RPG Discussion
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Beoric
8, 8, I forget what is for
Anyway, I was reading a supplement by a designer I like, and came across a mechanic for determining if the PCs are able to find a location that they are looking for, within a given area - hex, city, it doesn't matter for this discussion.
What struck me is that the mechanic was entirely random, other than being modified by a particular ability bonus. That is, the mechanic does not contemplate being influenced by the decisions of the players. How do you search? What are you looking out for? Are you asking for directions? Who do you ask? You can, of course make up modifiers on the spot. But the mechanic does not appear to contemplate that, and gives no guidance as to how modifiers should be assigned, or what would constitute a typical, unmodified search.
The second thing that struck me is that the majority of the possible results just related to how long the search takes, not to actual success or failure. And it is expressly called out that encounter checks should be made at regular intervals during the search. So effectively what players are doing is rolling for the number of encounter checks the DM is going to make.
And that defeats probably the most important purpose of having encounter checks, which is to impose a risk of consequences upon player decisions to do things that are time consuming or attract attention.
It's getting late for me and I don't have time to finish my thought tonight, but for now I will say that my general position on any mechanic that has the potential to penalize characters, is that the players should be able to influence the result by their choices. No mechanic that directly affects the characters should be truly random. The only function of truly random mechanics during play is as a prompt to generate content.
This is also my issue with a lot of downtime mechanics.
What struck me is that the mechanic was entirely random, other than being modified by a particular ability bonus. That is, the mechanic does not contemplate being influenced by the decisions of the players. How do you search? What are you looking out for? Are you asking for directions? Who do you ask? You can, of course make up modifiers on the spot. But the mechanic does not appear to contemplate that, and gives no guidance as to how modifiers should be assigned, or what would constitute a typical, unmodified search.
The second thing that struck me is that the majority of the possible results just related to how long the search takes, not to actual success or failure. And it is expressly called out that encounter checks should be made at regular intervals during the search. So effectively what players are doing is rolling for the number of encounter checks the DM is going to make.
And that defeats probably the most important purpose of having encounter checks, which is to impose a risk of consequences upon player decisions to do things that are time consuming or attract attention.
It's getting late for me and I don't have time to finish my thought tonight, but for now I will say that my general position on any mechanic that has the potential to penalize characters, is that the players should be able to influence the result by their choices. No mechanic that directly affects the characters should be truly random. The only function of truly random mechanics during play is as a prompt to generate content.
This is also my issue with a lot of downtime mechanics.
DangerousPuhson
My my my, we just loooove to hear ourselves don't we?
In terms of what you reference above, I obviously don't know the supplement you are referring to, but I think the expectation about modifiers and how to perform searches is one of those assumed DM competencies (i.e. "a DM should already know how to do this").
I personally use a semi-random mechanic for city navigation (that is to say cities which need to be navigated anew - I don't apply it to well-known cities or small settlements) based on a Survival or Investigation check. Not entirely random, mind you, since different characters have better or worse check bonuses, but still determined by a die roll. Modifiers do come into play depending on specific circumstance, but being 5e, they are more in the "Advantage/Disadvantage" realm rather than "+X/-X" bonuses.
My players state their objective ("I'm looking for a place that sells _____"; "I'm trying to find a man who knows about ________"; etc.), and I set the DC based on difficulty. If it's a simple or unimportant request, it gets a low DC, or I just may just handwave it and say "You just want to find an inn? Yeah, there's one right on the corner". If it's a big request that requires wandering and asking around a lot, then the DC is tougher, and there is usually a penalty involved for bad failures (wasted time, picked pockets, corrupt city guards, walking down the wrong alley into a mugger's nest, etc.).
Unlike squeen's position, I believe that playing it out is the whole point. That's the game; you want situations to unfold, not to be dropped into laps like neat little packages. Wandering a strange city should feel like that - wandering. That's how you explore, those are your opportunities to showcase what the city is all about. The random things they encounter and the consequences for that wandering are exactly what breathe life into a city, otherwise your city is just "a place where stuff is". The trick is using a deft hand (see below).
This part I think is just vestigial rules from old-style dungeon crawling, and shouldn't be done. Time is generally not a valuable commodity when the party is outside in civilization; doubly-so if they are taking some downtime and are already killing time anyways. Routine random encounter checks in a settlement are more detrimental than beneficial, because:
1) players tend to split up in cities, so you get long sessions of each player doing like two (usually mundane) things while you (the DM) has to juggle ten different scenarios at once;
2) there is generally no time pressure hanging over their heads, and so no real punishment or stress is felt for delays (as you've stated);
3) it actively punishes the players for getting to know your city, who are just going to rent a room and hole-up for a week to avoid trouble;
4) if the party is split up, you get a lot of combat scenarios playing out between you and one or two party members, which bores everyone else at the table; and
5) it steers the party way off course, into a million little side-quests (which can be fine if they need to be moved, but not when it's mandatory).
Beoric
8, 8, I forget what is for
I'm posting this in chunks, because the forum is giving me problems.
For instance, I have a mechanic for healing through rest. If I ever published it, I would state that the unmodified roll assumes you are eating trail rations, have sufficient water, are sleeping with a bedroll, not wearing heavy armor (leather or padded only), it isn't raining or snowing, and there are no extremes of heat or cold. Deviating from these conditions results in penalties or bonuses. It pays to sleep in a decent inn, or to lug around a tent.
This is true, but the mechanic should at least set a baseline, so you know which approaches should have a bonus, and which should have a penalty.
For instance, I have a mechanic for healing through rest. If I ever published it, I would state that the unmodified roll assumes you are eating trail rations, have sufficient water, are sleeping with a bedroll, not wearing heavy armor (leather or padded only), it isn't raining or snowing, and there are no extremes of heat or cold. Deviating from these conditions results in penalties or bonuses. It pays to sleep in a decent inn, or to lug around a tent.
Beoric
8, 8, I forget what is for
I have a couple of relevant design rules I follow:
1. The PCs (and players) should never suffer a consequence unless there is some opportunity for them to make choices that can affect the outcome. And for me, the top level "stating an objective" decision doesn't count, unless the objective is inherently dangerous. I don't play everything out (lots of situations just aren't that interesting to play), but if the objective is not trivial, at a minimum I will ask what their approach is. If they don't really have any particular approach - if they choose not to choose - that's their (character's) funeral, they can take their chances on an unmodified die roll.
2. Things that shouldn't be hard, shouldn't be hard. Inns make themselves easy to find, because most of their customers aren't locals. And every local knows where at least a few inns are. It is, of course, different if you come to town during the annual Race of Eight Winds, and every inn is booked. But most of the time it should not be difficult to find an inn, or a baker, or a leatherworker, or any other business or person who wants to be found.
3. Things that are routine or tedious should not be played out, I have to disagree with you on this one. Failing to find a nearby grocery store with decent fruit at the end of the growing season might be a genuine challenge for me personally IRL, but I am not diverting resources from the actual adventure stuff I have going on to play a "finding fruit" minigame. If the players want to do that, they can play My Sims. Ditto for haggling. I have one player who wants to haggle everything - not because he enjoys it, but because he's cheap. I refuse to waste precious playing time in haggling over the price of a new bow.
4. As you suggested in relation to time pressure in urban centers, or a lack thereof, a resource is only a sacrifice it its a sacrifice. Mechanics that relate to a resource that isn't scarce in an environment have no place in that environment.
5. Mechanics should be somewhat transparent, so that the players can make informed decisions. Depending on how you implement it, I may have an issue with your setting a DC based on your assessment of the challenge of the task. Making it an ad hoc decision makes it difficult for the players to predict the risks and make intelligent choices. Player and DM can have very different ideas about how hard a task is, so at the very least, the DM and the player need to be in agreement as to what the character would know about the situation.
Beoric
8, 8, I forget what is for
Looking specifically at urban centers, most are pretty safe in most places during the day, and pretty safe in a smaller number of places at night. If the players stick to populated major routes during the day, I am not going to bother with encounter checks in most circumstances. People live in these towns and cities, and If it's not too dangerous for a cook's assistant to run to the market to buy supplies, it probably isn't all that dangerous for half a dozen heavily armed adventurers.
And yes, you do want the party to be able to split up in cities, because different players - and in particular, different classes - have different needs in an urban area. And yes, the different things that players are doing should be resolved quickly, and preferably narratively, so nobody is left out. It would probably be a good rule of thumb that gameable content should be restricted to activities where all the characters are likely to be together.
I put a hex grid over town and city maps, and if the party strays from a major route in an unfamiliar city, I run the exploration as a hexcrawl. In part this is because RPG town and city maps are unrealistically small and simple - whereas a realistic town or city map would be way to complicated with way too many streets. So I make neighborhoods composed of a few hexes. I treat the major routes as major routes, but I assume there are a lot more minor roads and buildings than are portrayed on the map. So if you are trying to get somewhere not using a major route, I assume you are trying to navigate through the neighborhood, and then I think about the chances of getting lost and ending up in a district you shouldn't be in.
I see that I'm about to start writing a treatise about how I run cities, and I really don't have time for that, so I'm going to circle back to my original point. I think true randomness should be reserved for content creation or resolution of trivial matters. For anything that is non-trivial and has a direct impact on the characters, I think there needs to be an opportunity for the players to make decisions that can affect the outcome, even if they choose not to take advantage of that opportunity.
Also, if it's trivial, it should be resolved immediately, preferably by just allowing the players to accomplish whatever they want (by definition this is within reason, because if they are asking for something big, it is non-trivial). If its non-trivial but not interesting, or excludes other players, it should be resolved quickly. If it is non-trivial and interesting, then it should be played out.
[Man this editor is weird. I have no idea why that last paragraph was giving it problems.]
And yes, you do want the party to be able to split up in cities, because different players - and in particular, different classes - have different needs in an urban area. And yes, the different things that players are doing should be resolved quickly, and preferably narratively, so nobody is left out. It would probably be a good rule of thumb that gameable content should be restricted to activities where all the characters are likely to be together.
I put a hex grid over town and city maps, and if the party strays from a major route in an unfamiliar city, I run the exploration as a hexcrawl. In part this is because RPG town and city maps are unrealistically small and simple - whereas a realistic town or city map would be way to complicated with way too many streets. So I make neighborhoods composed of a few hexes. I treat the major routes as major routes, but I assume there are a lot more minor roads and buildings than are portrayed on the map. So if you are trying to get somewhere not using a major route, I assume you are trying to navigate through the neighborhood, and then I think about the chances of getting lost and ending up in a district you shouldn't be in.
I see that I'm about to start writing a treatise about how I run cities, and I really don't have time for that, so I'm going to circle back to my original point. I think true randomness should be reserved for content creation or resolution of trivial matters. For anything that is non-trivial and has a direct impact on the characters, I think there needs to be an opportunity for the players to make decisions that can affect the outcome, even if they choose not to take advantage of that opportunity.
Also, if it's trivial, it should be resolved immediately, preferably by just allowing the players to accomplish whatever they want (by definition this is within reason, because if they are asking for something big, it is non-trivial). If its non-trivial but not interesting, or excludes other players, it should be resolved quickly. If it is non-trivial and interesting, then it should be played out.
[Man this editor is weird. I have no idea why that last paragraph was giving it problems.]
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DangerousPuhson
My my my, we just loooove to hear ourselves don't we?
With regards to No. 3, I'm not sure where you got the idea that I believe tedious /routine things should be played out all the time, because I don't. I suspect you think I meant that in regards to my response to squeen's (limited) contribution, but my intent of that retort was to point out that "playing it out" means going through the motions of city travel via an element of randomness (which I believe squeen was arguing against, albeit with almost no words or context to go off), because I do believe that city travel with a randomized element is valuable. However, as I state with my "you want an inn? There's one on the corner" example, I too agree that trivial tasks should not be drawn out. If players just want to buy some rope, it's almost always "ok, you go to the general store, they charge PHB prices for everything".
Ultimately, the granularity of your city adventures will depend on your intentions, your pace, your own DM comfort, and your player's preferences. There is no singular answer applicable across all groups. Some folk want to crawl from block to block rolling up encounters; others want to hand-waive cities altogether so they can get back into the dungeon or what have you.
Talking to point to No. 5, if you want transparency with regards to DC, my usual solution is simple: tell the players the DC. "You want to find Sammy the Smuggler? That's tough because he's a smuggler and his criminal buddies would probably cover for him, so you'd likely be looking at a DC 17 Investigation check, and failure might mean asking the wrong questions of the wrong people". Now you can dress that up in whatever immersive language you want, hinting towards things rather than stating outright that the character would know it, etc., but in the end the players would ultimately decide "yes I want to do that, even though there may be risks", or "no, that sounds too tough, let's go talk to Billy Three-Fingers the thief instead and see if he can point us towards Sammy".
Again though, different preferences for different groups - some players genuinely get into that nitty-gritty simulationist stuff, others find it absolutely tedious and just want to keep adventuring. Judgement calls would have to be made, and no blanket advice is applicable to all tables.
DangerousPuhson
My my my, we just loooove to hear ourselves don't we?
My personal play style tends to use randomness to determine not just success or failure, but also the degree of success or failure. If you roll up a 15 on a DC 10 check, you get a successful outcome, but rolling a 23 is a super-favorable outcome - for example, the difference between finding a shop that sells wands versus finding a shop that sells wands and is also having a sweet sale; likewise, rolling an 8 on a DC 10 means some kind of failure, but not as troublesome as rolling a 3 - the difference between not finding a contact who can smuggle you into the castle versus being ratted out to the town guard for even daring to ask around. As my prerogative, the degrees and consequences of the rolls are always adjusted on the fly, as befitting a DM running a dynamic world.
As to triviality - this is again entirely table-dependent. Some players like haggling over apples, some don't. A good DM is a flexible DM in tune with the preferences of his players. My players just so happen to enjoy doing more adventuresome things, so we often steamroll over the trivial points, no dice required. But once in a while, my OCD-esque players want to nitpick every nook of their brand new wagon, and that's fine too. It's all about reading the vibe.
DangerousPuhson
My my my, we just loooove to hear ourselves don't we?
Mana Meltdown | tenfootpole.org
tenfootpole.org
Oh Lazlo, you silly little person. Coming into the comment section of a blog for D&D adventures to say that people are dorky is like Lopez-levels of ignorance. Seriously, how do these people function with such poor awareness? Had he bothered to ask, he'd have known that I haven't touched Minecraft in over a decade. But they never ask... they just smirk and name-call and pat themselves on the back as if their ability to snark were valuable or likeable in any way.
Also, what's wrong with Reddit? It's the Front Page of the Internet! It's just more aggregated content, like Instagram without the skanks, YouTube without the conspiracy nuts, or Tik-Tok without the brainrot. What the hell else are you gonna do online?
DangerousPuhson
My my my, we just loooove to hear ourselves don't we?
Hoes, thots, thirst-traps... you get the idea. Lots of Brazilian butt-lifts on Instagram. It's a hive of the self-absorbed; Narcissus would weep.
DangerousPuhson
My my my, we just loooove to hear ourselves don't we?
Fun story time: I was on vacation in Cuba a few years ago, and on a daytrip from our resort to Havana we stopped at a mountaintop cafe/tourist trap thing about halfway along. Souvenirs for sale, a band playing music, panoramic vistas, really expensive pina coladas... you get the gist.
Anyway, at the cafe was this woman dressed to the nines. Fake tan, fake blond hair, fake eyelashes, fake boobs, ten pounds of makeup - the works. She had in tow her (presumably) boyfriend, who was taking pictures every step she took. She'd go over to the vendors, try on a hat, do a cute pose - click click click pictures - then put the hat back without buying anything. She'd work her way into the little four-piece band that was playing, dance around in her wavy dress - click click click - leave the band without giving them a tip. Go over to the edge of a wall, look forlornly out to the horizon - click click click - check the camera to make sure the lighting was right. I know it sounds like I was creeping on this woman, but honestly she was putting herself front-and-center everywhere, you couldn't avoid seeing her doing it.
Then her boyfriend asked if she could take a picture of him just in front of just like a big aloe plant or something, and you could seriously hear her eyes rolling in her head. It was my first experience with an influencer in the wild, pretty crazy stuff.
Anyway, at the cafe was this woman dressed to the nines. Fake tan, fake blond hair, fake eyelashes, fake boobs, ten pounds of makeup - the works. She had in tow her (presumably) boyfriend, who was taking pictures every step she took. She'd go over to the vendors, try on a hat, do a cute pose - click click click pictures - then put the hat back without buying anything. She'd work her way into the little four-piece band that was playing, dance around in her wavy dress - click click click - leave the band without giving them a tip. Go over to the edge of a wall, look forlornly out to the horizon - click click click - check the camera to make sure the lighting was right. I know it sounds like I was creeping on this woman, but honestly she was putting herself front-and-center everywhere, you couldn't avoid seeing her doing it.
Then her boyfriend asked if she could take a picture of him just in front of just like a big aloe plant or something, and you could seriously hear her eyes rolling in her head. It was my first experience with an influencer in the wild, pretty crazy stuff.
DangerousPuhson
My my my, we just loooove to hear ourselves don't we?
"Skank" may have been too harsh, since it implies promiscuity (and I say hooray for promiscuous women - they really got me through my college years lol). The Instagram people that I do not care for are more like "egotists", "attention-seekers", or just full-blown narcissists.
Blakely
A FreshHell to Contend With
Did you guys see that new psych poll about things women find attractive? I was born about 40 years too early. Now - they claim - the most attractive hobby a man can have is reading. Playing D&D only came in at 53% unattractive! When I was 13 I think it was 153%.
DangerousPuhson
My my my, we just loooove to hear ourselves don't we?
The very first thing my (second) wife said to me was "You play D&D? That's so cool! What class do you play?"
When I told her I was a DM, she was smitten.
Beoric
8, 8, I forget what is for
I mean, back in the day the English majors I knew always used to get laid more than the engineers and athletic majors.
To the extent it hasn't been happening in North America for a while, I think liking men who read is a throwback, not something new, at least within those social classes where good literacy is available as a learned skill. For the last few decades the meathead jock has been a high status position (in part because so much of the US psyche seemed to obsess over the high school years), but before that, reading was a skill of people in higher class/status positions.
I have thoughts about why literacy as a preference is back in vogue with women now, but I can't really get into that without touching on politics, or at least things that people think are political. The number of things that should not be political but are being politicized is irritatingly large right now.