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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5768727" data-attributes="member: 42582">A couple of people upthread said it was new for D&D rulebooks to be prescriptive in their approach to playstyle. Reynard, in particular (post <a href="http://www.enworld.org/showpost.php?p=5766611&postcount=236" target="_blank">236</a>), said it was offensive and not D&D to do so.This sort of stuff is in the 4e DMG, which at pp 6-13 talks about player preferences (storytelling, powergaming, etc), game "mood" (gritty, humourous, etc), and the like. Naming conventions are discussed on p 14. 4e is not prescriptive as to this sort of stuff - except perhpas a certain interpretation of "Deep-Immersion Storytelling", namely, exploration-focused immersive play.Well, that's a tricky question, isn't it. Were I to run such an encounter, for whatever reason, then I would endeavour to make it entertaining for my players. But if the question is - Do I tend not to run such encounters, on account of finding them boring, then the answer is that I do not tend to run such encounters, because I find them boring. The last time that I remember actually framing and engaging in an encounter with gate guards was several years ago - probably about 2005 or 2006. The PCs (a group of high-level samurai plus entourage) were trying to establish control over a pirate city. The NPC captain of a group of soldiers at one of the city ward gate houses challenged one of the PCs when he tried to enter the ward. A duel was fought and the PC won. This contributed to the PCs' endeavours.More recently - about six months ago or so - the PCs were pursuing an enemy and followed her to a city. As per the module I was using (Night's Dark Terror) I had notes on what they might learn from talking to the gate guards, but no such talking took place. I think the exchange with the guards was limited to a "who goes there" from the guards, and a "Lord Derrik, warpriest of Moradin - make way for him and his entourage" in reply from the PCs self-appointed herald. The PCs had just reached paragon tier, and it was an opportunity to flag this with a bit of colour.Do you think this is an instance of "telling the players they get through the gate without much trouble" (as per Wyatt, p 105) or not? I do, but am happy to be contradicted.The time before that when the PCs entered a city - with many refugees from goblin-ravaged villages and homesteads - I don't remember if gates were even mentioned. I do recall that the whole town episode - arranging with temples to care for the refugees, shopping and inventory matters, talking to the baron of the town and getting horses, etc - was confined to two hours or so of play, which I was very pleased with given past experiences of such things blowing out.You mean by reading in a "usually" or "typically" (as appears in the following sentence)? Or a more dramatic reading in? Am {I allowed to read it in the contex of PHB p 9, "Whenever you decide that your character wants to talk to a person or monster, it's a noncombat encounter"?To me, this is illustrative of the inadequacies of the guidelines in the 4e rulebooks. The DMG, and most of the PHB, is written under the apparent assumption that while either the GM or the players set quests, the GM sets the encounters that feed into those quests (in Forge terminology, the books seem to assume that the GM has situational authority). But page 9, in saying that whenever a player decides to have his/her PC talk to an NPC it is an encounter, seems to be giving the players a degree of situational authority.There are ways of sorting this out. Here are three, each of which I sometimes use:*the extreme metagame approach, of telling the players "move on, there's nothing to see here"; *the traditional ingame approach, of making it very clear fvia interaction with a quest-irrelevant NPC that the NPC has nothing useful to offer (there are variants here, too, like requiring Insight checks and the like, or feeding the players the relevant signals without requiring such checks); *the "no myth" approach of changing the backstory behind the scenes so that the NPC the players are interested in suddenly gets dealt into things, sending the game off in a new direction.But the 4e books don't even canvass these sorts of options, let alone advise which ones the designers envisaged the players of their game actually using.Of course. Because this quote speaks to 4e's character as a non-exploration-focused game. Which is what, it seems, many dislike about 4e. S'mon put it like this, and I agree:</blockquote>

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