Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5475091" data-attributes="member: 82106">Actually I think we're all just confident that even if you haven't played for 20 years you're fully capable of running the game in a fun and interesting way. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Just speaking for myself I thought this article was basically "does this kind of thing actually need to be said?" Maybe players these days are way too wrapped up in mechanics. The game world and how it works is really the more important thing in an RPG. Remember, turns and rounds don't exist there. Action happens simultaneously and continuously. Even looking at the mechanics free actions like saying "Surrender or die!" can be taken at any time and cost nothing. Suppose the players decide to talk? Let some talk happen. Both sides can lay up for a few seconds, there's no need to use fancy rules for this, just stop rolling hits for as long as it takes for some dialog to happen. If it breaks down, then everyone goes back to hacking.The whole retreat/pursuit mechanic seemed both too mechanical and at the same time too abstract for my tastes. Let the PCs delay or ready and use APs or just clever tactics to disengage. If there's a significant chance they are going to want to break off a fight then they should consider that during the fight, not by invoking a whole different set of rules that suddenly turn a bunch of bad decisions into a different set of mechanics with different results. It just seems odd. Pursuit challenges are fine and all, but I'd make you actually get out of melee before that is even relevant. The flip side is DMs should keep in mind that monsters don't act with perfect planning either and that deciding to pursue or not may or may not be a snap decision. Often if you withdraw the monsters will at least consider their options before rushing after. They may want to heal, get reinforcements, etc first anyway. Things rarely happen in the real world with the speed of combat rounds.</blockquote>

Verification