I've incorporated. I very much tailor most things to make them work like I would like them to work, then let player choice and random rolls act as fate taking encounters in directions I may not have foreseen. I imagine that is a difference in play philosophy.</blockquote>

Verification