Quote from: Ratman_tf;1064735Sure. I think the argument is that the GM is still modulating the content based on the character's levels. Giving ample warning and clues about a lame kobold mushroom farmer is not nearly as important as warning the players about the ancient red dragon that lives in the mountain pass.
It would be perfectly serendipitous for said dragon to mistake the party of 1st level characters for the party that just stole his gem, and go gunning for them full bore, no prisoners. But I doubt any GM would find that kind of scenario appropriate for their level.

The ideal is to not modulate the world to the players. The easiest way to doing this is to make up enough shit ahead of time that how hard the critters are that the PCs run is already set. Of course that's impossible in practice, you can't write up the entire world but you can work towards that as a default by having a bunch of hexes with snippets of info and by having random tables. A large dungeon works this way in miniature which is party of the reason why dungeons are popular. You really CAN stat out every last thing in a dungeon ahead of time so that what order the players run into things is out of your hands and up to them.

If you look through the 1ed DMG there's all kinds of percentage chances of this or that. They can't cover anything but they encourage a kind of Crom mentality:

Quote from: R.E. HowardHe dwells on a great mountain. What use to call on him? Little he cares if men live or die. Better to be silent than to call his attention to you; he will send you dooms, not fortune! He is grim and loveless, but at birth he breathes power to strive and slay into a man's soul. What else shall men ask of the gods?

Even if you can't be perfectly impassive you try your best and set things up so that you don't care if the players live or die and try not to modulate things to their situaton. Getting that feeling across to the players of their just being a small part of a big world that doesn't give a shit about them and that will stomp them flat if they're not careful is the goal and you do that as best you can.

Or to put it another way there's two kinds of rules in RPGs: scene setting rules and scene resolution rules. The first rules describe that did the players just meet and the second rules describe whether the players' actions succeed or fail. Scene setting rules include balanced encounter building, a whole lot of the more out there Story Game rules and a whole slew of older D&D rules from ecounter rolls to random hex stocking tables. Those rules can be as important to the game as the scene resolution rules. The right kind of scene setting rules can convey the feeling of "this world doesn't give a crap about what level you are" so that meeting a warband of 500 orcs is just something that happens just like rolling a one when you're trying to hit something is just something that happens, not something that is the DM being a jerk to you.

Quote from: Itachi;1064728I would say videogames are so wide and diversified a medium at this point that saying that doesn't really say anything. While there's a parcel of games that follow the logic you criticize, there are others which do not.

Video game RPGs largely fall into one of two categories:

1. The world levels up with you (most Bethesda games)

2. The world is gated or guided such that the monsters you meet are nearly always close to your level in difficulty (most JRPGs, Divinity: Original Sin, etc).

Exceptions are rare. You are probably going to list several of them in response.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1064735Sure. I think the argument is that the GM is still modulating the content based on the character's levels. Giving ample warning and clues about a lame kobold mushroom farmer is not nearly as important as warning the players about the ancient red dragon that lives in the mountain pass.
It would be perfectly serendipitous for said dragon to mistake the party of 1st level characters for the party that just stole his gem, and go gunning for them full bore, no prisoners. But I doubt any GM would find that kind of scenario appropriate for their level.

The argument is missing the point, by preferring to haggle over the true meaning of "modulate the content based on the levels" instead of substantially understanding what people are actually talking about and addressing that. Everyone in this conversation now knows there's a difference between running a linear adventure of finely-tuned encounters where the players can reasonably expect, "If the DM put it here, I can kill it," and an open-ended scenario where you can't assume that just because you're 4th level, that witch in the forest isn't an accomplished 18th-level warlock whose pet pig is a polymorphed nalfeshnee. Complaining that one shouldn't refer to the latter as "not modulating the content based on the character's levels" accomplishes nothing and informs nobody of anything interesting whatsoever. You know what people are talking about. Since everybody knows what everybody means now, complaining about word choice is more about needing to be right about something irrelevant than actually making an argument.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1064795Video game RPGs largely fall into one of two categories:

1. The world levels up with you (most Bethesda games)

2. The world is gated or guided such that the monsters you meet are nearly always close to your level in difficulty (most JRPGs, Divinity: Original Sin, etc).

Exceptions are rare. You are probably going to list several of them in response.

Rare?

Ultima 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, Ultima Online, Darklands, Daggerfall, Fallout 1, 2, New Vegas, Arcanum, Gothic 1, 2, Underrail, STALKER SoC, CS, CoP, Neo Scavenger, King of Dragon Pass, Six Ages, Dark Souls, Darkest Dungeons, etc.

And that's just from the top of my head. Hehe I think you have a point that the more mainstream titles (Bethesda, World of Warcraft, Final Fantasies) indeed tend to follow that formula (which probably explains their popularity, as it makes them more accessible), but generalizing the whole industry is a stretch.

Quote from: Itachi;1064829~gives exactly the response I predicted~

That's really not a big list (I can easily write a much longer list off the top of my head). By the way, the Souls games do in fact guide the player to level-appropriate, linear paths. They just expect you to figure out via trial and error which railroad is the one you've got a ticket for. There's also another element of video games, which is that death isn't a big deal. You either reload your game or start back at a respawn point. Games with permanent character loss aren't popular (I expect you now to point out there are several popular games with a "hardcore" mode with perma-death, which of course hardly anybody plays).

QuoteAnd that's just from the top of my head. Hehe I think you have a point that the more mainstream titles (Bethesda, World of Warcraft, Final Fantasies)

Indeed, games that people have actually played have more influence over what they expect than games they've never heard of. Several of my players were born in the 1990s. The youngest was born in 1998. I can assure you that Apple IIe games like Ultima IV play absolutely no role in what they understand by "RPG."

Quotebut generalizing the whole industry is a stretch.

It's really not.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1064752Me too.  I even take it to the next fun step:  Some creatures and organizations are deliberately full of bluster, and thus set out to create the impression that they are more capable than they are.  One of the very best things about breaking the "encounter appropriate" mindset is not setting up the PC kill.  You could do that anytime.  When you get them to run in terror from something that they could easily handle?  Gold, Jerry, Gold!   Sometimes it happens almost by accident.

The pinnacle was when I had them running from a werewolf.  They completed two adventures and were well on their way to finishing a third, over about 20 hours of play and weeks of game time. The whole time they were spooked by found remains (not all from the werewolf's victims), distant howling, seeing the werewolf in the distance, and the hysterical ravings of some NPC guards that had blown the threat all out of proportion.  The werewolf had been hired by one of their many enemies, but the party stayed on the move.  When the werewolf finally cornered them in a small dungeon, they were convinced they were dead.  After one anti-climatic round of ranged combat, the players were a bit miffed.  "I can't believe we've been dodging this guy for days!"

This is an interesting point. You can't always trust the information at hand. The fabled "Dire Swamp of Instant Death", might just have a reputation spread by a grumpy ogre who wants to be left alone. Or even better, a 20th level halfling assassin who intentionally acts like a neophyte in order to put people off their guards.
The problem is complicated by the fact that D&D really doesn't use a system that tracks to "real world" evaluations. HD are not linked to anything concrete, like size or shape. It's an abstraction and a 1 HD warrior without equipment looks like a 20 HD warrior without equipment. But if the two got in a bar fight...

Quote from: Fearsomepirate~gives exactly the response I predicted~

Except not? How is three of the most popular RPG series of all time - Ultima, Fallouts, Dark Souls - an exception? If you and your players don't know those series or their influence to the medium, then it's a case of ignorance on your part.

What's next, you'll also generalize that tabletop RPGs are resumed to faux-medieval class-based monster-bashing because that's what Pathfinder, the best-selling game of the last decade, does?

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1064870This is an interesting point. You can't always trust the information at hand. The fabled "Dire Swamp of Instant Death", might just have a reputation spread by a grumpy ogre who wants to be left alone. Or even better, a 20th level halfling assassin who intentionally acts like a neophyte in order to put people off their guards.
The problem is complicated by the fact that D&D really doesn't use a system that tracks to "real world" evaluations. HD are not linked to anything concrete, like size or shape. It's an abstraction and a 1 HD warrior without equipment looks like a 20 HD warrior without equipment. But if the two got in a bar fight...

I see that as a feature, not a bug.  Some things are dangerous, some things are not, and many are muddled.  Information is useful, but not fool-proof.  Caution is a good idea, but if you want to get anything done, sooner or later (probably sooner) you need to go with your best guess.  Meanwhile, the world displays some consistency most of the time.  If after all that, leaping in turns bad, then trying to find an alternate means out (escape, surrender, bribe, etc.) is a good idea.  Still, you play the odds, by doing the best you can on that front, and usually it will work out OK.

Granted, this is much easier to achieve with a regular group of players.  Also, my groups have players that thrive in that environment, where getting 5 or 6 pieces of information on one thing is very useful, in part to more easily spot the bad pieces.  They constantly seek information, but don't automatically trust any of it.  

Moreover, while I'm not anywhere close to an "encounter-based" world, where if the GM places it you are meant to tangle with it, I'm not exactly a pure sandbox either.  Closer to the pure sandbox extreme, but not all the way there.   Generally, I would classify my style on that continuum as I am using encounter/challenge ratings and experience to build a setting that is slightly biased to PC success IF they are aggressive with gathering information, but somewhat biased against them if they dash in with no clue.  It's casual-friendly (as long as they gather info), but completely willing to let them crash and burn if they play it that way.  I tell new players the rules are just enough in their favor that they have a better than average chance of surviving being unlucky or stupid, but not both together, and not so great a chance that they'll want to draw from that well any more than they can help it.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1064870This is an interesting point. You can't always trust the information at hand. The fabled "Dire Swamp of Instant Death", might just have a reputation spread by a grumpy ogre who wants to be left alone. Or even better, a 20th level halfling assassin who intentionally acts like a neophyte in order to put people off their guards.
The problem is complicated by the fact that D&D really doesn't use a system that tracks to "real world" evaluations. HD are not linked to anything concrete, like size or shape. It's an abstraction and a 1 HD warrior without equipment looks like a 20 HD warrior without equipment. But if the two got in a bar fight...

That's why front-loaded campaign prep can be helpful, you make all of those decisions ahead of time and then don't have to be put on the spot and decide if what the PCs are blundering into is going to be hard or easy. Not that hard if you make/buy a simple hexmap and then scatter some module/one page dungeon content about and start with something Wales-sized.

What also helps is that instead of deciding something when the PCs go into a blank bit of the map decide on the probabilities. So quickly brainstorm some of the possiblities of what the Dire Swamp of Instant Death contains and then roll a dice. Or just roll a d20 and decide that "high is really nasty" and "low is flowers and puppies" and go from there. 1ed DM I played with a while back would roll dice even for simple stuff like "is there a decent blacksmith in this little town" or "are there good-sized throwing rocks nearby" and that helps with the kind of detachment that's useful in sandbox games.

In principle I like the idea of an uninvolved world which is independent of the PCs. In practice, it seems difficult for the standards and structure of D&D in particular. Partly this may be from a history of having played a lot of AD&D modules (and later editions) which are rated for a particular level range, but I'm curious about others' takes.

FWIW, most of my play over the years has been in non-D&D play. Sometimes encounters were designed (like when playing Monster of the Week or Buffy the Vampire Slayer with episodes tailored for the characters); but usually there was more of a living world. On the other hand, my D&D play has usually been either modules or patterned on modules, so the encounters were designed for particular levels for the most part.

Quote from: Ratman_tfThis is an interesting point. You can't always trust the information at hand. The fabled "Dire Swamp of Instant Death", might just have a reputation spread by a grumpy ogre who wants to be left alone. Or even better, a 20th level halfling assassin who intentionally acts like a neophyte in order to put people off their guards.
The problem is complicated by the fact that D&D really doesn't use a system that tracks to "real world" evaluations. HD are not linked to anything concrete, like size or shape. It's an abstraction and a 1 HD warrior without equipment looks like a 20 HD warrior without equipment. But if the two got in a bar fight...

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1064895I see that as a feature, not a bug.  Some things are dangerous, some things are not, and many are muddled.  Information is useful, but not fool-proof.  Caution is a good idea, but if you want to get anything done, sooner or later (probably sooner) you need to go with your best guess.  Meanwhile, the world displays some consistency most of the time.  If after all that, leaping in turns bad, then trying to find an alternate means out (escape, surrender, bribe, etc.) is a good idea.  Still, you play the odds, by doing the best you can on that front, and usually it will work out OK.

If everything usually works out OK, that implies that their information sources are pretty good. In terms of dungeons, though, often it doesn't make sense that there is good information.

If the dungeon is an active enemy fortress - like Steading of the Hill Giant Chief - then there may be some good sources of information about what is in there. For example, interrogating some escaped orc slaves or capturing a giant on patrol. But a lot of dungeons are more insular, with little traffic in and out. If there is an ancient tomb with undead, say - what are the sources of information by which the PCs can tell what's in there?

Quote from: jhkim;1064937If everything usually works out OK, that implies that their information sources are pretty good. In terms of dungeons, though, often it doesn't make sense that there is good information.

If the dungeon is an active enemy fortress - like Steading of the Hill Giant Chief - then there may be some good sources of information about what is in there. For example, interrogating some escaped orc slaves or capturing a giant on patrol. But a lot of dungeons are more insular, with little traffic in and out. If there is an ancient tomb with undead, say - what are the sources of information by which the PCs can tell what's in there?

In the case of an ancient tomb, maybe with an entrance they just found out in the wilderness--there isn't much in the way of information.  The lack of information is itself a warning, though.  The players will be hesitant to go in, unless they have a really good reason why they need to.  If they were searching for the tomb specifically (or at least something very much like it), then they probably spent some time researching it before the "adventure" really started.  I tend to run several overlapping "adventures" at once, and not all of them will be finished.  It's perfectly acceptable for the players to find the tomb and not go in.  Or at least not go in now.

Now, part of what I meant by not running a pure sandbox is that there are exceptions.  The mode of play I've described is explicit.  If I've been really pressed by real-life pressures, and am not adequately prepared, such that it would be very convenient for all of us if the players bit on the obvious hooks, then I make that explicit, too.  As in, "Hey, I'm railroading everyone to the start of the adventure, which you are expected to tangle with in some fashion, but then we revert to our usual ways."  In that case, there's no automatic party killing demon or dragon or lich or whatever.  That's part of the deal when I said they had to do tangle with it.  There are still potentially killer things in place, but also opportunities to negotiate, scout, etc. to get information at the location.  

The only place it gets really tricky is when I appeal to their better natures.  Say an NPC they knew was in trouble is taken into the ancient tomb they just found with no idea what is there.  Usually, they'll bite.  Every now and then, it works out that such a thing happens in a place I don't think they can handle.  I make a point of telegraphing how bad it is, and don't have the teleport with no way out but through type of traps.  It's an ancient tomb, with shriveled wildlife in a 1 mile radius around it, and the first few rooms are bad.  I tend to do that more often than not anyway.  But remember, even though I had the ancient tomb there all along, it was my decision to have the NPC taken there now.  The players know from past experience that sometimes they just lose.  Sometimes they accept that.  Sometimes they go heroic on me with not much chance and get lucky.  Sometimes they try and fail.  Sometimes they try and die.  Usually, they realize pretty quick that they are in over their heads and start running for the hills.  We've got a group of 8-9th level characters doing that now, after foolishly trying to take a short-cut across an uninhabited region.  Their last advice from the locals in town was if they were going that way to make sure they had their last will and testaments all in order before setting out. Heh.

OD&D modulated the content by dungeon levels; stay on a lower dungeon level and get monsters you are more likely to be able to deal with. For any game that like D&D has characters advance from wounded mosquito to godlike power, I think there has to be some way of modulating content: providing the characters enough information to choose opponents they can deal with, stratifying areas of difficulty (whether this is informational or low level characters cannot open up more dangerous areas), or giving low level characters an out from overly powerful opponents. (Munchkin doesn't modulate the content - no matter what your level, you draw from the same deck of cards - but some of the more powerful monsters do not pursue low level characters, so the last thing kind of applies, although it's not really anything like an RPG anyway.)

In games where player characters do not increase in ability very significantly, or depend entirely on things like equipment that comes and goes, this is less needed.

Quote from: jhkim;1064937If the dungeon is an active enemy fortress - like Steading of the Hill Giant Chief - then there may be some good sources of information about what is in there. For example, interrogating some escaped orc slaves or capturing a giant on patrol. But a lot of dungeons are more insular, with little traffic in and out. If there is an ancient tomb with undead, say - what are the sources of information by which the PCs can tell what's in there?

Coupla things to consider. The first is I think there is sort of an implication that very powerful things are remote. If the land was just swarming with Death Knights, for example, the kingdom wouldn't currently be standing. Personally, I rarely have the characters just stumble upon dungeons. They get them via maps and quests. What they do stumble upon are random encounters. The second is basically putting a "You Must Be This Tall To Ride" sign somewhere that isn't blatantly that, but one which rewards recon. Like the first room or the entrance has a rather powerful guardian, some beast that the players have heard has ripped greater men than they in twain.
And just your luck, it's sleeping. (Players might continue to be morons here, but well, them's the breaks.) A third thing is I'm pretty generous with escape attempts. Maybe some people would say I shouldn't be, but it gives me a chance to introduce powerful monsters and some tension without a TPK.

Mechanics I hate most:)?
Quickly-escalating "ablative" HPs.
Challenge Levels.
Classes.
Those should be the main ones;).

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1064795Video game RPGs largely fall into one of two categories:

1. The world levels up with you (most Bethesda games)

2. The world is gated or guided such that the monsters you meet are nearly always close to your level in difficulty (most JRPGs, Divinity: Original Sin, etc).

Exceptions are rare. You are probably going to list several of them in response.

1. Exceptions include some of the best-selling CRPGs.
1.1. It seems that you're right that combined, the rest of them are more numerous.
1.2. Possibly because that's the lazy approach.
2. And that's why most CRPGs suck compared to at least decent TTRPG sessions!

Quote from: AsenRG;1065139Mechanics I hate most:)?
Quickly-escalating "ablative" HPs.
Challenge Levels.
Classes.
Those should be the main ones;).


1. Exceptions include some of the best-selling CRPGs.
1.1. It seems that you're right that combined, the rest of them are more numerous.
1.2. Possibly because that's the lazy approach.
2. And that's why most CRPGs suck compared to at least decent TTRPG sessions!

The problem in bringing up the videogame medium is also that, at this point, "RPG" is more of a factor that's been applied to a bazillion titles that wouldn't fit exactly the delineated box of the genre but that portray key characteristics of it as immersion, simulation systems, choices & consequences, etc. sometimes even better realized than what the so called "RPGs" do.

The STALKER series being a good example here. It's basically a first person shooter only with a myriad systems for simulating survival in a harsh environment, like trackers for sleep, thirst, hungry, radioactive contamination, etc. Besides portraying a setting whose people/fauna act by seeking their needs and goals dynamically/in a non-scripted way. All this result in an emergent environemt that, frankly, puts most so called "RPGs" - both in electronic and tabletop format - to shame in regards to simulation.