Quote from: jibbajibba;670750However, the fact remains that when we build an orc fortifaction, a goblin warren, a Fire giant castle those things are designed for a certain level of PC, that is how all offical D&D games have always been written and the Random monsters tables in 1e, the concept of increasing danger as you descend, are all geared round this form of play.

It's not as cut and dried as that, at least not in 0e (and not in 1e as I recall, but I don't have my 1e books out at the moment).

In Dungeons: You are supposed to hand-place your specials on each level and roll randomly for the rest of the rooms. 33% have a monster. If there is a monster you roll a D6 on the "Monster Determination and Level of Monster Matrix.

For the 1st level of the dungeon, the rolls are:

1-2  Table 1
3-4  Table 2
5     Table 3
6     Table 4

Which means a 1st level dungeon room with a monster has a 16% chance of the monster being on 4th table of the 6 tables. the 4th table includes monsters like: wraiths, lycanthropes, ogres, 6th level fighters, 7th level magic-users, gargoyles, etc. These are hardly what most people would consider level appropriate encounters for  first or second level characters on the first level of the dungeon. This is a big hint to me that ensuring that every encounter PCs run into is "level appropriate" was not a big concern.

In the Wilderness, encounters are determined by terrain, the level of the PCs has NO bearing on what is encountered. This was why wilderness adventures were often considered far more dangerous than dungeon adventures for lower level characters. At least with a dungeon, most of the room with monsters would be creatures "appropriate" to the dungeon level. In the wilderness, not only was there no such likelihood, but the number of monsters in a group was often higher, sometimes much higher.

Quote from: jibbajibba;670750Brendan I think what a couple of us are saying is more a case that in D&D all encounters are level appropriate for the correct level and the GM through rumours hints, placement and other stuff effectively overlays across their game world a level appropriate way of negotiating the game world.

This is is not the same as saying "ah they have gone north I will more the Dripping Spear orcs to the Northern hills", and its not the same as saying "ah they have entered the Dungeons of Gisk I will retool these to be CR appropriate for a group of 4 4-5th level PCs."

However, the fact remains that when we build an orc fortifaction, a goblin warren, a Fire giant castle those things are designed for a certain level of PC, that is how all offical D&D games have always been written and the Random monsters tables in 1e, the concept of increasing danger as you descend, are all geared round this form of play.  

A good GM will provide in game reasons for the PCs to be presented with the option of taking on foes they can beat or foes they can't and let the dice fall where they may. But a GM that give no such warnigns no foreshadowing of danger may well be playing a far more realistic game world but it will be much less sucessful as a game.

I disagree with some of this, but not totally.  As to Brendan's post, I see this as something of a continuum.  I also do not place any holiness in the term, 'that is how all offical D&D games have always been written'.   That cuts ZERO ice with me.  I think often level appropriateness and those charts you mention create very fun, playable adventures for the new GM and new player, and then we can grow up and expand our minds and games a bit.  

I also appreciate your use of terminology; the phrase, "the GM through rumours hints, placement and other stuff effectively overlays across their game world a level appropriate way of negotiating the game world."  is a good example.

I believe a good GM, as I have said, creates less incongruence between the in-game logic and the placement of placed playable scenarios.  It really is, in my book, one of the key GM skills to look at for the quality of a game.

And a good GM has in-game reasons that the players can see and understand why they should attempt scenario 'X' and maybe 'Q', but that this 'Z' thing they heard of, that's out of their league.  I don't think this needs to be level appropriate so much as it needs to make sense and the PCs will learn to see where they need to go.  Do I design my longer scenarios to reflect in game logic and yes still possibly get tougher as the PCs move on? to some degree, I think.

Quote from: RandallS;670732Telling the players random rumors (that may not even provide correct info) their characters hear when talk to various people in an inn, town, or city does none of the above. All it does is provide raw information. It does not guide anyone to any place or action.  I realize that you have some incomprehensible need for my campaigns to be based on level appropriate encounters so are trying hard to figure out some way that I really am ensuring that characters get to level appropriate encounters, but your desire for this does not change the fact that is not how my campaign works.

I couldn't care less about your selfmasterburatory games.  
You've made it perfectly clear that you don't give two shits about your players.

Quote from: RandallS;670732No, providing rumors does not guide people to level appropriate areas. It provides information which is generally somewhat vague (or even completely incorrect at times) about the area and what is going on in it. It can give players an idea of what is in a particular place so they can decide if it is something they want to investigate in person but a rumor of goblin bandits in the woods a day's ride away does not mean this is automatically a level appropriate encounter.

The rumor may be accurate, or true but incomplete (say, the bandits are lead by a Ogre Magi with his pet umbar hulks who simply do not go on raids so no one has ever seen them), or misleading (the goblins are actually hobgoblins), or not true at all (the bandits have left the area, or the bandits are just an illusion used to scare people away by a high level mage who is looking for a powerful magic item in the woods, or ...).  It's just a rumor, not a guaranteed lead to an encounter that a low level party can defeat in combat (or defeat in any other way).

Of course. No one ever really knows anything in your settings :rolleyes:.
It's all half truths and half or false informations.  Giving them actual concrete information is a big :nono:
You can't fuck them if they have foreknowledge.  What fun will you have if they walk in with confidence?

Quote from: RandallS;670732This doesn't even consider the fact that -- as I have stated in a prior post in this thread -- the idea of "level appropriate encounters" is meaningless in my campaigns as most of time PC adventuring parties are not composed of characters all about level X, but are composed of characters of a wide range of levels.

I don't care about LAE.  You've already stated numerous times your dislike for combat and have abstracted combat to a couple rolls.  Your campaigns are all carrot on the stick.

Quote from: RandallS;670732Yes, they will have some idea from rumors. Although it has nothing to do with jumping through hoops, but with roleplaying the characters. I realize that seeking rumors in a town is probably considered part of the boring stuff between action/combat that designers of games like D&D 4e think should be skipped, but my players enjoy such interaction.

:rotfl:Yeah of course they do:rolleyes:  They could have the most perfect roleplaying ever done in the history of gaming and will come out with nothing but some ideas from vague rumors.

Quote from: RandallS;670732Hearing a rumor does not force anyone to do anything. The idea that it might is so silly that is in impossible to take you seriously.

:banghead:  You know I really think you are that ignorant.

Quote from: deadDMwalking;669959Those who have said they disagree with the statement have actually indicated by their posts that they do agree, they just are so fixated on the semantics that they insist they they don't agree.

Why choose such semantics, then, rather than, "The GM's job is to challenge the players?" Why complain about people making clearer statements?

Quote from: deadDMwalking;669979Unless you're some percentage of your campaigns have included: dragon attacks at 1st level, you all die; or Horde of Orcs pillage your village, you all die (which to be fair are things that tend to happen in the game when the PCs are at a level appropriate to deal with it), people are setting up challenges that are 'winnable' in some manner.  

I don't even understand why people are arguing to the contrary.  If you're not setting up challenges that the PCs can win, then they will all die.  Game over.

The challenge of not getting attacked by a dragon at 1st level is "winnable" in old D&D by staying the hell out of the wilderness and the deeper dungeon levels -- or by luck if you're more reckless.

That's a very different matter than 'fudging' so that players who buck the odds get a soft pitch.

The likelihood of a village getting pillaged in the near future tends to be related to events in the near past. Do you force your players to locate themselves in such a situation? How do you explain the ordinary villagers' decision to do so?

How is it automatic death? Do you suddenly and arbitrarily make it impossible to escape?

Quote from: deadDMwalking;670049If you generally set up challenges fairly so that even 'unbeatable' challenges can be avoided, players will self-select challenges that (while they may be tough) they're reasonably confident that they'll win.

So, why do you call this "the GM's job to be defeated," rather than "the player's job to choose challenges?"

Apart from your wanting to provoke disagreement, all I can figure is that you have in mind a game in which it is in fact the GM -- not the players -- who decides what the PCs undertake.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;670062But there are long running games where player characters not only can die, but do so frequently. Particularly when I was younger, I was often in such campaigns. I recall being in a D&D campaign that lasted about two years or so and most of the people went through three or four characters. That is a bit on the extreme end, but it does occur. There are people who enjoy that style of play, and who manage to keep a game going despite PC death. In highshool lethality rates of the campaigns I was in ran the spectrum from characters dying nearly every session (sometimes people losing multiple characters in a single session) to games with total plot immunity.

With the original D&D set -- before the slight HD inflation and greater monster-damage inflation of Supplement I -- a 1st-level fighter might have a 100% chance of getting killed with one hit, or a 0% chance. Average figures have a 1/3 or 1/2 chance. The toughest has 8 HP (7/12 chance of surviving two hits).

That means you try to avoid letting a monster get a swing at you, and at the least you want a hefty treasure to be on the line! In my experience, it's still quite typical even for skilled players to go through three or four characters before getting one to second level.

Quote from: Exploderwizard;670240Using a familliar example of a mini sandbox, if the PCs are playing in module B2 and gather rumors at the keep they have some information with which to make decisions.

If memory serves, there's a medusa in a situation (at least at start) that's very likely to come down to a save vs. petrification for a character. The element of chance is a big part of the game, too!

The larger role of chance is another contrast with WotC's presentation of D&D, among other rules sets. In old D&D, in my experience, initial high ability scores account for less because so many changes can happen to a figure in such unpredictable fashion.

There's no "level appropriate" rule for magical treasures, for instance, and they can be lost as well as gained. All sorts of surprising transformations can come about, and even death need not be final.

Quote from: Phillip;670824So, why do you call this "the GM's job to be defeated," rather than "the player's job to choose challenges?"

Apart from your wanting to provoke disagreement, all I can figure is that you have in mind a game in which it is in fact the GM -- not the players -- who decides what the PCs undertake.

to be fair he din't it was the OP that make that comment and the threaad has been trying to maintain that as central and weirdly for this forum we have stayed pretty much on track so that has to be a good thing right?

Quote from: jibbajibba;670844to be fair he din't it was the OP that make that comment and the threaad has been trying to maintain that as central and weirdly for this forum we have stayed pretty much on track so that has to be a good thing right?

I would agree, this thread has stayed unusually close to the original topic as far as RPG discussions go.

Quote from: LordVreeg;670778I disagree with some of this, but not totally.  As to Brendan's post, I see this as something of a continuum.  I also do not place any holiness in the term, 'that is how all offical D&D games have always been written'.  That cuts ZERO ice with me.  I think often level appropriateness and those charts you mention create very fun, playable adventures for the new GM and new player, and then we can grow up and expand our minds and games a bit.  

I also appreciate your use of terminology; the phrase, "the GM through rumours hints, placement and other stuff effectively overlays across their game world a level appropriate way of negotiating the game world."  is a good example.

I believe a good GM, as I have said, creates less incongruence between the in-game logic and the placement of placed playable scenarios.  It really is, in my book, one of the key GM skills to look at for the quality of a game.

And a good GM has in-game reasons that the players can see and understand why they should attempt scenario 'X' and maybe 'Q', but that this 'Z' thing they heard of, that's out of their league.  I don't think this needs to be level appropriate so much as it needs to make sense and the PCs will learn to see where they need to go.  Do I design my longer scenarios to reflect in game logic and yes still possibly get tougher as the PCs move on? to some degree, I think.

First the bolded... I don't place any reverence to it either I was merely trying to highlight that its the default mode of play out of the box (the 1e box and the 2e box, from Randall's post I see that 0e liked to drop in wierd random shit for no reason and some of it was way too tough for the PCs)

I think we are roughly on the same page for the rest of it the difference is that I both believe that the PCs winning is the best outcome and I want to foster the sense of competition between them and the Big Bad as embodied by me. I actually want them to high five each other when they kill that demon, I want them to cry when their PCs die I want them to totally care more about some made up shit in our heads than they do about their own families for 4 hours every week Competion breeds that level of bonding (I am sure there are other ways too of course).

I think dropping in unbeatable bombs that the players might randomly encounter is well random. Say I built a 'haunted house' scenario for low level PCs. I would populate it with say ... skeletons and there would be an area with ghouls and maybe one wight that rules the place but the PCs are kind of expecting so they have a sliver weapon or a stash of silver arrows, maybe they find them on a corpse on the way in maybe they hear a rumour from a local wise woman whatever, the point is a low level party organised and with some degree of forethought can beat a wight. It's tough and they need to be on their game. However, if I droped in a Spectre as a possible random encounter that would be a bit silly. Basically if it showed up the first thing the PCs would notice is that one of them was dead then they could all try and run away. Now I could introduce a spectre and just play them very badly, ie not like an ancient powerful super intelligence malevolant being that's only sustances is to suck the life out of living beings but instead like some character in a scooby Doo cartoon who lets the PCs escape or whatever but I think that would reduce the potency of when I want to introduce a 'proper' Spectre.

Now this is the oposite of say a CoC game where the sudden death of one of the PCs to a creature from the void is totally part of the genre but also is good to introduce tension and rack up the fear level, even then though I would probably foreshadow such a creature.

Well, I'll stand by what I said before: "The GM's job is to be defeated" is a common enough kind of entertainment these days that I can see how a blogger can retail it as conventional wisdom. On the other hand, it is (as with most things RPG) not a universal truth.

I am one who happens to enjoy games in the old style in which it's up to a player to define victory conditions and take measures toward attaining them, and the dice fall as they may.

Quote from: Phillip;670824So, why do you call this "the GM's job to be defeated," rather than "the player's job to choose challenges?"

Apart from your wanting to provoke disagreement, all I can figure is that you have in mind a game in which it is in fact the GM -- not the players -- who decides what the PCs undertake.

Players don't also get to pick the challenges they're faced with.  If you're a Sandbox GM with complex encounter charts, it's reasonable to say that there is a 1% chance for the players to run into Astromaryx, the Great Wyrm Red Dragon if they travel through the Dragon Tooth mountains.

It's very possible and reasonable for the players to have a legitimate reason to pass through that area without trying to engage the dragon.  They'd probably prefer to avoid the dragon.  

If the random chart indicates that they encounter the dragon, what then?

If the answer is anything other than 'dragon kills everyone', it's clear that the GM is making it POSSIBLE for the players to overcome the challenge.  

Why would the GM assume that the dragon isn't hungry?  Why is the dragon traveling around if he isn't hungry?  

Dragon killing the party is unsatisfying.  The GM finding reasons for the party to 'engage' the dragon without necessarily all becoming lunch is usually the superior option.  It is a game; players dying without any chance to save themselves isn't fun.  

A dragon is a great example of how the entire party could be killed if that's what the dragon wants to do.  Combined with the inability to be damaged by non-magical weapons, the ability to travel further and faster than the PCs (can't be outrun) superior senses (scent), there's no reason that the Dragon can't win if he doesn't want to.  

Sometimes the GM finds ways to make a situation that could reasonably be an auto-lose situation into a challenge.  

The other option might be more 'realistic', but it tends to make for a less exciting game.

Quote from: deadDMwalking;671030Why would the GM assume that the dragon isn't hungry?  Why is the dragon traveling around if he isn't hungry?  

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That is what reaction tables are for. There are methods for running such encounters where everything from "the dragon attacks" to "the dragon passes overhead and continues on" are possible. There is also the issue of whether the dragon sees the party or not. Obviously an encounter with such a creature is potentially quite lethal, but dragon eating the party is not the only possible outcome of such an event.

But if my party decides to travel through a pass where dragons are present, even if the chance of meeting one is small, and we get eaten because we decide to pass through and the dice are not on our side, I am not going to object.

Quote from: deadDMwalking;671030Why is the dragon traveling around if he isn't hungry?  

Daring to answer this question is exactly what makes my gaming style possible without having all dragons swoop in for the kill.