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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7731764" data-attributes="member: 42582">Gygax's rules for reactions are actually quite subtle, in terms of the weighing of various inputs into a reaction roll. Later editions drop some of this. 4e adopts a quite different but also rather subtle system for resolving social interaction. I think 5e also has something, but I'm less familiar with it.As for the idea that only bards and wizards do social interaction - that is not true to my own experience, and seems to be mostly the result of GM's running social encounters in a very non-dynamic way.I know from experience that every player can participate in social interactions (just as, in the real world, everyone at the table is participating in the social activity of playing the game - verisimilitude!).Telling the players "A hybsil approaches you as you wander through a meadow, and adresses you in elvish" is not worldbuilding (under any standard definition of world-building I'm familiar with).Designing a "meadows" random encounter table, then putting hybsils on it, then rolling up a hybsil encounter, would count as an application of worldbuilding - but that is not what is going on when a referee uses The Book of Lairs II!One obvious motivtion to enter a dungeon would be to rescue a captured family member. But by your lights it would be bad GMing (because "contrived") for the GM to write a dungeon with a captive in it who is related to one of the PCs. (This would also be bad GMing by [MENTION=45197]pming[/MENTION]'s lights, based on <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?507010-Your-one-best-piece-of-GM-DM-advice/page6&p=7311783&viewfull=1#post7311783" target="_blank">this recent post</a>, but I think for different reasons from you.)I don't really know what you regard as the proper way for a GM to give PCs sufficient motivation to enter a dungeon, when it is verboten for the GM to deliberately write in any part of the gameworld to engage some cue or signal sent by a player in the build or play of his/her PC. You talk about a world in which "interesting things" happen, but that must mean "generically interesting, given some generic set of motivations". This would seem to lead to many rootless PCs with few personal/intimate motivations - or else players who write their PCs to accord to the GM's world/plot.So instead of framing the PCs into an encounter, the GM runs an "imaginary" encounter off-screen? Did the players have the option to have their PCs stick their fingers in their ears, or to walk away, when the rumour-bearer turned up in that off-screen event?The point I'm making is that the game can't proceed without the referee providing the players with some sort of information (but not other information - the gameworld is authored, and that fiction is conveyed by one person telling it to another person; it is not an actual world that actual people explore and inform themselves about by actually sensory investigation).Which was my point. AD&D 2nd ed (and even late 1st ed AD&D products, like the Book of Lairs II) assumes that the GM will frame the PCs (and, thereby, the players) into encounters.This is all conjecture which depends heavily on table norms, and which the D&D rulebooks have never said anything about.For instance, in the case of the hybsil, for all you know if the PCs tell the hybsil to go away, then the GM decides it attacks them; or decides that the gnolls attack the PCs in the night (which is not noticeably different from the drow encounter you don't like); etc.And with the drow, the PCs can run, or ally themselves, or (as you note) surrender, or try and calm the situation by talking to the drow, etc. The idea that fighting is the only option seems very narrow to me.I don't know why you would invent your own definition of what it is for the GM to frame the PCs into a situation, and then impute it to me.<a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/21/" target="_blank">Here's one definition of "situation"</a> from someone who has thought a bit about RPGing: "Situation is the center. Situation is the imaginative-thing we experience during play." Framing the PCs into a situation, therefore, is establishing that there is some thing, some event, going on that calls for a response[/i]. In the fiction, that response will come from the PCs (or perhaps a pseuo-PC like a henchman etc under player control). At the table, that response will be authored by the player.If the situation is an approach by a NPC, and the player in question decides that his/her PC ignores the NPC, then the rules of D&D leave the GM with a range of ways that the NPC in question might respond, regardless of whether that NPC is a hybsil or a drow.A hook, as I understand it, is different from a situation because it tends to involve the referee narrating some event that already occurred (eg via "boxed text").You're in a tavern. A grizzled old man approaches you, with a glint in his eye. That's framing the PCs into a situation.While you're in the tavern, a grizzled old man with a glint in his eye asks you if you're interested in undertaking an exploration and rescue mission in the forest to the north. That's a hook, but it's not really a situation. The GM has already resolved the would-be situation him-/herself: the PCs listended to the NPC and received his/her message.I think the first - done well - tends to make for a more interesting RPG experience. The second, in my experience, is the companion of railroading and lacklustre fiction pre-authored by the GM.Obviously others, presumably on the basis of different experiences and different tastes, prefer the second.</blockquote>

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