The Guards at the Gate Quote

[jonesy]

I enjoy the scene in Lord of the Rings where Gandalf and company encounter Hama guarding the doors of Meduseld.

How can you mention LotR and not mention the best gate guard team ever?

The heroes are on their way from a well fought war to meet an infamous enemy leader at his legendary fortress.

What they find instead are shattered gates, and two hobbits happily smoking a pipe.

 

[S'mon]

You probably haven't picked those books up in a while. The older AD&D DMG I had started off with a ing math lesson.

I loved that 3d6 bell curve. It really helped explain character generation for me.

It also stood me in good stead when I started doing statistics & probability in Maths class a few years later. Most bits of Maths I was pretty bad at compared to the rest of the class, but AD&D and the DMG really gave me a leg up in those areas.

 

[S'mon]

You probably haven't picked those books up in a while.

I was using them last night to run my 1e AD&D Yggsburgh campaign.

 

[S'mon]

However, I really like the interpretation of some posters here that the guards at the gate are symbolic of the city's atmosphere and personality, and provide a concise introduction to that city for players. It's still an encounter that I would only ever play in detail once, but now I feel that one time is worth the cost.

The same encounter played over and over again will be boring, whether combat or non-combat. Wyatt didn't say that, though.

 

[Shemeska]

But lots of games use interactions as red herrings and also to allow room for players to create interactions.

I find that it's often those sort of moments with the PCs interacting with mundane or even random created off the cuff NPCs that really allows them to develop their characters above and beyond what you might get from strings of combats or with important NPCs. Maybe my players have just been ten flavors of awesomesauce, but when faced with trivial NPCs they really get into character and will just banter with the NPCs and each other for an hour or more at the table iif they feel like it. I've got pages of collected in-game quotes from some of them that I've mined for my storyhour, because they really comprise some of the things that you continue to remember about their characters years later.

One of my favorites was the interaction between one PC and a random street vendor of Baatorian firewine. This repeated over a few games as the PC would go back to this nameless osyluth brewer and harang him for selling watered down tasteless garbage. Each time the fiend would take offense and up the amount of razorvine that went into the next batch.

The PC was half-fey and immune to poison and literally could not get drunk off of the stuff. Long story short it ended with a confused, pissed off osyluth and the last batch having a bale of razorvine, and some other random NPC gnome getting incinerated after drinking a glass of the stuff (after watching this random, poor looking PC with no shoes and a sword guzzling the stuff like it was water). The banter between the PC and that osyluth, and the other PCs reactions to it all was priceless, and the entirety of it was unscripted, off the cuff RP with NPCs no more important than those un-fun gateguards.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

All, in all, that quote is an example of why game designers should not be the ones writing ad copy.

Plus, I hated the idea of those books - it would have been better to do them as articles in Dragon, but noOOo.... Let us instead charge as much for the advertisements as we did for the 3e books....

The Auld Grump

 

[S'mon]

The guards at the gate is a classic roleplay encounter.

I count 3 "Guards at the Gate" encounters I've DM'd in the last 3 weeks:

1. In my 4e Loudwater campaign, the PCs at entrance to the Citadel of Adakmi (from Dungeon #155 Heathen) with the rotting corpses of 40 Hand of Naarash cultists hanging from the walls, and nervous, trigger-happy Adakmi crossbowmen aiming down at the PCs from the walls as they explain: "We're here to help, we're the Hand... ...the Burning Hand Adventurers!"

2. In my 1e Yggsburgh campaign, first approach to Yggsburgh with a bunch of dead and wounded brigands strapped to their horses, and an obnoxious guardsman dealt with by a handy charm person.

3. Also in Yggsburgh campaign, a wounded PC carrying the incapacitated body of another PC, trying to get back in through the gate to find a healing temple, and the guards demanding to know what happened, considering they just saw those two PCs going out of the gate an hour previously.

All of those encounters were ultimately successful, but poor play could have resulted in TPK - and the players knew it.

 

[S'mon]

All, in all, that quote is an example of why game designers should not be the ones writing ad copy.

Plus, I hated the idea of those books - it would have been better to do them as articles in Dragon, but noOOo.... Let us instead charge as much for the advertisements as we did for the 3e books....

The Auld Grump

The quote is from the DMG, not the previews!

 

[TheAuldGrump]

The quote is from the DMG, not the previews!

Sorry, you are of course correct - my brain had latched on to the other infamous Wyatt quote. (Which I read literally a day after my players had gone 'traipsing through a faerie ring to interact with the little people'.) Raises my blood pressure. Throughout this thread my brain was attributing the quote to those preview books.

I did read the 4e DMG, which seemed very much a mix of good advice that was never built upon and advice that ran counter to my experience. I'm sure that there was some actual good advice, most likely a majority, but the exceptions stuck in my mind. Almost all of it dealing with encounters.... But by that point I was already turned off by 4e, so I will admit to bias.

Seems like Wyatt was the go to guy for bad-wrong-fun quotes though.

The Auld Grump

 

[LurkAway]

I wanted to XP S'mon but have to spread it.

I suggest that we stop arguing about the OP and have fun adding our own captions to this image. For example, something like:

Ya, ya, nothing to see here folks. Move on to the fun already.