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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadfan" data-source="post: 4705573" data-attributes="member: 40961">The problems I have with the Raven Crowking / Imaro approach: You all keep talking about how the game world changes as a result of effects in the game world, not as a result of the DM changing the game world to accomodate the player's need for an adventure.  1. But the game world isn't real. When Imaro decides that the Emo Caves no longer have level 2 goblins because of some external event (not because the PCs are level 5, of course), Imaro ALSO was the one who decided that the external event happened. His choice may not be 100% unbounded (prior in game events might force his hand), but his choice is very close to free. 2. Unfortunately he's wed himself to a design paradigm in which he cannot decide which external events occur based on a desire to create good gameplay. But what other criteria is he going to use? 3. If he uses "realism" or "what really happened," which I'm going to count as standing in for "some objective criteria other than a desire to match player level to challenge difficulty," then logically he should occasionally have things happen which wreck his game. In real life, sometimes people catch terminal diseases, totally unavoidably, and die. In real life, sometimes people go places that logically should be safe, and are murdered in ways they could not avoid. Lots of things like this happen. And yet they don't generally happen in sandbox campaigns. 4. The underlying issue is: If you're not adjusting the setting to fit the PCs, why is it that game-appropriate scenarios keep playing out? Isn't it awfully coincidental that your game world, allegedly built upon a premise of realism and objectivity, just coincidentally happens to create good game outcomes? Real life doesn't do this. Its almost like your game world is controlled by some semi-benevolent hegemon who tailors reality to the needs of a few specific inhabitants. If that's not the case, why does it look so much like that is the case? 5. But no one addresses that underlying issue. Instead, they debate hypotheticals instead of debating the question raised by the hypothetical. 6. So we get treated to lengthy essays (almost as lengthy as mine) that basically read like classic psychological texts on blaming victims. See <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_blaming" target="_blank">Blaming the Victim</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_World_Hypothesis" target="_blank">Just World Hypothesis.</a> Every time someone asks, "if you do things based on realism, why doesn't this thing, which is realistic but really unfair to players, ever happen?" the response isn't to actually answer, but rather to come up with more and more elaborate and tenuous ways to claim that player behavior "chose" the allegedly unfair outcome. The player *knew* that Doug the Dangerous was a scary person, so its his fault when he intervenes when Doug the Dangerous is mugging someone, and gets butchered by a level 20 rogue. The player *knew* the forests were dangerous, so its his fault when he enters them and the DM rolls a 100 on the wandering monster percentile chart and devours the level 1 party with a trio of Purple Worms. The player *knew* that he didn't know which direction to go in the dungeon, so its his fault that he didn't cast divination and avoid the unescapable deathtrap of doom. 6a. The first problem with this is that its just avoiding the real question. Lets say you really did successfully defeat the hypothetical. Fine, imagine a different hypothetical. In real life, unfair things happen. Do they happen in your game? Sometimes real life unfair things end you, permanently. Does that happen in your game? If not, why not? 6b. The second problem is that it starts to get absurd. There's a reason that my back and forth earlier in the thread kept discussing the information a player "reasonably" requires to avoid blundering into unfair situations and dying. The tact taken here seems to be that IF the unfair situation could have been avoided, THEN whatever precautions would have avoided it are per se reasonable and the PCs should have used them. But come on. This is just classic victim blaming. The fact that someone could have performed some unusually cautious act doesn't mean that any consequences they suffer as a result of not performing it are their fault.  6c. And lets say that your victim blaming is true, and reasonable. Everything really was in the control of the PCs. They really did have precautions they could have reasonably taken, and they really do have precautions they can take at every step of the game. How did that happen? Real life isn't like that. Sounds to me like someone's engineering the game again to match player needs for fairness. I also have a problem with distinctions without a difference ("You can't say that X and Y are the same in terms of player freedom! X is totally different than Y! Its blue!"), but I don't think that's getting anywhere as a discussion.</blockquote>

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