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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5396323" data-attributes="member: 42582">Interesting example. I've never quite had it come up - and certainly never in the language of Player 2 - but I tend to agree with what Hussar said in his reply. I do tend to take this sort of approach to a lot of exploration elements (eg I don't fuss very much about food, ammunition, weather, etc unless it emerges out of the mechanical resolution of a skill challenge) but this isn't really altering things real time in the course of play - it's more about adopting a certain approach to play in the first place.The sort of changes I tend to make during play are to assumptions about relationships between the PCs and NPCs, and hence to assumptions about what sort of conflict will happen next. To elaborate: like many GMs (I think), I tend to sketch out a sequence of encounters for a given session, which presuppose (i) some sort of sequence of events that will lead the PCs through those encounters (not necessarily in any particular order, and perhaps not all of them) and (ii) some sort of "orientation" or "comportment" of the players towards those encounters ie whether I'm expecting them to fight, or negotiate, or explore, or . . .  These two things are interrelated, because the way that the players approach an encounter obviously affects the way that it unfolds and resolves, and this in turn effects the sequence of events that leads through the encounters.Because I know my players and their PCs pretty well, and I plan with this knowledge in mind, mostly my planning works out. But every now and then, though, the players approach an encounter in a way that I didn't expect, or resolve it in a way that I didn't expect. (I'm not talking here about anticpated variations - like do they save two, one or zero prisoners from ritual sacrifice - but about significant variations, like joining in with the cultists and helping finish the ritual.) This can require both developing or alterning an encounter on the fly (eg if a fight starts, 4e needs a battlemap, and a battlemap needs terrain details that I probably won't have worked out in detail if I was assuming that the room would just be the site of negotiations) and then coming up with new encounters, or resolving entirely new events, as the whole direction of play changes in a way that I didn't anticipate. For me, perhaps the most frustating aspect of 4e is its lack of a good mechanical interface between skill challenges and combat, so making these changes to the "orientation" of an encounter and to the direction of play is sometimes non-trivial.Both from my own play experience, and from what I used to read in old Dragon letters columns and what I read now online, I gather than not all GMs do this. For example, in an adventure path, I gather that the players are more-or-less obliged to follow the directions of the module author and the GM as far as the primary villain is concerned, and also as far as the principal events are concerned.I also know that some people have the view that players have a sort of duty of civility to follow the GM's adventure hooks. Consistent with what I've said above, my preferred approach is to have the players build the hooks into their PCs - either at creation, or through the way that they play their PCs as the game goes along - and then I build and resolve the encounters in accordance with those hooks.I regard this approach to play as a non-sandbox alternative to the railroad. It's my favourite way to RPG, both as GM and player.</blockquote>

Verification