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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5206343" data-attributes="member: 42582">This paragraph makes so many assumptions about the situation that it's hard to know where to start. Suffice to say that I don't think I've ever had a party go to sleep in a tavern with wizard locks, alarm spells and bottles balanced on the door handle. If the players did describe their PCs doing all that, then (everything else being equal) they're sending a pretty clear signal that they want to play out an attempt to thwart someone breaking into their room - in which case, as a GM I'd run that encounter rather than the capture scenario.As to your points about saves vs poison, Light Sleeper feats etc - that reinforces my earlier comments that mechanics matter here. For example, one mechanical way of treating the Light Sleeper issue is to require the GM to give the players some sort of metagame token in exchange for the Light Sleeper not waking while being captured. That's not D&D's way of handling it, obviously - hence my comments that D&D makes scene framing trickier than in some other games - but it's a pretty well-known mechanic, and I don't know of any evidence that games that use it produce adversarial GMing or railroady play.This more or less repeats my first two options for capture in my Edit of my earlier post - abuse of the encounter building guidelines, or abuse of the action resolution mechanics. These are not the only two options - but for other (metagame driven) options to arise, the action resolution mechanics need to make room for them.Or there is the third, metagame alternative in play.My real point wasn't to defend Ron Edwards, who (if he cares) is more than capable of looking after himself, but rather that you described my mind as having been "killed" by him. I was making the point that I don't think you know me well enough (as far as I'm aware, you only know me from a few posts on a messageboard) to make that judgment.What matters are subsequent, downstream consequences of upstream encounters. For example: in a game system that defaults to detailed monteray accounting, and which want to explore the implications of the PCs being down on their luck, there is mechanical pressure to resolve the haggling, because it matters to the game whether or not the PCs spend that extra silver piece. Even for that sort of game, however, there is a good chance that resolution of the haggling is itself boring for many or all of the participants in the game. But the mechanics, which provide no alternative to detailed monetary accounting, make it hard to try a different way of going about it. In particular, it is hard for the GM to simply stipulate a price without interfering in an arbitrary way with the workings of the mechanics.Again you're making a lot of assumptions. After all, maybe the dramatic scene was the consumption of the drugged meal in the tavern the night before - what had seemed innocuous takes on new meaning in the light of subsequent events!You're also assuming that the GM's desire is the only one operating here. I've never asserted that, and indeed finished my last post (in the edit) with a more detailed discussion of the advantages of metagame scene framing because it gives the players an alternative "in" to the discussion.But anyway, let's suppose that in a given session there's time to resolve only a handful of dramatic scenes. I don't see how it is per se objectionable to resolve scenes (1) wake in prison, (2) escape from the cell, (3) sneak through the corridors into the baron's bedchamber, (4) kill him in revenge and (5) jump out the window escaping across the moat, rather than starting at (0) fight in tavern room at night.Fair enough. Needless to say I think the viability of different approaches to scene framing is heavily system dependent. Even if we disregard various sorts of metagame mechanics as part of the system, the action resolution mechanics for a system have a huge implication for the sorts of scene framing it makes viable.And I don't really take this as a refutation of my earlier claim that games that constrain scene framing by reference to traditional action resolution mechanics are potentially tactically and strategically rich but incline towards the thematically narrow and limited. If it's all AD&D-style action resolution all the time, with bottles balanced on doors and saving throws against poison and killing trumping over capturing, you won't get to play a capture scenario - in which case your game won't really resemble the sword and sorcery stories that (for many players) made the genre attractive in the first place.There are obvious mechanical alternatives within the same general approach to action resolution mechanics - for example, in RM knocking out is more common than killing, atlhough it tends to be "unconscious from blood loss" rather than "knocked out by a well-placed tap to the head" - but the obvious alternative solution, for those who want to explore these other elements of the genre, is to take it to the metagame. As I've said, this depends upon the action resolution mechanics tolerating that sort of move.Which, as Hussar said, is in practice not to play that sort of scenario. If you don't want to, fine. If others don't want to, fine. No one's making you, or even urging you. But the notion that it can't be done without exercising GM force via abusing the encounter building guidelines or the action resolution mechanics is simply not true. It can be done by tolerating a metagame approach to scene framing.Upthread you expressed concern that players shoudn't have things put at stake that they didn't buy into, and now you're saying that it's OK for a traditional fantasy RPG to force a split between courage and self-interest, whereas perhaps the most basic presupposition of standard heroic fantasy RPGing (drawing on tropes established by REH, Tolkien etc) is that these two will not come apart. It's not a coincidence that fantasy RPGers have a strong aversion to having their PCs surrender (as is being discussed in multiple threads at the moment). The unity of courage and self-interest is almost inherent to the genre.You also seem to be saying that it's anathema to frame the capture scene, but it's acceptable to run the Colossal Red Dragon "surrender-or-die" scene. I certainly know which sort of game I'd rather play in - one in which the GM frames exciting scenes and I can be confident that the GM is abiding by the encounter building guidelines, than one in which the GM abuses the encounter building guidelines so as to railroad the players. And the "surrender-or-die" scene is a railroad, because it is as encounter with only one real option, namely, to surrender. Whereas the capture scenario is not a railroad at all. The encounter has multiple meaningful choices, and the framing of the encounter (assuming that the players did not trap their door with spells and beer bottles) doesn't vitiate or even implicate any player choices.Finally, as to the question about the play preferences of the OP's posters. The OP said this:I'm not as confident as you are in inferring from this information that these are players who are happier playing ASL-style AD&D rather than The Dying Earth. There's just not enough there to tell.The OP also said this:In my experience, this style of "turtling up" D&D play is quite common. Sometimes I'm sure it's an expression of a genuine desire to play in that way. But I've also seen it in players who very obviously are trying to have a different sort of experience in their fantasy RPGing. And reading articles and letters to Dragon magazine through the 80s one (or at least, this one!) can see the issues being played out, in discussions of alignment, clerics and paladins, XPs for non-combat encounters, GM die-roll fudging, etc, etc.Games like AD&D 2nd ed try to resolve the issue by keeping the same "continous play" assumptions and the same action resolution mechanics but adding heaps of injunctions to the GM to use egregious force to produce dramatic scenarios. For me, this is a terrible way to play an RPG, but I know that there are some (perhaps many) who like it.I'm suggesting a simple alternative - if you want to have your RPG include the sorts of fantasy scenarios that attracted you to the genre in the first place, then just do it. It's GM power, but it's egregious GM force only if (i) we make all sorts of assumptions about the nature and purpose of the action resolution mechanics, or (ii) we assume that the players don't want to play that sort of game. The solution to (i) is, if necessary, to change systems. The solution to (ii) is to talk to your players. But I'd be surprised if every turtling player, once they are shown that a different sort of play is possible, really turns out to want to play exclusively in the turtling mode.</blockquote>

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