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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6091450" data-attributes="member: 4937">This could potentially lead us into a discussion of what the word creativity really means.  For myself though, the reason that PC's coming up with inspired and creative solutions to a problem is fun and desirable, is because it is a marker that the player is invested in my campaign.  He's thinking about the space his character is in, he is interacting with it, and he is imagining possibilities within it.   This is a 'a good thing' whether or not the solution is expected or unexpected.  If it is unexpected, as I said, the only question is whether this is a rules problem in the future.  I've been DMing for nearly 30 years now, and nothing the players do short of comitting suicide can really disrupt my game.   There are just too many stock fall back plans and recovery models I can use, and very little types of solutions that I don't have plans for.  The 'short cut' solution doesn't present a problem because they get from A to B faster than I want.  The main problem with 'short cuts' is that they often mean that the player's arrive at B with fewer resources than I planned to give them.  That badlands contains treasure, potential allies, clues, and experience that will be helpful when they get to B.  If they teleport across it, use a wish to get a djinn to carry them across, or simply fly over it its not so much that they've ruined my fun, as they have potentially lost out on things.  But by this point, I've been doing this long enough to have a backup plan for, "What happens if the party gets to B without the dingus?" written into the text.  In fact, I like to occasionally amuse myself and my players when they pull tricks like this by occasionally pulling out my notes and reading them verbatim, just to show that I really did foresee the possibility and in some cases had actually counted on it.To me, XP results from two things - participating in the game and entertaining the DM.   It's a marker for the fact that story has happened and the character has as a result growed.  It's heroes journey stuff.  If no story happens, if the PC's find some way to step out of the story and avoid it, then they get no XP because nothing important happened to them.  There was no oppurtunity for growth.   If you teleport across the desert, all the experiences that bring you experience points didn't happen to you.   If on the other hand, something does happen to you and you resolve the challenge on the road of problems easily, that still is something that happened to you and worth the full experience points for overcoming the challenge.  How much you get isn't weighed by how easily you succeeded, but by how much worth I assigned it before hand.  Yeah, you can pull pretty much the exact same trick with a string of disposable ponies.  Either way though, I want to role play it out.  For one thing, it's pretty obvious what the real trick is with the string of disposable ponies, but I think the players might eventually be shocked to discover what the trick is - and question whether it is fundamentally morally the same - with the giant centipede.  You want to earn some bonus XP in my game?  You ride that centipede through the desert, overcoming challenges together, and then ride it until it dies - stop - and then seriously consider whether the centipede had become your friend in the course of the journey and if so what that means to you and your character.   I'll give as much XP for that as I would for killing a monster on the sheer story value alone.Frankly, I'm not sure that the strategy would pay a huge dividend in obstacle avoidance in my game, but it definately would be fun (hopefully for all).  I check for random encounters in the wilderness for each hex you enter as well as planned encounters in certain hexes, so what you are really doing here by travelling fast is compressing 3 or 4 days worth of encounters into a single day - assuming that you treat this as a road trip with no potty stops.   The centipede has a 40 ft. base move, which isn't enough to avoid pretty much anything in the wilderness (horses are much faster, and I generally design with them in mind), to say nothing of fliers and burrowing lurkers and other ambush predators that you'd be stumbling into.   Moreover, I'm not convinced that if the party rides a centipede past 'tourist traps' like 'Valley of Ancient Tombs' or 'Ruins of Lost Temple' or 'Entrance to the Dragon's Lair' that they aren't going to want to 'stop the car' and get out and explore.   Plus, I'm pretty much definately going to make them RP stopping for lunch or else at least let them role play through having a picnic or trying to urinate off the back of a hustling giant centipede because being on the back of a giant centipede makes those events less mundane.  The idea I'm going for here isn't necessarily the threat involved in taking a leak when aboard a monstrous centipede, but the image of it.  And that's not even getting to the fun to be had figuring out how to ride the creature.  If your goal is to avoid mundane travel, I think this would definately fail because what you've actually done is sparked my interest in the means of travel.  You've made the process of the journey more interesting to explore.Your approach to skill checks sounds similar to mine. Indeed.  I have no real interest in punishing players.   The notion is absurd.  The tax collector doesn't come around because you are a PC.  It comes around because the only things certain in life are Death and Taxes.  Heck, the last time that the tax collector came around in my game, the cleric talked him out of assessing taxes on the grounds that all the profit had gone to the church - his own - which wasn't taxable.  The parties current henchmen is a 15 year old lawyer who is basically employed to find tax loopholes and shady investment oppurtunities.   It's been fun for everyone involved.   I assume that if you are sitting down for a PnP role playing game, that you like to a greater or lesser degree all the things that implies.</blockquote>

Verification