Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7732520" data-attributes="member: 42582">Hardby is not mapped out. Nor, as I mentioned, is the tower.Why does it matter exactly where the staircases are?Look at it this way - probably most of the time, you go through your RPGing never knowing exaclty what NPCs are wearing, what sort of stitching it has been made with, how it might be embroidered, etc. And this causes no problems.Now if your were GMing for a group of embroidery-obsessed players, who kept track of all this stuff, you'd have to be careful - including avoiding slip-ups, like mixing up your different cultural motifs, or getting your sumptuary laws wrong, or whatever.But most RPGers aren't that concerned with tailoring, and so it doesn't come up.Maps are the same. In most of my games (4e combat being an exception), the details of locations simply aren't that important, and are not a focus of play. Even if the PCs were using tools (like plumb lines and the like) to help them with their architectural studies, that would all just be factored in as a bonus on the appropriate check (eg get an advantage die on your Catacombs-wise because you've got a plumbline on your equipment list) with no need to actually map things out, or describe all the minute details.Sure, but that's a neglibile element in most of my RPGing. The PCs who got to Jabal's tower are either guests, or are looking for one particular thing (on one occasion a spellbook, on another a recuperating mage). There are no monsters to clear out, and they are not bent on exploring the place.Likewise in Mal Arundak - the PCs befriended the angels, purified them of their Abyssal corruption, and then were shown into the reliquary where they then did what they had gone there to do.It is the Catacombs-wise check that determines whether or not the character is able to find a path from A to B. If the check fails and no such path is found, it remains an open question whether that's because there is no such path, or rather because the character just failed to find it.(Ie the GM's state of knowledge mirrors that of the player, which in turn mirrors that of the PC.)Think of it this way: in AD&D you can resolve a thief's climbing of a wall without knowing where every, or even any, handhold is. The resolution doesn't depend upon that information.In Cortex+ there is, similarly, no detailed geographic/tactical input into action resolution - the permissibility of a declared action is assessed by reference to fictional positioning (just as the thief can't climb a wall if his/her hands and feet are tied, so the PC who is surveying the steading from the top of the palisade can't declare an attack against the chieftain in his dining hall); but then resolution is by way of opposed checks.In 4e they do - it's part of the game. In BW, treasure is measured in bonus dice ("cash dice"), but there's been very little of that. Mostly the players track their gear.In Cortex+ loot isn't that important - but when one scene ended with one of the PCs tricking a drow into leading him first to the treasury nd then out of the dungeon, while the other PCs got stuck in the lowest levels, that PC started the next session with a free "bag of gold" asset, which provides a bonus to appropriate action declarations.It's established that the interstellar research vessl the St Christopher - which was last seen jumping away from Byron - might be on Olyx, so I've got stats for its crew. But I don't want to stat up the research station, as its nature and inhabitants haven't been established yet in the fiction.The last (and only) time the PCs staged a quasi-military assault on a base, the geography of the base was, in part, read of the results of the encounter range determination roll. I regard this as just another instance of Traveller's heavy reliance upon random generation of the content of the fiction.But that doesn't require anything being written in advance. The requisite content can be generated, using appropriate techniques, in the process of resolving the looking.That's not going to happen in a game run the way that I run it.There are different ways of establishing a compelling scene, depending on system details. But in Traveller the players would take steps to trigger a patron encounter; and then I (as GM) would make sure that the patron encounter draws play back to where the action is. (This is, in fact, exactly what happened at the end of session 4 - a player had his PC go to the TAS bar to meet a patron, the chart told us said patron was a diplomat, and I - as GM - established him as an Imperial official approaching the PCs on behalf of the PRSI.)</blockquote>

Verification