Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7592169" data-attributes="member: 4937">Oh, I'm aware.  The longest single fight in the history of my D&D took 28 hours or so to resolve.  I have no idea how many rounds were involved, but it did involve 50,000 combatants.  Even abstracted to a mass combat system, it was an extremely complex encounter.  It also is one of the real highlights of my gaming career, and the people that were involved still remember it fondly.  It was tense, exciting, and the combat evolved in a ton of surprising ways.That entirely depends on the combat.  I've certainly run combats where everyone was thinking, "Let's just get this over with."  I consider that a failing by me as the GM.Absolutely, which is why you have to take the trouble to stage any fight that is going to go more than a few rounds with great care, starting with picking a foe for the combat which will present a novel challenge to the players and then creating an evocative setting with hopefully some interesting terrain.   I don't always succeed in that, and in particular I tend to let my own desire for realism get in the way of a truly interesting encounter quite a bit.  The correct approach to this is probably design an interesting encounter, and then rationalize the setting to create believability, rather than creating a realistic setting and then put an encounter in it just because you need an encounter.   (Not that every realistic setting is uninteresting, but its better to be unrealistic than uninteresting.)Probably not.  I just have very precise ideas about what railroading is and how you do it and why you do it.  To follow along, you might want to read this essay first: <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?298368-Techniques-for-Railroading" target="_blank">http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?298368-Techniques-for-Railroading</a>Well, yes, but there are different degrees of subtly in that.  Railroading are acts that take agency from players and transfer it to the GM, and there are a variety of techniques for doing that as I outlined.  There are even narrow conditions where I think that a GM is justified in railroading for a variety of reasons in order trade a short term unavoidable lack of agency (meaning that PC's presently don't actually have much agency to lose) in order to grant them more long term agency.   Much as a sympathize with players that fit your claim, "For many players, the worst think you can do to their characters is take away their autonomy. Death is preferable.", because really if players don't have agency then you are wasting their time, the truth is that no player actually has autonomy, because the vast majority of games require a GM in the roles of secret keeper, narrator and antagonist - without which the player has no meaningful choices anyway.Sure but combat tends to end when one side obtains their goals regardless of the system, and if the three round rule is really applied that flexibly then it becomes simply a restatement of Rule Zero (which incidentally is itself often a form of railroading).   I don't need a system to validate that as GM I can break the rules.  Breaking rules is easy.  Having a set of rules that don't need to be broken regularly is both difficult and desirable. Combat is practically its own aesthetic of play.  There are plenty of people who find mindless action in the movies dull and uninteresting as well, and some people have very little tolerance for drama that is essentially about whom can beat up whom.  And in my experience, almost everyone prefers even in the movies for combat to have some important stakes so that they are emotionally invested in the outcome, even if they enjoy combat mostly as spectacle.   The same is also true of running an RPG.   There are some players for whom the tactical skirmish wargame combat generator is the reason to play an RPG, and they are perfectly happy doing nothing but moving from one tactical problem to the next stepping up to the challenge.   Others have almost no tolerance for combat and do not enjoy it as a thing in and of itself.  For them, it matters only what you are fighting for, combat is mostly interesting as a sort of dramatic social encounter, and the details of the fight in terms of weapons and terrain are really unimportant.  But, regardless, the same key factor suits both players - the fictional reality must continue to evolve if the fight is to be really interesting.   The worst sort of 'combat' is two parties toe to toe slugging it out in a damage race where each side takes the exact same action "I attack" each round, and it devolves down to a lengthy series of dice rolls that is no more role playing than figuring out how many armies you lose when your 58 armies in Brazil attack 32 armies in North Africa.</blockquote>

Verification