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="Celtavian" data-source="post: 6672708" data-attributes="member: 5834">How can you possibly do this without using metagame knowledge? That would break suspension of disbelief. How does a PC in character know what he can or cannot take on if he doesn't through experience carefully constructed by a DM? Does he go, "Oh I'm 1st level, better look for some kobolds" and once he reaches level 15 go, "Oh those kobolds are too weak. Better look for a lich." A DM wants to ensure the player never has to think about such things by tailoring encounters that fit what he can take on at a given time. Then he never has to ask himself how would my PC know the difference between what he could take on at 1st level and what he can take on at 15th level. What if the lich is the biggest threat the town he lives in? He wants to eliminate that threat, not look for kobolds because he can't take the lich on at level 1. So if the party is trying to kill a lich, you want to place challenges in their way that allow them to level up to where they can take on the lich without them ever having to worry about their level. You want the entire process to feel organic as though the players are making choices that allow them to one day defeat the lich threatening their town. If done right, players have an amazing time and feel they accomplished something extraordinary through by virtue of their choices.Outcomes are determined by PC action. Tailoring is not predetermination. Part of tailoring is determining an NPCs personality and how it will react to specific situations. All this stuff is made up. So it is all tailored as in created in the mind of the DM to engage the players. Just like your PC is tailored to your specifications. It does appear to be a semantical disagreement.I consider any world I make to be tailoring. I will not waste my time throwing encounters in the way of a party that will either destroy them or they will destroy with ease unless that is my intention to begin with. That is wasting my time and the PCs time for some fictitious idea that there is choice in fiction. This entire game is a fiction that must be tailored to even exist.And if you run those modules as they are out of the box, you have heard the numerous complaints that they are not challenging enough. That module designers do a poor job of challenging PCs. It is essential that the DM assess his PCs and provide them with challenging and engaging material. A module designer does not know the party and will have tremendous difficulty creating challenges for PCs with capabilities he cannot foresee. That is where the DM makes his bones as they say.How does your level 1 party determine this? How does your level 20 party determine this? Do they think of themselves as having levels? What is the point of placing a pirate ship in their path where their character choices are rendered meaningless because the challenge is either too strong for them or too weak to provide them with an interesting or engaging challenge? How does that make your choices more meaningful if a DM doesn't bother to make something challenging for the specific PCs he is running? If you run these squash or get squashed encounters, would it keep your players engaged? It would not keep my players interested.And what you the DM determine the NPCs do in that situation either by constructing their personalities prior or improvising their personalities during. If you're improvising that often, I doubt your characters have much depth to them. Thus wasting their time and yours.These are tactical choices you should have taken into account prior to constructing the encounter. Unless of course you intend to improvise all of that. That is improvising a story as you go. And I doubt most DMs can improvise better than a DM that had constructed these eventualities in advance.And a DM that constructs these things in advance will provide a much deeper, richer experience than a DM that attempts to improvise encounters of this kind on the fly all the time. That is why so many DMs talk about preparation. It works. It is very much tailoring encounters.I am not interested in this world. I consider it lazy DMing. I've been gaming long enough I can destroy any DM that attempts to toss encounters taken from the Monster Manual or constructed without knowing party capabilities prior to doing so unless he is punching so far above my weight as to make that impossible.If you're pulling punches to keep me alive, you take choice out of my hands. If you're not taking the time to construct encounters that will challenge a highly optimized party using good tactics, I'll roll over the campaign like a steamroller. That will also bore me by making my choices meaningless because they always achieve victory with little threat. If you're not putting any work in to challenge me and attempting to improvise all the time, when I and the other players are carefully constructing our characters to be effective, you're being what I refer to as a lazy DM. I've dealt that that in my years of gaming as well. It was fun when I was young and we just made stuff up and gave ourselves great treasure switching off as DM. As I've grown older that style of DMing started to bore me. Too much system mastery causes you to reach a point where anything other than encounters tailored to specifically challenge a party are trivial.My players would look at the type of world your describing  and not even think about it in real terms. We would just metagame the world picking off the low hanging fruit and working our way up to the high hanging fruit. It would become trivial and boring if the DM wasn't putting work into encounter design. I know I no longer enjoy wandering about looking for useless things to do. I want a hard challenge. I want a DM that constructs that challenge appropriate to my level of capabilities. I want a DM that does so in a way that my suspension of disbelief is not affected. I want to feel like the enemies are worthy of my notice and that I am worth of their notice. I want to play in an interesting tale that takes me to a worthy endpoint where I feel I accomplished something extraordinary. I don't feel I would get that in a world like you are outlining. It sounds like the expectation is that the DM improvises nearly everything. He is expected to provide a challenge to an organized, tailored party while doing no tailoring himself and expect to challenge them without using DM caveat in anyway. I've never seen anyone accomplish that with any success. Every quality DM I know spends hours preparing a campaign. The player choice happens when improvising within a tailored framework where resolutions are determined by random dice rolls and player choice.</blockquote>

Verification