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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5766607" data-attributes="member: 42582">Who says it's all about GM authority?DMG p 103:Player-Designed Quests You should allow and even encourage players to come up with their own quests that are tied to their individual goals or specific circumstances in the adventure. Evaluate the proposed quest and assign it a level. Remember to say yes as often as possible!PHB p 258:You can also, with your DM’s approval, create a quest for your character. Such a quest can tie into your character’s background. . . Quests can also relate to individual goals, such as a ranger searching for a magic bow to wield. Individual quests give you a stake in a campaign’s unfolding story and give your DM ingredients to help develop that story.And who says it's all about combat?PHB pp 9, 258-50:Encounters come in two types. *Combat encounters are battles against nefarious foes. In a combat encounter, characters and monsters take turns attacking until one side or the other is defeated. *Noncombat encounters include deadly traps, difficult puzzles, and other obstacles to overcome. Sometimes you overcome noncombat encounters by using your character’s skills, sometimes you can defeat them with clever uses of magic, and sometimes you have to puzzle them out with nothing but your wits. Noncombat encounters also include social interactions, such as attempts to persuade, bargain with, or obtain information from a nonplayer character (NPC) controlled by the DM. Whenever you decide that your character wants to talk to a person or monster, it’s a noncombat encounter. . . Encounters are where the action of the D&D game takes place, whether the encounter is a life-or-death battle against monstrous foes, a high-stakes negotiation with a duke and his vizier, or a death-defying climb up the Cliffs of Desolation. . . Two kinds of encounters occur in most D&D adventures: combat and noncombat encounters. . . A skill challenge occurs when exploration (page 260) or social interaction becomes an encounter, with serious consequences for success or failure.The point is that it's about encounters. Situations in which there are serious consequences for success or failure. If it's just about talking to two guards on the way into a city, and there are no serious consequences for success or failure - it's just colour - than Wyatt is saying to move through it quickly. Whether or not one enjoys playing this sort of game - personally, I do - it is not "terrible advice". It's pretty standard advice on how to run a situation-focused game.Correct. But it is Wyatt's prerogative to give advice on how to play the game, just as Gygax did back in his PHB and DMG. Advice that not everyone followed, or follows.Where's the evidence of all these new GMs being led astray by James Wyatt? I mean, the AD&D PHB and DMG only gave me advice on how to run a Gygaxian/Pulsipherian style game aimed at challenging "skilled players", but I nevertheless worked out for myself how to GM the sort of game I was interested in.Where are all the threads bemoaning Gygax's "terrible advice" in the AD&D PHB? Have you (or anyone else) read it lately? It's advice for running a boring, bomb-squad style game of the sort discussed on the recent Tomb of Horrors thread. Maybe you like that sort of game, but I'm pretty confident a lot of players don't. And they managed to find other styles, and even use AD&D to run those games, despite Gygax's advice. I'm sure people who like talking to guards for the sake of colour are running those games in 4e despite what Wyatt wrote.The fact that Wyatt, or I, think those are boring games shouldn't deter them, any more than I'm deterred in running my game by the fact that many posters on this board would think it has not enough exploration, nor enough fictional positioning at the gritty action resolution level.</blockquote>

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