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Things your table should do, but doesn't do- The Fun v. Efficiency Thread
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<blockquote data-quote="ClaytonCross" data-source="post: 7555657" data-attributes="member: 6880599"><p>I constantly see 2 things. </p><p></p><p>1. People ignore/handwave inventory management, encumbrance, and athletics test for play efficiency because they don't want to wait for players to organize notes or they are too lazy to track weights. The results are bags of holding with 26,000+ gp and all their extra gear in a single bag of holding etc. Also, thief attempts on gear are negotiations and time consuming but rare so its not huge deal. The biggest result of this is that no matter your strength score your essentially super strong able to carry mountains as long as you say "I put it my backpack" because their are no limits. They make a strength check to open the door but then they just say well between the 5 of you, you are able to force the door open or it takes some time but as one of you gets up you pass the rope around and are able to help each other scale the wall. It makes the loot process faster, dealing with gear easier, and speeds through physical bearers for the sake of getting to more involved narrative conversations or combat but it devalues strength resulting in higher numbers of dex based characters because strength has no out of combat function. Then you get "fighters need more out of combat option threads" and "All I see are dex based melee fighter threads" not because strength is not useful, but because the hand wave everything that makes it so out of combat. The dex character trying to steal some one's wallet or sneak past a guard they keep because they are interactions the deem "narratively valuable" meaning if you drop a merchants keg and it breaks no one cares but if you steal his coin purse the guards are called even though both represent a cost to the merchant. I am not a fan when I GM, but my GM is. No interest in strength based tasks, however he does us variant encumbrance so we still value strength. </p><p></p><p>2. Scouting and traps. GMs tend to hand wave traps until it gets serious but then make traps lethal to build tension. The problem is there is no indication of the switch until the first trap. The party watching the rogue check every door can slow things down but not have the rogue do so results in PC death. So its a catch 22. The end result is it gets hand waved until unless players insist and while it does bog down the game while the rogue or scout basically leads the group through the dungeon players tend to except it because they don't want there character to dies randomly to an enemy they can't fight. My attempt to resolve this is instead of hand waving traps I have a random trap macro with alternate ways of spotting and disarming that means perhaps the rogue with a high perception skill doesn't see a trap but the passive investigation of the wizard might spot it and the rogue might disarm it but it turns out when he goes to open the door its not locked its just stuck and he is going to need the much stronger fighter/barbarian to get it open with an athletics test. Just like encumbrance this slows down "mundane tasks". My GM hand waves but I consider the mundane journey as much a part of the game as the destination role play/combat. When we play his games though he can't stand it when we push to check for traps because he finds in REALLY boring form the GM side really being a narrative GM. That has never stopped him from putting a random trap or hidden door in each dungeon though so we still ask because we don't want to die to death machines. Its a bit of a back and forth.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="ClaytonCross, post: 7555657, member: 6880599"] I constantly see 2 things. 1. People ignore/handwave inventory management, encumbrance, and athletics test for play efficiency because they don't want to wait for players to organize notes or they are too lazy to track weights. The results are bags of holding with 26,000+ gp and all their extra gear in a single bag of holding etc. Also, thief attempts on gear are negotiations and time consuming but rare so its not huge deal. The biggest result of this is that no matter your strength score your essentially super strong able to carry mountains as long as you say "I put it my backpack" because their are no limits. They make a strength check to open the door but then they just say well between the 5 of you, you are able to force the door open or it takes some time but as one of you gets up you pass the rope around and are able to help each other scale the wall. It makes the loot process faster, dealing with gear easier, and speeds through physical bearers for the sake of getting to more involved narrative conversations or combat but it devalues strength resulting in higher numbers of dex based characters because strength has no out of combat function. Then you get "fighters need more out of combat option threads" and "All I see are dex based melee fighter threads" not because strength is not useful, but because the hand wave everything that makes it so out of combat. The dex character trying to steal some one's wallet or sneak past a guard they keep because they are interactions the deem "narratively valuable" meaning if you drop a merchants keg and it breaks no one cares but if you steal his coin purse the guards are called even though both represent a cost to the merchant. I am not a fan when I GM, but my GM is. No interest in strength based tasks, however he does us variant encumbrance so we still value strength. 2. Scouting and traps. GMs tend to hand wave traps until it gets serious but then make traps lethal to build tension. The problem is there is no indication of the switch until the first trap. The party watching the rogue check every door can slow things down but not have the rogue do so results in PC death. So its a catch 22. The end result is it gets hand waved until unless players insist and while it does bog down the game while the rogue or scout basically leads the group through the dungeon players tend to except it because they don't want there character to dies randomly to an enemy they can't fight. My attempt to resolve this is instead of hand waving traps I have a random trap macro with alternate ways of spotting and disarming that means perhaps the rogue with a high perception skill doesn't see a trap but the passive investigation of the wizard might spot it and the rogue might disarm it but it turns out when he goes to open the door its not locked its just stuck and he is going to need the much stronger fighter/barbarian to get it open with an athletics test. Just like encumbrance this slows down "mundane tasks". My GM hand waves but I consider the mundane journey as much a part of the game as the destination role play/combat. When we play his games though he can't stand it when we push to check for traps because he finds in REALLY boring form the GM side really being a narrative GM. That has never stopped him from putting a random trap or hidden door in each dungeon though so we still ask because we don't want to die to death machines. Its a bit of a back and forth. [/QUOTE]
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