Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="chriton227" data-source="post: 6672680" data-attributes="member: 33263">I don't expect the PCs to automagically know exactly how dangerous an area is, but there should usually be in-character clues available for observant PCs.  Just like how you probably know (or could easily learn) what areas of your local city are relatively safe and which areas you don't want to walk around alone at night, or the assumption that you are less likely to end up in a gunfight in Disneyworld than in contested areas of the Middle East.  And with that knowledge, the PCs can choose where they attempt to go. Nothing is saying that PCs can't get mugged at Disneyworld, or that they won't have a peaceful night in a back alley in the bad part of town, but they have at least limited control over where they go and the dangers they anticipate based on that in-character knowledge.If I'm in a 1st level party and we knowingly choose to go after a lich, then either we think we have a brilliant plan that may succeed despite impossible odds, or we are choosing to commit character suicide and end the campaign. If the DM isn't giving the lich information it wouldn't actually have, it wouldn't know initially that we were only 1st level, so we might be able to bluff it for a short time. If it ended up in a combat, I wouldn't expect the GM, or the lich by extension, to pull punches to spare my feelings. If I didn't want my L1 character to get steamrolled by a lich I shouldn't have gone after the lich in the first place.  Part of meaningful choices is sometimes the meaning is "that was dumb, guess it is time to roll a new character."  In a recent Shadowrun game, my character cornered a quartet of gangers solo to give a friendly NPC a chance to get away.  The gangers flashed their guns at me to get me to move, but in the situation my character wasn't intimidated and wouldn't have drawn his weapon (blowing his cover), so he just said "Oh yeah? Go ahead and shoot me." If that had resulted in my character dying in a hail of gunfire, so be it, that would be the consequences of my choice. It was a calculated risk based on how important it was for me to let the NPC escape vs. how dangerous I thought the gunfire would be.  I knew how tough I was, and I know what guns they had showed me (I had the same gun), but I didn't know how good of a shot they were,whether they were packing anything heavier, or whether they had allies I hadn't spotted.  And the choice was meaningful; I survived, and as a direct result of my choice we got information from that NPC that we wouldn't have otherwise had, making a later part of our mission easier.  To me a meaningful choice is one where I could choose X or Y, where I have some knowledge about the possible outcomes of X or Y (not just random chance), and depending on which I choose the resulting outcome is materially different.  If I have two doors to choose between and they both go into the same room in the same basic situation, it isn't a meaningful choice.  If one door goes into a room and the other is labeled balcony and goes to the balcony overlooking the room where I think I could observe unnoticed, the choice of doors is meaningful.I don't think we are ever going to come to a full agreement on this topic.  Part of it might be semantics.  I don't consider an NPC reacting to a PC's actions according to the NPC's knowledge and motivations to be tailoring, to me that is just role-playing the NPC.  Intentionally giving an NPC characteristics particularly because of how those characteristics will interact with specific characteristics possessed by the PCs on the other hand I do consider tailoring (like using elves against the party just because a PC likes to cast sleep). Likewise, when I refer to a GM presenting a plot or story, I am thinking of a preconstructed outline of events that the party is expected to follow, for example the party is supposed to be ambushed by goblins, then follow the goblins trail back to their hideout where the party will find an NPC they are seeking, at which point then will proceed to town and confront the local bandits. We may very well be agreeing with each other on everything except the way we define the terminology used.If I understand you correctly, you feel that by the very action of running a game, you are tailoring the game to the PCs and creating the story.  I feel that a GM can run a game without tailoring encounters to fit some predecided challenge level, and although the game should be tailored to interests of the players, it should not just be a plot (or series of plots) created by the GM that the players are playing through, but instead the plot or story should develop naturally from the starting situation based on the actions of both the NPCs and the PCs.  By definition anything created by the GM prior to the PCs being created is not tailored to the PCs, as it could not have been tailored to PCs that did not exist at the time.  The same process that a GM could use to create something prior to the creation of the PCs can also be used after the PCs are created if the GM so wishes.At the most basic level, I feel that crafting adventures without tailoring encounters to the party has been done thousands or millions of times by people running modules as written, where the limit of tailoring would be the GM picking a module in the a given level range or on the flip side, or having the players bring characters of the right level for the module (tailoring the party to the adventure instead of the adventure to the party). I even have adventures for some systems that don't specify any sort of level range; Shadowrun adventures are a great example of that where the situation and opposition are what they are, and it is up to the players to figure out how use their abilities to be successful. Campaign setting books aren't usually tailored to a level or particular party, but they demonstrate plenty of things available for PCs to explore and do.  Published mega-dungeon usually aren't tailored either except maybe that most get more challenging as you get farther from the entrance, and even that isn't always the case (see Ruins of Castle Greyhawk with 12 armored trolls hiding in an entrance staircase).  I've got the 2e City of Greyhawk box set sitting on the shelf next to me, it has enough info on the city and surrounding environs to give a party of almost any level plenty of choices of things to do and plenty of events that have been set into motion that the players can interact with or ignore as they choose, and there is nothing stopping a party from pursuing  things above or below the assumed difficulty for their level or experiencing the consequences of their pursuits.As a GM, I can easily say "There is a pirate ship over here.  I think a L6 fighter/rogue sounds about right for a captain tough enough to keep his crew in check.  His first mate is probably around L4, lets call him a pure fighter.  If his ship is big enough to allow him to board a merchant ship, he probably has around 20 crew, say 10 L1 fighters and 10 L2 fighters to represent the recent recruits and the more experienced crew.   They probably have a doctor on board, say a L2 cleric, perhaps of a god of trickery or thieves, or maybe even just of a god of the sea. And just to make it interesting, let's throw in a noble prisoner that is slowly coming to think this pirate life isn't so bad."  You don't have to tell the players what level the pirates are to convey the danger.  If they ask the survivors of an attack, they can get an idea of how the fight went.  Asking around or knowledge checks can turn up that as a GM you've decided the average merchant ship sailing in this area has a crew of 10 sailors and usually only about 4 marines on board, and it's pretty common for those marines to be recruited from the ranks of the local town guard.  It might even turn up that the pirates have left larger ships with more crew alone.  The party could easily watch as the local guard goes through some of their basic training, and through observation figure out that the guards are basically local citizens with the bare minimum training to handle their weapons safely, or in game terms probably level 1.  If you want, you can even drop in some motivation for the pirate, say he was a local businessman years ago that was driven to bankruptcy by unscrupulous merchants, and now he want revenge.  Nowhere in there did I base things on the party's specific abilities or level, or even think about the party except in the most general sense.  The party might be L1, in which case taking on the pirate ship in a direct fight is suicide.  The party might be L20, in which case the pirate ship isn't even worth their time.  My consideration was purely what would make sense in the world.  It wouldn't make sense for the pirate crew to all be level 15 unless they were the most renown pirates in all the seas as opposed to a single ship harassing small merchant vessels, nor would it make sense that a crew of 4 L1 pirates would be terrorizing merchant ships with over a dozen crew, and regardless of their level the pirates must have some motivation for being pirates, otherwise they wouldn't be there in the first place. The backstory of how they came to be is like the the PCs' backstory, it sets the stage and informs the reactions, but it doesn't define the story going forward or establish an end point for the story of the interaction between the PCs and the pirates.At this point, I've presented the party with a situation. The story comes from what they do with the situation.  They could ignore the pirate threat and turn their attention to other things.  They could try to join the pirates, either legitimately or as a covert attempt to assassinate the captain or to foment a mutiny.  They could try to fight the pirates on the open seas.  They could set a trap for the pirates using a merchant vessel full of soldiers instead of cargo.  They could try to find out where they pirates dock (you can't stay on the water forever) and try to ambush them. They could bargain with the pirates, maybe asking around and doing the legwork to find out some of the captain's history, and either appealing to his better nature or offering to help him get revenge on the unscrupulous merchant who wronged him.  They could even try going and doing other things to increase their power until they feel they can confront the pirates head on. The choice the party makes affects both how challenging it will be and where the story goes next, making it a meaningful choice in my opinion.  There isn't a preexisting plot or story written for the interaction with the pirates, there is just a situation where the involved parties (PC and NPC alike) have motivations and abilities and some knowledge of the current state of the situation, and the story comes from how those parties interact. Just as there are limits to the party's knowledge of the pirates (based on what actions the party takes), there are also limits on the pirates' knowledge of the players (they don't share in the GM's omniscience about the game).  The party doesn't know exactly how tough the pirates are, and the pirates don't know exactly how tough the party is.Repeat the process a few times with different hooks, using what makes sense in your game world. For example with the mine, kobolds aren't tactical geniuses, there is only so much space in the mine, and they have to eat.  They are probably spread out some just due to how many can fit in a given chamber or tunnel.  Choose to storm the front entrance and let them raise the alarm, and you're going to have a rough encounter as they all come running.  But I'm sure they don't send the entire tribe out as a single group to hunt for game; they probably go out in small groups so they don't spook all the prey. After a hunting party or two have been picked off, they'll probably be more cautious and send out larger groups, or maybe two groups with one watching the other. Or maybe a stealthy infiltration can pick off the guards before they can raise the alarm.  As a result, this hypothetical kobold tribe may be able to be wiped out by a L1 party with good tactics and good luck, or may be a challenge for a L6 party who charge headlong through the front door. They could try to smoke the kobolds out, or even collapse the entrance to the mine.  As far as how the party knowing what they are getting into, they could do some recon to get some estimates of the tribe's size, or do some research to find out how extensive the mine was when it was in use, or capture and interrogate a kobold.  And once again, the tribe just is what it is based on what makes sense for the world, not based on the party.  Rather than a world built around and for the PCs, I am interested in a world built apart from the PCs, where the PCs can be inserted to allow the players to explore an interact with the world. If everything is about the PCs and tailored to the PCs it shatters my suspension of disbelief, because I know in the real world not everything is about me and tailored to me. I need it to be a world containing my PC, not a world about my PC.</blockquote>

Verification