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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 6595870" data-attributes="member: 6790260">It's the difference between changing the DC of a trap in the middle of trying to solve it, and deciding that there should be more (or fewer) traps than you previously thought there should be. The former is Schrodinger's Difficulty--it doesn't actually have set odds until the DM looks into the box. The second is DMs being flexible about their planning and responding to player participation. The former means success or failure boils down to "did the DM favor us this time, or not?" The latter will have fixed odds of success for each trap employed, even if the OVERALL odds still change. It is thus, in my eyes, "unfair" to the players (and yes, I include favoring the players as "unfair"!) to modify the difficulty of challenges that are currently in progress, but perfectly legitimate to modify the difficulty of challenges that have not yet been started. Players cannot, *even in principle,* make actually informed decisions about solving problems (be they springing traps, fighting monsters, parleying NPCs, whatever) if the difficulties of those problems are always a breath away from being changed. Players can, at least in principle, make informed decisions about an encounter that might expand later, and certainly about solving *this current trap* regardless of whether there are also future traps down the road.Also, once a monster/trap/etc. exists explicitly in the fiction, I believe it should remain the way it is, *unless and until* there is a good reason for it to be different. E.g.: Once a vampire is introduced in combat, its HP should be a fixed value. Prior to combat being joined, the DM can do whatever she wants; she put the bloody combat together in the first place, she can re-build it if she likes. If battle is joined, its HP are its HP, because it clearly exists. But let's say the party realizes they can break a hole in the ceiling and let some sunlight into the lair, and then do so. Suddenly the vampire is in a substantially weakened position. Such a situation is a perfectly justified time for the DM to say, "Okay, the vampire's max or current HP should change" or "the vampire can't hit as well after this point" or any number of other changes, because those changes are justified by an event which "actually happened" (as much as any event in a TTRPG "actually happens.")</blockquote>

Verification