Noncombat adventuring

[Mendicant]

How do you run noncombat adventuring? I'm especially interested in environmental challenges: one of the most engaging passages that Fritz Leiber ever wrote was a description of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser climbing a mountain, but tabletop RPGs rarely handle handle this sort of challenge in an engaging way. There just aren't a lot of interesting choices offered. D&D has a series of bloodless skill checks or a "skip to the next scene" spell. The few other systems I've played had a lesser emphasis on tactical combat, but there still wasn't much "adventuring" that wasn't combat or social challenges/RP. Any tips? Favorite systems that model, say, a flash flood or an avalanche in an interesting, dynamic way?

[Fri]

Don't have any specific advice, but the system "Ryutama" revolves mostly on these non-combat dangerous adventuring, climbing mountains, journeying through dangerous forest, etc. Maybe you can get ideas from there.

http://kotohi.com/ryuutama/

[Martin Greywolf]

Most of the newer systems actually have a pretty decent ways of handling this, so for them, I use what they give me.

For older systems, you have two general ways of doing this: meta-combat and contest.

Contest is easier one to do, it comes pretty much wholesale from FATE. You get rounds, just like normal combat, you describe what you do, just like normal combat, roll your appropriate skill check and first one to three victories is the winner. A draw gives both of the participants a win, and you can get a bonus win if you beat your opposition by a large amount. This method works well for stuff where there is an enemy who doesn't want to attack you just yet - chase scenes and cooking contests are a good example.

When there is no opponent per se, you can use combat or contest with a meta-enemy. There's no reason you can't use mechanics normally reserved for creatures for something else, with a bit of tweaking. A mountain has HP that represent remaining height you need to climb, it has defense that represents how difficult a climb it is, and it can attack with loose rocks and nesting eagles. You attack it with your climb/acrobatics/whatever skill. Once a fight breaks out, the enviroment becomes just another enemy character, albeit one you can't easily attack.

Admittedly, some spells will allow you to bypass the mountain entirely, but that's the problem of those spells being available to the party in the first place, your encounters should be taking party capabilities into consideration anyway.

Of course, there are systems that handle this better than others - FATE has this pretty much built in from the get go, DnD 3.5 requires quite a bit of tweaking to make it work.

[Thrawn4]

How do you run noncombat adventuring? I'm especially interested in environmental challenges: one of the most engaging passages that Fritz Leiber ever wrote was a description of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser climbing a mountain, but tabletop RPGs rarely handle handle this sort of challenge in an engaging way. There just aren't a lot of interesting choices offered. D&D has a series of bloodless skill checks or a "skip to the next scene" spell. The few other systems I've played had a lesser emphasis on tactical combat, but there still wasn't much "adventuring" that wasn't combat or social challenges/RP. Any tips? Favorite systems that model, say, a flash flood or an avalanche in an interesting, dynamic way?

Disclaimer: High level spells in D&D circumvent the perils of travel, so I would advise you to use a different system or avoid those levels.

Creating environmental challenges is not so difficult, though.
First, consider what you want. Let's take climbing a high snowy mountain. Second, what are possible threats? Lack of food, cold, avalanches, falling rocks, treacherous snow that only seems to support your weight, falling while climbing. If you cannot come up with enough, do some research.
Third, create options. You don't want to handle this as a few skill checks, you want the players to sweat and make difficult decisions. For example, you can introduce different routes to the top that entail different challenges / threat levels; vital informaton gathering (talking to locals, weather forecast for a good start, finding a guide); how much provisions they are going to take (more means more weight which can be a hassle if you have to climb - hunting might be useful here); climbing: the long and easy route? (remember, provisons are limited) / short and dangerous? / something where you can rest on a precipice if you have the guts?; crossing a chasm by means of a snow bridge which might or might not hold (skill check? weight check?); time limit: the long and easy way is well and nice, but the seasonal storms might begin soon... ; finding shelter at night might be a challenge, but you can also use a tent if you drag it with you... (limitting provisions again); avalanche: how to avoid? running back to the cave from last night? climbing the steep wall next to you? praying to the god of the mountain?
Fourth: Atmosphere. Envision the feelings you want to create. Being alone in a hostile or strange environment with no one to help you for many miles. The cold, sapping your strength and dexterity, always biting your skin unless you go numb, which is even more dangerous. The slow, ever so slow progress when you spend an entire day labouring to cross a single obstacle. The small wonders that nobody might have ever seen before, like a rare animal, a hot spring, the beautiful view.
Take your time and let the players feel what it is like to face the perils. Then present them with the next challenge, where they can decide for a way. Before rolling, describe the situaton as they struggle to climb the wall with numb fingers (maybe they should have taken the other option), and when there is a climax (will they fall?), only then let them roll.

[Darth Ultron]

In the vast majority of games environmental challenges are little more then a waste of time, but real time and game time. You simply ''can't'' make such things interesting in most games. It often comes down to a simple roll to ''pass an environment'', and trying to do like a ''roll for every ten feet'' or something is just impossible.

The vast majority of games assume super human characters so something like climbing a mountains is just silly to them. But as soon as you go to ''weak'' characters, the environment will just kill them...there really is no middle ground.

You might ask yourself what it is about ''environmental challenges'' you like? Just as they are different?

Unless there is a Survivor or Naked and Afraid RPG....

[Stealth Marmot]

In order to make them really interesting, you really have to add combat, but combat in a sort of different way. Like a swarm of a bats isn't a real hazard to most adventuring parties, but a swarm of bats when climbing a hazardous rope, or a slippery bridge?

[Cluedrew]

You simply ''can't'' make such things interesting in most games.

You can make almost anything interesting in a game if you do it right. Generally you need a couple of things:

An Uncertain Outcome: Things that the players know they are going to win can be a release, things that they cannot overcome... have the occasional place. Most content should be somewhere in the middle, the might or might not be able to accomplish it (or will succeed, but at what cost?).

Input Opportunities: The players have to be able to effect that outcome, not in that they decide it directly but they can do things to effect the overall game. Combat has tons of this, every movement and every attack is an input but none of them will decide the outcome by themselves.

Increasing Mastery: Most games require the ability to get better. In a role-playing game this can also apply to the characters, but the players getting better is the one I'm getting at. Even if it is not the point (a player ability game) it is a good test for how meaningful the input opportunities are.

And of course then you have to be able to put this all together in a game. Not always easy.

[NichG]

In general, the important questions to keep in mind are:

- What's at stake?

Realistically, 'the party has a TPK' is not a stake you actually want to risk. Furthermore, 'the party fails to travel' defaults to status quo and can make the game feel like it's stagnant or even that the DM is actively resisting progression. Generally, as well, you want there to be a good balance between positive stakes on success and negative stakes on failure - in combat, this is generally that when you win a fight, you get loot; that pays for the risk you took that you might lose.

So the important thing is to figure out some good stakes for the dangers of travel that lie between the extremes but are still significant. This may necessitate adding subsystems, making certain other aspects of gameplay more carefully tracked, or choosing a plot that has lots of subgoals that can be affected (for example, if the players are travelling for the purpose of building a supply line or trade route, deals and discoveries they make along the way can influence the overall profitability of the route by the end of the adventure)

For example, travel-related stakes for a strong failure: loss of gear, supplies, money, other resources; loss of time, in cases where time is a finite resource towards some goal; in a gritty game, long-term debilitation (but not in D&D where its easily fixed).
For a mild failure: loss of transient opportunities (you encounter a roaming exotic animal, try to hunt it, but it gets away, etc); accumulation of temporary penalties
For a mild success: gain extra opportunities for incidental gain (learn something, gather rare alchemical ingredients, etc, etc)
For a strong success: gain a major extra opportunity/long term gain such as discovering a magical location.

- What are the players' choices?

Travel that is of the form 'here is a list of skill checks I want you to roll, tell me how often you fail' may be challenging, but it's not going to be engaging to the players. So the key is to make for meaningful choices. This means managing the players' awareness of the situation and consequences of various courses of action, as well as designing the adventure in such a way that it makes those choices interesting.

This can tie in nicely with the stakes. If time is of the essence and the party needs to go to multiple places, they might have to sacrifice going to one of those places - unless they take a risk and succeed at something challenging. If failures accumulate temporary penalties, then maybe after the first few failures the players might think 'should we turn back and rest and recover, or can we make it if we keep pressing on?'.

Generally in an adventure, there should be about one moment where the circumstances cause a player to reconsider their plans or defaults. Too much and it feels overwhelming or out of control; but if you just have the one, it can be a highlight that gets remembered in contrast with the rest of the adventure. With combats, it can be for example that one tricky fight where the guy who normally uses a sword has to switch to a bow. Or that one bit where you have to keep your charge alive rather than kill all the enemy. In other kinds of RP, it can be a situation that makes the characters question their ethics.

In travel, one of the big things you have that you can use for this kind of moment is that every step forward makes it a bit harder to turn back, so there's a tension associated with the perception of a point of no return that can get players to question their decisions. Extreme weather for example can be useful for this - do you keep going even though the rain is coming down harder and its getting cold, or do you retreat back to the last bit of shelter you found? Especially if you have a random component so that no one at the table knows exactly when it will let up or how bad it will get (otherwise, the players might assume its just a bravery test).

One big difficulty in travel adventures is that if the players have a specific goal behind their travel ('we need to get to X to do Y') then most of what happens on the way can be seen as holding up the plot that the players actively want to pursue. So sure, that abandoned village could have an interesting story, but that means spending the session doing that rather than getting on with things. I think it probably works better to use these techniques in an exploration-driven campaign, where the players may not have a specific or known goal in the region, but know there are interesting things in it.

[Geddy2112]

D&D and most other fantasy adventures indeed downplay the effects of the environment and other challenges. After the first few levels, food/water/exposure to elements and the like is simply not an issue that PC's have to deal with. Any system that features low mortality and heroic characters will either outright ignore such hazards of adventure, or make them trivial.

Survival horror systems where players are fragile, although not focused on noncombat adventuring and survival, can be modified to handle this perfectly well. Call of Cthulu has less than heroic characters and it is perfectly easy to die or be seriously injured in the system. Torchbearer has some mechanics for survival.

The zombie game all flesh must be eaten brings up survival elements, but there is still plenty of combat.

[Potato_Priest]

When I ran a survival game, I ran it hour by hour, going around the table and asking people what they wished to do for that hour, getting specific as necessary for the described course of action, and narrating the result of their actions.

With climbing a mountain, describe all of the particularly difficult bits and have the players find out how to get around them.

[quinron]

Sometimes conflict is immediate, like racing against a deadline, and sometimes it's not - a mountain isn't dangerous until you start to climb it. Of course, you can always mix things up by combining the two: when the group reach the perilous mountain they have to climb over in order to reach the evil cult before they can summon the demon lord, that mountain's conflict becomes pretty immediate.

For non-immediate conflicts, try to milk real-world time out of the situation, but in a way that makes players feel their ingenuity is being tested, not their patience. Instead of asking for Climb skill rolls, ask players for how they're going to approach climbing the mountain. Make it prohibitively difficult and dangerous if they don't have proper equipment, and drop hints about the need for equipment and where to buy it before they leave town. Players who catch those hints will feel clever, and those who don't will find you very clever when they catch up. Focus on the preparation and decisions made to climb the mountain - what equipment they brought, where they're placing their rope anchors and who's performing what duties during the climb - rather than on what skill they should be rolling, though feel free to call for skill rolls once they've made a decision.

For immediate conflicts, like racing against a deadline, present a series of choices that have major tradeoffs. If the group can save 4 hours crossing bandit country instead of taking the high road, then they're probably going to, but they're going to need an 8-hour rest after doing so, which may leave them too little time to play it safe later when they need to.

Regardless of the approach you take, focus on the specific situations that pop up as the group travels - make overland travel time quick and snappy so that these obstacles gain importance when you spend long periods of real time on them; it'll also keep players invested in these obstacles rather than bored and frustrated at having to spend even more time traveling.

[hifidelity2]

In one campaign I (well the party did it to themselves) stranded them on top of a mountain – they went in summer but due to time dilation came out in the middle of winter

90% of what I then did was have then tell me what they were doing – I had very few die rolls and quite large modifiers depending on how they were trying to solve the issues

Issues were

Wind Chill and the cold
Food (lack of)
Fuel
Climbing
Finding / avoiding animal encounters


I was using GURPS but lowish magic and they told me afterwards they really enjoyed the challenge

[Beneath]

Don't have any specific advice, but the system "Ryutama" revolves mostly on these non-combat dangerous adventuring, climbing mountains, journeying through dangerous forest, etc. Maybe you can get ideas from there.

http://kotohi.com/ryuutama/

I know I'm definitely going to be running that to get to understand it.

[Mastikator]

Is there any particular reason that you don't want social challenges/RP?

[Honest Tiefling]

Why not thievery and or graverobbing? I mean, give a party a crowbar and just see what happens. Traps and environmental hazards can be employed in old ruins, you're just robbing someone a bit more on the deadish side of things. Traps being handled not with a disable device or what have you but as an actual encounter can be done well from what I hear.

Also gives a reason to be on the stupid mountain in the first place.

[Yora]

Something I do to make the adventure more than regular combat is to fill it with NPCs who are hostile but don't want to fight. They will fight if the party does certain things that makes it necessary, but they would prefer to just have the players leave without putting their own lives at stake.

[Frozen_Feet]

I run LotFP with long stretches of wilderness travel between adventure locations. If you want to make travel itself the main point and challenge, you need to pay attention to some things which are wrongly glossed over in many modern games.

The first thing you must pay attention to is supplies. The travel begins with preparation. Did the the characters bring enough food? Sufficient clothes? A map? A compass? How encumbered they are? Each equipment decision has consequences later on and informs when and where the characters can go. At no point should you assume the characters just have something simply because 'they're experts' or some such. If the players roll Survival or something, give them information on what equipment they should have and why, but the actual decision to have that piece of equipment has to be on the player.

The second thing is time. Is it night or day when they leave? What about when they arrive? How many days did the journey take, did the seasons change in the interim? You can adjust the relation of in-game time and real time to keep a steady flow to the game, but you cannot ignore it.

Third thing is locations. Simply put, a travel adventure doesn't work if the only outcomes are "the players reach their destination or they die". There have to be alternate locations and alternate routes the characters can take. As noted, supplies affect which destinations the characters can reach and when; in a travel adventure, this is the main source of choice and tension. The characters wanted to go to A, but they miscalculated the amount of food required, so now they have to choose between B or C. To make these choices meaningful and interesting, you have to put effort into detailing the flora, fauna and geography of these locations. Watch a bunch of nature and travel documentaries for inspiration.

Fourthly, random encounters and tables are your friend! I've made heavy use of LotFP's Weird New World, as it has some easily usable tables for arctic weather and conditions. It is hard to keep coming up with new and interesting things for long travels; you mitigate this problem or solve it alltogether by offloading weather, wildlife encounters and such to combinational random generation. Think of random encounters broadly. They aren't just combat and can inform savvy players of other nearby things. For example, the presence of bald eagles might inform the characters that there's water nearby. Crows feasting on dead carcasses might inform them of the presence of wolves. A bear grazing on berries might tell the players that there are edible berries to fill their supplies with; fighting the bear is optional. They might run into ruined houses, old places of worship or other relics informing them of current or past human presence and their cultural practices. They might run into other travellers or wandering salesmen; you can built a campaign around simply establishing and maintaining trade relations between different human groups.

Natural disasters also make for decent ecounters. Heavy snow might make a mountain pass impassable, forcing the party to take a detour through caverns. A storm might wreck their ship, forcing them to continue a trek by foot or to spend time repairing their ship. This cycle of buying a ship, repairing or scavenging old ships, and then wrecking them and being forced to buy a new one became something of a theme in my maritime campaign. (Alongside piracy, but that's back into combat.) This lead to a discovery: if the random encounters are sufficiently interesting (or profitable), the players will voluntarily make their characters venture far into the wilderness in hopes of triggering one. As the number of experienced random encounters grows, the players also develop a sense for what is or is not common and start to prepare for the common encounters. My players eventually developed special strategies to deal with storms (hire weather forecaster, plan trips so that there's a safe haven nearby before a storm) or ship-wrecking dragons (lower sails and masts, pretend the ship is a ghost ship).

For inspiration, watch the animation Tout en haut du monde.

[Tanarii]

How do you run noncombat adventuring? I'm especially interested in environmental challenges: one of the most engaging passages that Fritz Leiber ever wrote was a description of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser climbing a mountain, but tabletop RPGs rarely handle handle this sort of challenge in an engaging way. There just aren't a lot of interesting choices offered. D&D has a series of bloodless skill checks or a "skip to the next scene" spell. The few other systems I've played had a lesser emphasis on tactical combat, but there still wasn't much "adventuring" that wasn't combat or social challenges/RP. Any tips? Favorite systems that model, say, a flash flood or an avalanche in an interesting, dynamic way?

They generally don't work because, as you noted, what is engaging in a book (a well written description of climbing a mountain) is typically not very engaging in an TRPG (there just aren't a lot of interesting choices). Stories and TRPG usually have very different goals. Stories are about descriptive entertainment, losing yourself and instead passively engaging someone else's descriptions. TRPGs are about choices, actively engaging with (not real) situations and overcoming them through decisions made.

It's possible to make environmental challenges about choices made, as many people have suggested in this thread. But it's important not to try and do it based on awesome descriptive stories (including movies). That just won't work out. What made one awesome won't make the other awesome.

You see this effect in Movies vs CRPGs of movies all the time.

[Slipperychicken]

Shadowrun's setting provides a lot of challenges that are not efficiently or productively resolved with violence. Security checkpoints for instance can be shot through, but that generally just creates more problems because they summon more enemies that don't go away like a GTA wanted level, plus the runners' fake identites get associated with a bloody shootout and that makes life harder. In addition, any violence is potentially deadly. The setting discourages looting with electronic ownership, wireless tracking rules, time pressure, and good loot-selling mechanics. Runners can go rifling through peoples' pockets for credsticks and equipment, but every second they do that is a second that the high-threat-response teams have to show up, and most loot isn't likely to get them much cash even when they do sell it. The game mechanics don't give them metagame rewards (i.e. XP, karma, fate points, etc) for murder either, only for completing their missions.

I think the most important part of it is just not rewarding the players for pointless easy murder. That's a combined job for the GM, the setting, and the game mechanics themselves.

[jayem]

To Cluedrew's suggestion of
An Uncertain Outcome
Input Opportunities:
Increasing Mastery:

I'd add:
Recovery from Failure (or input opportunities affect result, result affects (optimal) opportunities.
Mixed pressures

With that in mind a mountain, in particular has multiple but (effectively) limited paths and multiple challenges.
The windchill effects which can be 'solved' at the cost of dexterity
Food and supplies which can be 'solved' at the cost of time (hunting) or dexterity/speed (carrying)
Navigation issues
(Short term) Difficult dangerous terrain
Changing conditions/The unexpected

So you could draw a sort of diamond structure with different issues for each path,

so perhaps one there's a part by a crevice so you have a (X% chance depending on weather, load, etc) chance of crossing, or a chance of falling down the crevice (which you need rope from the top to get out, or go the easy way out but that takes you backwards)
A part of the mountain where (without a compass) you have a (X% chance) of getting lost and going up the wrong edge of the diamond
A part of the mountain where the camps are further apart, so if you run late, your doing the last part in the dark, or going back.
A part where the path you though would be easy, turns out to have a landslide and takes twice as long (or even impossible)
A part where before you can cross horizontally (and continue), you need to have reached a higher point (that is otherwise a dead end) to lower a rope. You can't put the rope up from the other side (but you can reclaim it, if you want to use it again)

Hmm, you could possibly make a set of tiles, that you could assemble to make a mountain of the day.

[solidork]

Listen to this podcast, starting at 7:30 to see a great example of how to do this.

http://majorspoilers.com/2014/08/09/...ls-challenges/

This lets players be creative, keeps the drama up, and lets you modulate how hard the challenge is by setting the DC or changing how many successes/failures you need.

[Mendicant]

Is there any particular reason that you don't want social challenges/RP?

I have no objectio to either of those at all, it's just that I'm not worried very much about running those in engaging, fun ways. Actual interesting wilderness survival or overworld navigstion is not something I've seen done that well, and it's not something I've really ever run successfully. For the most part it's skipped over.

[Mastikator]

I have no objectio to either of those at all, it's just that I'm not worried very much about running those in engaging, fun ways. Actual interesting wilderness survival or overworld navigstion is not something I've seen done that well, and it's not something I've really ever run successfully. For the most part it's skipped over.

What do you consider "done well"? I've been in games where the players were expected to have wilderness survival knowledge just to merely not die of exposure. It was much harder than any combat in any game I've ever done, but since there was virtually no abstraction it seemed unfair, my other skills were abstracted. I don't need to know medieval martial arts to do combat correctly, I just needed to allocate exp into the combat, but allocating exp into the survival skill did little to help me live.

[Mendicant]

What do you consider "done well"?

Well, there's a lot in this thread that at least sounds more interesting than what I've seen, although most of it is in principle rather than the nitty-gritty. Ryuutama at this point has piqued my interest the most, although that's at least partially because I really want to run it with my kid. Unfortunately he's only one, so I'm going to have to wait a bit there.


The question for me isn't the degree of abstraction, necessarily. D&D's rules for tactical combat abstract all sorts of things, but there is still a good game there. When I say "done well" the primary thing I want is a good *game,* one that presents interesting choices to the players, with mechanics that feel appropriate to the situation. It needs both. The D&D way where wilderness exploration is basically all handled through a few largely abstracted rolls or spells is mechanically appropriate given the assumptions of D&D, but it isn't really much of a game. Chess is a fantastic game but it would be entirely immersion breaking as a way to simulate guiding a ship through a storm.

I reject more or less out of hand the assertions of a few people in this thread that you simply can't do this kind of thing in an RPG. If someone can make an enjoyable board game out of developing a suburb or taking a nice walk, it is possible to make fun game mechanics for a party of 4 heroes who want to guide a raft through some rapids. Roleplaying and good narration are enhanced by good mechanics.

[awa]

The most important things is that they have meaningful choices. Too many environmental hazards are just skill check to solve. They need to be able to make choices that matter not just choosing witch skill to use. Those choices also need to be informed or at least have the potential to be informed.

So I had one the pc decided to do a different adventure but the party would have trapped in a magically malevolent forest fire with trees falling either to drop on pcs or to block paths. One of the dangers the party would have encountered is their path would become blocked by a collapsed tree on fire.
Two pc could get through the tree the strongest could have smashed his way through with a high strength check while a more fragile player with a magic anti plant knife could have cut through the tree.
The strong player had hp to spare and had slight fire resistance but he would needed to pass a check to succeed while the other player was more vulnerable but was guaranteed to get through.
Alternatively they could back track and try and find a different rout this would have cost them time and risked every one taking fire dam depending on how their survival checks went.
If they had other plausible ideas I would have worked with those to.

The important point was that they had multiple options for getting through the danger.

[Tanarii]

The most important things is that they have meaningful choices. Too many environmental hazards are just skill check to solve. They need to be able to make choices that matter not just choosing witch skill to use. Those choices also need to be informed or at least have the potential to be informed.

One other way to introduce meaningful choices is having the clearly right and clearly wrong choices obviate a skill check completely. Sometimes people complain this makes their skill 'useless', but it means making the skill useful when there is a chance of success and a chance of failure, as opposed to automatic success or failure. And of course, modifying the chance of success of a check is also introduces meaningful choices.

For example:
A) Bringing your own food with you, having proper equipment for inclement weather. No checks needed, automatic success.
B) No food or shelter/clothes but have necessary equipment to hunt, prepare foraged foods, create shelter, or create effective clothing. Easy check.
C) As above, but insufficient or no equipment necessary available. Hard check.
D) As above, but jumps in a river of freezing water to escape enemies and swims until exhausted, then falls asleep instead of foraging/preparing. Automatic failure.

[NichG]

The tricky thing is that if you just have some predefined set of correct and incorrect choices, then the choices aren't actually all that meaningful. Once players know which choices are correct, the gameplay can be reduced to 'we do standard wilderness procedures'.

One kind of good gameplay choice is the kind that causes the player to decide something about motivation - tension between desire and risk or ability. Another more common one is where a choice made now sets up a specific subset of options later (out of many equally viable paths) but where each subset has a different feel to continue from - this is stuff like character build choices, but also things like combat positioning.

[Tanarii]

The tricky thing is that if you just have some predefined set of correct and incorrect choices, then the choices aren't actually all that meaningful. Once players know which choices are correct, the gameplay can be reduced to 'we do standard wilderness procedures'.

That's good. It means player skill is a thing and has effect on the game, and that (just like IRL) they can learn from experience and improve themselves at the thing. After which you can occasionally have a curveball situation.

The main problem with this is when player skill > any reasonable interpretation of PC skill at the thing, and it leads to cries of 'meta-gaming'.

[NichG]

That's good. It means player skill is a thing and has effect on the game, and that (just like IRL) they can learn from experience and improve themselves at the thing. After which you can occasionally have a curveball situation.

The main problem with this is when player skill > any reasonable interpretation of PC skill at the thing, and it leads to cries of 'meta-gaming'.

Player skill is one thing, but this feels more like how gaming groups would develop a mindless SOP for dungeons back in the day. It doesn't really engage skill to say 'we test the ground with a 10ft pole, check the walls, check the ceiling, roll marbles, throw a rabbit from a bag of tricks, ...' every 5ft.

When the correct actions are static, they become pretty meaningless.

[Tanarii]

Player skill is one thing, but this feels more like how gaming groups would develop a mindless SOP for dungeons back in the day. It doesn't really engage skill to say 'we test the ground with a 10ft pole, check the walls, check the ceiling, roll marbles, throw a rabbit from a bag of tricks, ...' every 5ft.

When the correct actions are static, they become pretty meaningless.

Not really. I mean in a way you're right, the choices become pretty meaningless. More modern versions of D&D (specifically) handle this by assuming players *will* be doing the smart thing. For example 5e uses passive perception, which assumes that the front rank of the party is checking for traps as the go along. If they aren't, then you can just have them automatically fail passive perception checks to find such a thing. The paradigm shifted to account for everyone knowing what was smart, and moving the meaningful choices to things that are actually meaningful. Like figuring out how to bypass a trap when found.

Of course, this doesn't work so well when new players *don't* have said player skill, and never learn it because the DM just assumes they're automatically doing the smart things because the system has a way to avoid the drudgery of adjudicating it. So technically it's still a meaningful choice for the players to tell you they actually will be searching for traps and being careful the very first time they enter a dungeon. But once they do that once they don't need to do it over and over again, the system just assumes they will.

Regardless, it works the same with environmental encounters. If the party is prepared to face the environment, you have to shift the paradigm for what it means to make meaningful choices, or you have to assume they'll survive without an issue. If they aren't prepared, then you can have some meaningful choices about how to make do without preparation. But just forcing them to be penalized because they're exhibiting player skill by doing basic preparation, and ignoring it or removing it, because you want them to have to deal with it as if they didn't have any player skill, is kind of a bs move if you pull it too often. They've already made the meaningful choice and done the smart thing before even leaving on the adventure.