Pacing a megadungeon

[King of Nowhere]

I really wish you would stop saying I really on stories, that isn't true. Narrative gaming blows screaming chunks to the moon, and story structure is the last thing in the world on my mind when designing a scenario or a ruleset. Now, I may use a story or a real-life anecdote when trying to illustrate a point, but my goal is never to recreate a dramatic experiance.

well, the concept of "dramatic experience" and other stuff you said about "heroes defying danger" really screams "movie tropes" to me - while encouraging the players to rest as little as possible look like a speedrun. if you say you're not doing that I trust you, but from the way you describe what you want to achieve it's easy to come to those conclusions.

Is this fun for anyone?

Its not fun for me as a DM because I don't get to run the material I worked hard to come up with. It isn't fun for the players because they don't get to play the game or get any rewards.

Heck, it isn't even fun in character as the players haven't stopped the villain and the villain had to waste a buttload of time and money abandoning a perfectly good fortress to run away.

It is fun for me, because I could have my villain do something smart.
Now, the villain has lost his powerbase, so he won't be able to return for a while. and by then the players will have leveled and the villain will be irrelevant, so he's still defeated in a way. either that, or the villain will ally himself with someone stronger, and i'll get to reuse his stats.
None of those is a very strong reason, yet somehow the more I think of it, the more I like this outcome. I never pulled this specific scenario at the table, but villains giving up because they realize they can't win? I had plenty of those. generally they either try to ally with the players in exchange to keep their freedom and some measure of power, or they surrender (ok, they'd never do that with your players, knowing their "kill everyone" policy), or they team up with some other villain to stand a chance. In one extreme case of idealistic villains, they challenged the party to a duel they couldn't possibly win as a form of suicide by cop - trying, in defeat, to salvage as much of their honor as possible.

perhaps I like this scenario because it is the only rational thing to do when it's clear the villain can't win, and I hate to have my villains look like fools (except those who are supposed to be fools, of course).
And I absolutely hate playing the "overconfident" card: nothing screams "dunbass" and destroys the image of a clever mastermind more than a "muahaha I'm so powerful, you puny adventurers can't stop me" attitude - followed by a crushing defeat. the villain doesn't just die, he dies looking like a moron. If I introduce a villain with this attitude, I am setting him up to be utterly humiliated. And this is something important for my fun; as a player I want to win by overcoming the obstacles. As a dm, my villains are supposed to lose; but I want them (the serious ones) to at least look really cool while doing it.

That is a very good point. I completely forgot about the last thread.

I should have said the first fight is worth normal XP, the second fight is worth double, the third triple, the fourth quadruple, and the fifth plus five times, that way you are rewarding pushing on instead of punishing resting.

it's the same thing. although you may be able to fool people into thinking it isn't

Ok, so serious question here: What makes you think that my enemies are ineffective?

Most of the advice in this thread is about enemies running away, which isn't more effective, just more annoying, and doesn't really solve the actual problems I am having with dealing with pacing and risk vs. reward in a sandbox game.

My players are certainly convinced that my games are too hard, and most threads the general impression I am getting from the forum community is that I need to town the challenge way down.

Serious answer: it's an impression I got over the course of the thread - following various tangents.

let's see if I can reconstruct how we got there.

you are indeed right, remembering other threads of yours, there are many narrations of dead pcs implyig the fighting to be difficult, potentially deadly.

however, there are many other indications pointing the other way:
- most such accidents are caused by reckless stupidity by your players - weird that you are trying for them to be less reckless on one hand, and more reckless on the other
- even when such accidents happen, and are caused by the players being bloody stupid, they seem to be protected from lasting consequence. here I may be misinterpreting/misremembering
most important for this thread, though, are
- mentions of farming xp imply that the players feel safe in facing some fights, with no risk whatsoever.
- your arguments about depletion of resources and the realistic danger of an arrow on the first or last encounter strongly imply that the first few encounters are not dangerous.
- you wanting your players to take more risks strongly implies that they are not in actual danger.

So, while all of this is admittedly based on inferences, the natural conclusion is that as long as they rest frequently and only fight when fresh, your players are in no danger whatsoever and they can easily breeze the whole dungeon this way.
this concept also tied into the idea of playing the monsters differently to try and adapt to this strategy from the pcs - something, admittedly, that only works for sapient enemies.

[MrSandman]

Ok, so serious question here: What makes you think that my enemies are ineffective?

Most of the advice in this thread is about enemies running away, which isn't more effective, just more annoying, and doesn't really solve the actual problems I am having with dealing with pacing and risk vs. reward in a sandbox game.

Whether running away is more effective or not, really depends on the context. If the goal of the players is to reach place X before event Y, and the goal of the enemies is to acquire a powerful artefact, then fighting as a distraction while one thug steals the artefact and kills their horses i a whole lot more effective than fighting to the death then looting the characters. It is also interesting for people who see the game as more than a series of combats.

From what I remember, your players' ideal game is wave after wave of minions that can be easily dispatched. And if this is still the case, maybe the best way to avoid 15-minute adventuring days would be to have their resources repleted after every encounter. If all their spells were available at the beginning of every encounter, for example, they wouldn't feel the need to rest.

Now, the previous paragraph might seem facetious or disingenuous. But if it's the game that people want to play, it's a valid way of doing it. Honestly, in your situation, I'd just talk to the other players and say: "Hey, we're running this mega-dungeon, but I'd like it not to turn into a 15-MAD. What can we do to prevent that? What would make you happily forgo those rests?"

[Talakeal]

well, the concept of "dramatic experience" and other stuff you said about "heroes defying danger" really screams "movie tropes" to me - while encouraging the players to rest as little as possible look like a speed run. if you say you're not doing that I trust you, but from the way you describe what you want to achieve it's easy to come to those conclusions.

Adventuring is a dangerous business. Cowards don't become adventurers, and idiots don't survive being adventurers.

People on the forum, Quertus primarily, equate being cowardly with being smart, and I am trying to explain that, by definition, a successful adventurer is going to have to be both cunning AND brave.

Resting has nothing to do with narrative or speed-running; its merely gaming the system as most RPGs are built around attrition and don't have a built-in cost for wasting time. In real life spending months of your life traipsing through enemy territory would be absolute suicide, but in an attrition-based RPG that is the safest way to play, it is purely a mechanical exploit that also happens to create a disconnect between the game rules and the underlying fiction of the setting.

It is fun for me, because I could have my villain do something smart.
Now, the villain has lost his powerbase, so he won't be able to return for a while. and by then the players will have leveled and the villain will be irrelevant, so he's still defeated in a way. either that, or the villain will ally himself with someone stronger, and i'll get to reuse his stats.

None of those is a very strong reason, yet somehow the more I think of it, the more I like this outcome. I never pulled this specific scenario at the table, but villains giving up because they realize they can't win? I had plenty of those. generally they either try to ally with the players in exchange to keep their freedom and some measure of power, or they surrender (ok, they'd never do that with your players, knowing their "kill everyone" policy), or they team up with some other villain to stand a chance. In one extreme case of idealistic villains, they challenged the party to a duel they couldn't possibly win as a form of suicide by cop - trying, in defeat, to salvage as much of their honor as possible.

perhaps I like this scenario because it is the only rational thing to do when it's clear the villain can't win, and I hate to have my villains look like fools (except those who are supposed to be fools, of course).

And I absolutely hate playing the "overconfident" card: nothing screams "dunbass" and destroys the image of a clever mastermind more than a "muahaha I'm so powerful, you puny adventurers can't stop me" attitude - followed by a crushing defeat. the villain doesn't just die, he dies looking like a moron. If I introduce a villain with this attitude, I am setting him up to be utterly humiliated. And this is something important for my fun; as a player I want to win by overcoming the obstacles. As a dm, my villains are supposed to lose; but I want them (the serious ones) to at least look really cool while doing it.

I don't think I have ever had that problem.

My players are always convinced they are in way worse shape than they actually are, so it seldom makes the villain look bad.

Typically, a final showdown has high stakes. I am not sure if it is really "moronic" to play your hand if there is a big enough prize on the line and / or a big enough cost for giving up.

Besides, the players don't normally let the villains escape or surrender, so it's not like fighting and hoping to pull of a victory actually increases their odds of survival.


I tend to run games so that the players mechanical edges are on the meta-game level rather than the fiction level. Whether it be buckets o' HP, rerolls, will points, rounding in the players favor, hero points, etc. I generally run them as some combination of survivor bias, a divine plan, or deep reserves of grit that can be called upon when the chips are down, not something that a villain, or anyone else in setting, can actually use to make tactical calculations on. Mostly I do this because I don't like bullies, which is what OP characters, both protagonists and antagonists, invariably become.

I will post later a more in-depth explanation of what this means with some examples from my games.

it's the same thing. although you may be able to fool people into thinking it isn't

I know.

My last thread was about how my haggling system felt terrible because it used wholesale rather than retail as the baseline, which made players feel like they were getting punished rather than being rewarded despite paying the exact same amount for the exact same goods.

E.g. If a sword costs 5 gold to make and sells for 15 gold, and the haggle results in paying 10g for it; it feels like a punishment if you call that "double cost" but a reward if you call it "2/3 retail" despite being the exact same thing.

Rested XP in the World of Warcraft beta is a great example of this sort of nonsense. In short, as a pacing mechanism you got half XP if you played for too long in one stretch. People hated it, so they instead doubled the XP required and ley players earn XP for the first few hours after logging on.

Serious answer: it's an impression I got over the course of the thread - following various tangents.

let's see if I can reconstruct how we got there.

you are indeed right, remembering other threads of yours, there are many narrations of dead pcs implyig the fighting to be difficult, potentially deadly.

however, there are many other indications pointing the other way:
- most such accidents are caused by reckless stupidity by your players - weird that you are trying for them to be less reckless on one hand, and more reckless on the other
- even when such accidents happen, and are caused by the players being bloody stupid, they seem to be protected from lasting consequence. here I may be misinterpreting/misremembering
most important for this thread, though, are
- mentions of farming xp imply that the players feel safe in facing some fights, with no risk whatsoever.
- your arguments about depletion of resources and the realistic danger of an arrow on the first or last encounter strongly imply that the first few encounters are not dangerous.
- you wanting your players to take more risks strongly implies that they are not in actual danger.

So, while all of this is admittedly based on inferences, the natural conclusion is that as long as they rest frequently and only fight when fresh, your players are in no danger whatsoever and they can easily breeze the whole dungeon this way.
this concept also tied into the idea of playing the monsters differently to try and adapt to this strategy from the pcs - something, admittedly, that only works for sapient enemies.

Yes. It's true that players in my game generally only die when they do something stupid.

I have had very few casualties (typically 1-2 a campaign) and very few PC losses (93% of missions are successes, and they win 99.5% of fights), with about 1/3 sessions has a close call. Most people consider this a very hard campaign, although it still seems like a cake walk to me basses on RL sport's statistics or even fictional superheroes.

I personally don't like the idea of random pointless death as it disrupts the characters story* and isn't really fun for the player and I am not sure if that would improve the game for anyone; but I do agree that it is the threat of random pointless death that stops people from doing the 15 MWD so maybe that is a solution; its just one that I would prefer to save for a last resort.


*And I mean this in the emergent way, not in the narrative story structure way.

Whether running away is more effective or not, really depends on the context. If the goal of the players is to reach place X before event Y, and the goal of the enemies is to acquire a powerful artefact, then fighting as a distraction while one thug steals the artefact and kills their horses i a whole lot more effective than fighting to the death then looting the characters. It is also interesting for people who see the game as more than a series of combats.

From what I remember, your players' ideal game is wave after wave of minions that can be easily dispatched. And if this is still the case, maybe the best way to avoid 15-minute adventuring days would be to have their resources repleted after every encounter. If all their spells were available at the beginning of every encounter, for example, they wouldn't feel the need to rest.

Now, the previous paragraph might seem facetious or disingenuous. But if it's the game that people want to play, it's a valid way of doing it. Honestly, in your situation, I'd just talk to the other players and say: "Hey, we're running this mega-dungeon, but I'd like it not to turn into a 15-MAD. What can we do to prevent that? What would make you happily forgo those rests?"

My normal games are objective based and using either my own system or White Wolf's Storyteller and we don't have these issues.

Its only when I try and branch out into a more sandbox style that they come up. And, AFAICT, it comes up in other systems as well given the amount of complaining about the 15 MWD or caster balance or trying to squeeze in the recommended six encounters per adventuring day on the D&D forums.

Now, one of my players, Bob, is a "submission" gamer and relaxes by grinding. He hates challenge, and beating up people who are weaker than him boosts his ego. This is boring for me and the other players, and as I said above, I don't really like bullying.

The problem with doing just a single big battle each day is that it takes a tremendous amount of effort, and is less like an RPG than a game of Warhammer. It is fine sometimes, but it should be rare. Now, I could just use fewer stronger enemies, but that often strains belief, that there are entire squads of high-level characters or packs of huge monsters out there just waiting to be mooks to the PCs and doesn't always fit organically into the world.

Its much easier to have, say, six groups of goblin raiders thane one group of goblin paragons.

[gbaji]

Only in the very broadest sense, and if their only goal was to live and fight another day, they would have avoided combat in the first place.

Players do the 15 MWD so they can cast all of their spells, ensuring they win the fight without any casualties, get treasure and XP, and then fall back.

(Most) Monsters don't have spells. Monsters don't get XP. Monsters don't get treasure from losing a fight.

Thinking like an actual enemy strategist doesn't work because the game mechanics are stacked in the PC's favor.

Then don't stack them? Do the PCs only ever encounter "monsters"? Isn't the world also full of evil sentient NPCs, who presumably have access to the same class/level/spells/items that the PCs have access to? This sounds like a contrivance in the game system you are playing. Treat the NPCs in your game setting as though they are actual real beings trying to do whatever it is that they are trying to do. The rest should just flow from that.

One of my oldest horror stories involved the PCs invading a wizard's toward, and the wizard would periodically pop in, summon some minions, cast a few spells, and then teleport to a different floor. When the PCs finally killed him, they demanded full XP for each time he teleported away, because by 3.5 RAW you get full XP for enemies who run away.

The experience is gained for "defeating the enemy". If a pack of wild animals attacks your camp late at night, and you kill some and drive the rest off, you get experience for "defating the pack of animals". Period. If a group of bandits attacks you while you are on the road, and you kill some and drive others off, then continue on your way unmolested from that point on, then you get experirence for "defeating the bandits". This is what can be broadly thought of as "experience from the encounter". And yeah, in some cases, merely surviving said encounter gets the party some experience (how much should be up to you).

Um... If the wizard is engaging in hit and run tactics against the party, summoning things, tossing them at the party, and then teleporting away and that is his tactic for attack the party has not actually "defeated the wizard" at any point. You might give them a small amount of experience for surviving any given attack, but nowhere near the full exp for actually defeating the wizard, you know, cause they didn't actually do that. This comes back to the concept mentioned earlier "what is the objective of each side"? In your example, the PCs are trying to drive the wizard from his tower (and hopeuflly kill him in the process). The wizard is trying to prevent that from happening. Each side is going to use various tactics to try to achieve the objective. But you don't get experience for "defeating the wizard" until you get to the top of his tower and actually defeat him there. You only get experience for surviving various attacks and/or summong critters along the way.

The PCs objective isn't "kill some summoned monsters and survive an attack by the wizard", right? So there may be *some* experience for that, but the "full exp" comes when they achieve their objective (defeat the wizard). It's not really that complicated IMO.

A realistic gang of bandits are probably not interested in fighting at all, they want to get the maximum profit from the least risk, so they'd do things like 'I'll draw their attention, you grab a sack of flour and run, if they follow, kill the horse.' If a party of armed adventurers passed by, they probably wouldn't attack at all.

Yup. If you were a group of bandits which would you attack:

1. A group of 2 or 3 wagons traveling along with a fat merchant fellow with a floppy hat on, and 2 or 3 bored looking renta-guards walking along side, or...
2. A group of 6-8 people, no wagons, some on horseback, all wearing high quality cloths, shiny armor, fancy wizard robes, with wands staves, etc, glowing weapons, gleaming armor, etc.

You'd just let the second group walk right on by, wouldn't you?

I mean, there was the whole "Haley explaining why banditry isn't worth it to the bandits in the woods" story arc, but she was also acting on the assumption that the bandits would (somewhat foolishly) rob anyone and everyone who travelled through the woods, and that most of these people would be adventurers like the order. But banditry works really well if you ignore the hard targets and focus entirely on big fat wagons of trade goods travelling along. Plenty of wealth to be gained, and most of the time, you probably don't even need to fight (pop up, bows pointed at folks on the road, take their stuff, and let them continue on their way). Again, we ask the question: "What is the objective of the bandits?". Is it to "gain levels and magic items", or "steal money and stay alive doing it"? If they're trying to gain levels and magic items, then they have to (as Haley said) attack increasingly higher level and more powerful opponents in order to support their numbers until they can't do so anymore. If they're just trying to gain wealth, then they should be avoiding anything that grants them much or any experience, and just focusing on getting money.

Er. But at least part of that was a joke about the WBL rules in D&D. So there is that.

In most cases, though, the PCs objectives actually are "defeat some evil bad guys", and "gaining exp and levels" is a secondary goal and methodology along the way to that. That aspect of any game system is part of the abstraction designed to create PC advancement, but I think that GMs should not lose sight of the fact that PCs are the exception and not the rule. Most people do not become more powerful and wealthy by wandering around getting into life or death fights over and over. They just don't. They study their respective professions. They employ those skills to make money. And over time, they become better at those things, even if they've never once had their lives threatend along the way.

I'd make a stock comment about class/level based game systems, but that's yet another topic.

People on the forum, Quertus primarily, equate being cowardly with being smart, and I am trying to explain that, by definition, a successful adventurer is going to have to be both cunning AND brave.

No. Being smart is being smart. If the best way to defeat a huge dungeon full of enemies is to advance into one room, clear it using maiximal abilities/spells/whatever, then retreat back to a safe space, regain expended resources, then advance to the next room and repeat until the dungeon is cleared then that is the smart way to do this. It has nothing to do with cowardice. It has everything to do with "The GM has constructed an environment, and we are using the smartest way to navigate it".

Don't make that the "smart" way to clear the dungeon. It's really that simple. If you want your players to do more than "clear and retreat" tactics, then you have to make that *not* be the smartest way to do things. I've listed about a dozen or so methods to do this just in a "megadungeon" format already. Use one of those methods (or come up with your own). And yeah, the most prominent way to do this is to just have whatever/whomever is living in the dungeon *not* act like complete idiots who serve no purpose other than to sit in their individual rooms and wait to be killed so the PCs can gain loot and exp.

Resting has nothing to do with narrative or speed-running; its merely gaming the system as most RPGs are built around attrition and don't have a built-in cost for wasting time. In real life spending months of your life traipsing through enemy territory would be absolute suicide, but in an attrition-based RPG that is the safest way to play, it is purely a mechanical exploit that also happens to create a disconnect between the game rules and the underlying fiction of the setting.

The game system doesn't put those costs in. You do when designing your dungeon. You decide how the NPCs react to the PCs actions. If you decide that they just sit there in their own rooms and wait for their turn to die, then yeah, you are creating the conditions the players are taking advantage of.

Just don't do that. Why exactly is it that "In real life spending months of your life traipsing through enemy territory would be absolute suicide"? It's because the enemies would notice you both attacking some of their friends and "traipsing around their territory" and will organize some means to track you down and kill you, right? So just do that in your dungeon. Apply real life rules to your NPCs.

Typically, a final showdown has high stakes. I am not sure if it is really "moronic" to play your hand if there is a big enough prize on the line and / or a big enough cost for giving up.

Besides, the players don't normally let the villains escape or surrender, so it's not like fighting and hoping to pull of a victory actually increases their odds of survival.

Well. Usually, when we're talking about some kind of "final showdown" situation, the villian has some stakes involved in some major way (he's pushed all his chips in on whatever evil thing he's doing), and can't just escape. Prior to that point, yeah, he can teleport away from any minor skirmish. But when he's at his center of power, in his fortress of Doom(tm), and has gathered the mystical components needed for his super ritual to his patron demon lord or whatever, and the moon is in the right phase, sacrifices ready, etc, and the PCs burst in to break the whole thing up, he's pretty darn committed at that point.

But yeah, in a lot of cases, you can justify some enemies escaping various encounters if it makes sense for them to do so, and they are physically able to. I do tend to avoid using this too much for anything other than top tier bad guys though. Having every random bandit leader teleport away, and every random pirate captain do the same, and every random slaver, orc chieftan, etc is going to be very frustrating for your players. Save that stuff for the really epic big bads (and honestly, they should rarely be encountered prior to the "final showdown" scenario anyway, right?). Then again, I play in a game system where teleport is extremely rare and only accessible to very wealthy/powerful people. There's simply no such thing as "buy a X use dimension door amulet" kind of things. Just doesn't exist. Only certain deities grant teleportaion spells, and they don't share them outside their worshipers (and those teleports only act as short range line of sight sort of things or long range (go back to your temple) sort of things). Powerful wizards can gain access to teleportation, but it doesn't work like D&D teleport. You must spend power enchanting a target portal, and may later use the spell to teleport to it (or any other portals you have access to and knowledge of). So teleporting out of a dungeon is something that could be done, maybe, if you have a powerful wizard or a priest of the right deity with a heck of a lot of points in teleport (like an absurd amount). But then you have "gone home". Like back to your home town, home (or wherever the adventurers are from). You can't use these spells to go back to somewhere quickly or easily.

Honestly? Teleportation is one of the dumbest things D&D includes in the game (especially how it's implemented), and is probably the one thing most game designers should *not* replicate in their own games. Yet, oddly, many do anyway. Heck. There's a reason Rich intentionally made V specialize such that teleportation wasn't available. It literally breaks settings.

My last thread was about how my haggling system felt terrible because it used wholesale rather than retail as the baseline, which made players feel like they were getting punished rather than being rewarded despite paying the exact same amount for the exact same goods.

E.g. If a sword costs 5 gold to make and sells for 15 gold, and the haggle results in paying 10g for it; it feels like a punishment if you call that "double cost" but a reward if you call it "2/3 retail" despite being the exact same thing.

Uh. Have you ever actually haggled before? You're always haggling over the retail price, because that's what the seller is trying to get from the buyer, and what the buyer is trying to spend the least on (you are "buying" something, right?). The only way "wholesale price" comes in, is that this should be a floor at which the seller should never breach (ie: under virtually all conditions, you're never going to let someone haggle you down below the price you actually spent for it, and proably not down that low anyway). It's something you as the GM may consider when establishing the sellers initial desired price and "floor", but the actual haggle skill should be based on the degree to which the PC can get the NPC to come down from that price (or will get suckered into paying more if they do particularly poorly).

Yeah. I would also argue that any haggling rules that used declared wholesale price as a starting point would be problematic. The PCs don't actually need to know what the NPC paid for something. That's hidden information. Just decide what the NPC would think is a "fair price", then have the PCs roll their skill (perhaps in an opposed check against the NPC, depending on the system), and then adjust that initially desired price accordingly, but never below the floor. Then tell the PCs the price they can buy the thing for after haggling. It's not that difficult.

I personally don't like the idea of random pointless death as it disrupts the characters story* and isn't really fun for the player and I am not sure if that would improve the game for anyone; but I do agree that it is the threat of random pointless death that stops people from doing the 15 MWD so maybe that is a solution; its just one that I would prefer to save for a last resort.

Eh. I think it's "random encounters behind random doors" that pushes that thinking. If the PCs are engaging with a vibrant, dynamic, and realistic (within the constraints of the game) environment, then this should not be the case. They should have a feel for what lies ahead, and how much risk they are taking, and how many resources they have left to manage those things. This is why I said earlier to think of larger adventure components as "chunks" of content that have to be dealt with as a single thing. The players should be aware when an encounter is just a random thing they ran into along the way versus part of something bigger. And usually that's exactly because the encounter will suggest it like: "hey. We wandered into this swamp, and ran into a group of lizard men hunting, and they tossed javelins at us, and then ran/swam off deeper into the swamp, this probably means that there's some unkown sized lizard man tribe living here". Same deal with "entered a large dungeon, ran into a wandering group of goblins, then later encountered some posts with heads on them and some goblin symbols that look like territorial markers on them, so maybe we're entering a part of the dungeon controlled by these goblins". In these cases, the players should employ some stealth, scrying, or other intelligence gathering skills to figure out what they are getting into before proceeding.

If the party responds to those clues by just moving to the first room/encounter, killing them, and then retreating a distance to "rest up", that's probably going to result in the entire tribe/gang/whatever gathering together, using their own stealth/scrying/intelligence-gathering skills to find the party, and then either eliminate them, or set some really really nasty ambushes for them if they return.

The same applies to "in town" adventures. You discover that there's an evil temple operating in town, kidnapping people and sacrificing them (or whatever). The party decides to investigate and finds out that the temple is hidden under an old abandoned "haunted" house that everyone in town avoids (convenient, right?). You would investigate the cult members, try to figure out how many there are, and maybe who they are, and then launch an attack. What you wouldn't do? Walk into the basement of the house, kill the first set of temple guards, then exit, go back to the Inn, and rest up to continue attacking the temple the next day. Why treat a dungeon any differently? They are all "connected content". Treat it that way, and it will really nip that mentality in the bud.

Its only when I try and branch out into a more sandbox style that they come up. And, AFAICT, it comes up in other systems as well given the amount of complaining about the 15 MWD or caster balance or trying to squeeze in the recommended six encounters per adventuring day on the D&D forums.

Sure. That's the nature of many "sandbox" style games (and I'm not reallly a fan of that for a number of reasons anyway). They very much are "hand the PCs a speciic amount of content at a specific rate, based on established rules for doing this". Yeah. That's terrible. If all you are doing as a GM is rolling up a specific numerical amount of "level appropriate encounters" designed to match the correct number for a party that size, then you're really just phoning in the job of GM. I mean, there are computer games that can generate that random content just fine. If I want that kind of game, I don't need to go to your table to play it.

I expect a GM to actually write content.

Now, one of my players, Bob, is a "submission" gamer and relaxes by grinding. He hates challenge, and beating up people who are weaker than him boosts his ego. This is boring for me and the other players, and as I said above, I don't really like bullying.

The problem with doing just a single big battle each day is that it takes a tremendous amount of effort, and is less like an RPG than a game of Warhammer. It is fine sometimes, but it should be rare. Now, I could just use fewer stronger enemies, but that often strains belief, that there are entire squads of high-level characters or packs of huge monsters out there just waiting to be mooks to the PCs and doesn't always fit organically into the world.

Its much easier to have, say, six groups of goblin raiders thane one group of goblin paragons.

I think you are still thinking in terms of "X encounters of Y difficulty based on level/size of group". Stop doing that. Think in terms of "what would be here?". If the answer is "A vast lizard man tribe consisting of 10,000 members, complete with powerful shamans for spell support, and the ability to track and trap the entire swamp the PCs want to travel through", then that's what's there. The PCs had better figure out a way to get through the swamp that isn't just "kill off the swamp denizens one patch ground at a time", right? That's where "take the time to learn the environment" comes into play. And yes, where you as the GM can shine by also creating some things that these NPCs might want in return for passage through their territory.

Now maybe it's "small group of bandits in the hills", or "20 or so cultists operating under the haunted house", or even "small orc war band". Those are things the PCs should be able to handle in a single "chunk". And yeah, you can do some math in terms of how tough that chunk of enemies should be. But I never think in terms of size/number of encounters for the PCs. I think in terms of numbers/resources the NPCs have, and then how those would reasonably be deployed at any given time. And then adjust those based on changes, especially based on PC actions. Which means that if the PCs are reasonably smart, they can burn through the bandits, or cultists, or orcs, taking them out in reasonably bite sized pieces. But if they are dumb, they will face much more difficult situations. But I'm not determining that ahead of time. I'm just determining what is there, and letting the decisions of the PCs determine how they engage with those things.

And yeah. This means that sometimes players will bite off far more than they can actually chew. You're free as the GM to warn them ("um... maybe you should find out how many lizard men are in this swamp before you just start killing them", or "um... maybe attacking this one thieves guild safe house in this big city is going to result in a whole lot of other folks being mad at you"). But if they foolishly do things like this, you have to let them suffer the consequences. That's how they learn. And yeah, you can be a "nice GM" and find ways to give them outs when/if they do stuff like this, but again that's a learning experience for the players and will make your game better over time.

If the players learn to expect that they will never ever encounter anything that is beyond their ability to defeat, then yeah, the only way they can ever "lose" is if they attempt to have more encounters per day than they should. So you should not be surprised that their way of dealing with this risk is to avoid having any more encounters per day than necessary. If, instead, literally anything they encounter could turn out to be far far more than they can possibly handle, then they'll learn to think and ask questions first instead of just treating everything as an enemy to be defeated for exp/loot. The "caution" comes in learning what is in front of them first. Then deciding if they can handle it. And then having to handle "all of it" (or risk response/retribution/reprisal/whatever), which may/should involve multiple encounters between rests.

[Talakeal]

Then don't stack them? Do the PCs only ever encounter "monsters"? Isn't the world also full of evil sentient NPCs, who presumably have access to the same class/level/spells/items that the PCs have access to? This sounds like a contrivance in the game system you are playing. Treat the NPCs in your game setting as though they are actual real beings trying to do whatever it is that they are trying to do. The rest should just flow from that.

Yes, every RPG I have ever played includes contrivances in the PCs favor.

In D&D, characters need buckets of magic items to keep up. If all the opponents have buckets of magic items, then the game goes into an insane monte haul wealth spiral.

In White Wolf games, if you give the NPC's full PC resources, then every fight takes two hours and the players whine incessantly about having to ration out their resources while the enemies can burn through a month of resources in a single combat. (Heck, my players whine about the monsters being at full HP when encountered).

Its also extremely boring for the PCs to encounter NPCs over and over again and a pain in the butt for the DM to have to make an NPC party for each encounter, which is why, imo, modern games no longer even attempt PC NPC symmetry.

No. Being smart is being smart. If the best way to defeat a huge dungeon full of enemies is to advance into one room, clear it using maximal abilities/spells/whatever, then retreat back to a safe space, regain expended resources, then advance to the next room and repeat until the dungeon is cleared then that is the smart way to do this. It has nothing to do with cowardice. It has everything to do with "The GM has constructed an environment, and we are using the smartest way to navigate it".

Don't make that the "smart" way to clear the dungeon. It's really that simple. If you want your players to do more than "clear and retreat" tactics, then you have to make that *not* be the smartest way to do things. I've listed about a dozen or so methods to do this just in a "mega-dungeon" format already. Use one of those methods (or come up with your own). And yeah, the most prominent way to do this is to just have whatever/whomever is living in the dungeon *not* act like complete idiots who serve no purpose other than to sit in their individual rooms and wait to be killed so the PCs can gain loot and exp.

Optimal play =/= smart characters.

As a quick example, in most video games players will jump off cliffs because it is faster than waiting for the elevator / taking the stairs. Their character will then take damage, and heal up. And if the player misjudges the fall and the character dies, they just load their saved game.

Does this mean that, in the fiction, smart people are always risking pain, dismemberment, and death jumping off cliffs to avoid waiting for the elevator?

For a more direct example, most RPGs have some sort of luck mechanic to save player's lives. Fate points in WHFRP or Lord of the Rings, Destiny in my system, inflated HP totals in D&D, Light Side points in Star Wars, etc. These exist on the meta level, and serve to save the player's lives. The characters don't know that they have these things (in most systems), from their perspective the first goblin's sword hurts just as much and is just as likely to strike a fatal blow as the tenth goblin's sword, and so it is stupid to expose yourself to more risks as a result. And heck, even if you were aware that PCs are extra lucky, are you really going to test that theory when it is also equally possible that you just happened to survive through random chance so far?

Exploiting mechanics that exist at the meta-level is not the same thing as playing smart, anymore that it is smart to bring loaded dice to the table or peak at the GM's notes while he is in the bathroom.

A lot of the "15 MWD" problem comes from that. Players don't experience their character's pain, hunger, boredom, fear, discomfort, etc. They don't feel the character's lives slip away as they spend months walking the same road and eating the same stale iron rations over and over again. They don't care that every day they dally the evil overlord conquers another kingdom dooming its people to torture and slavery and being eaten by monsters. They don't miss their loved ones back in town and feel anxious over the terrible things that might happen to them (or already be happening to them) should they take too long.


But, in short, I do agree with you. If the game is designed well, there shouldn't be this big divide between smart OOC tactics and smart IC tactics, which is why I still create threads like these rather than simply listening to the most common advice which is something along the lines of "The problem is the player's attitude, not the mechanics."

Yeah. I would also argue that any haggling rules that used declared wholesale price as a starting point would be problematic. The PCs don't actually need to know what the NPC paid for something. That's hidden information. Just decide what the NPC would think is a "fair price", then have the PCs roll their skill (perhaps in an opposed check against the NPC, depending on the system), and then adjust that initially desired price accordingly, but never below the floor. Then tell the PCs the price they can buy the thing for after haggling. It's not that difficult.

That is exactly how the system does work.

The problem is that in real life the "floor" is hidden information, but in the game the players can look in the book and see what said "floor" is, and will thus always feel ripped off if they pay more than it.

Stores will try and get as much as they think they can get away with, retail price is just an illusion to make people feel better about their purchases. Like, literally today I bought a bottle of wine in a liquor store at their 12.99 sticker price. Then I went into the grocery store next door and saw the same bottle of wine with a sticker price of 19.99 "on sale" for 12.99.

The game system doesn't put those costs in. You do when designing your dungeon. You decide how the NPCs react to the PCs actions. If you decide that they just sit there in their own rooms and wait for their turn to die, then yeah, you are creating the conditions the players are taking advantage of.

Just don't do that. Why exactly is it that "In real life spending months of your life traipsing through enemy territory would be absolute suicide"? It's because the enemies would notice you both attacking some of their friends and "traipsing around their territory" and will organize some means to track you down and kill you, right? So just do that in your dungeon. Apply real life rules to your NPCs.

It doesn't have to be, no.

As I said upthread, in real life your first gun fight of the day is as likely to see you dead as your tenth. In RPGs you have mechanics that save your life.

In real life, if you could choose between 6 shootouts in one day, or one shootout a day for three months, the first one is a much safer bet. In an RPG, go with the latter every time. This is the disconnect.

In my last campaign they were trekking across a wilderness that is roughly as dangerous as Skull Island from King Kong, not an active enemy war-zone. The things they fought were primarily big monsters and environmental hazards rather than organized enemy armies. The idea was the PCs would hear about a treasure in the wilderness, get to it expending as few resources as possible, and then pull back. What the players did instead was retreat to town after every random encounter and only go for the treasure if they made a near flawless run. So, they ended up having far MORE combats, but because every combat was their first combat of the day, they had zero potentially lethal combats.

I think you are still thinking in terms of "X encounters of Y difficulty based on level/size of group". Stop doing that. Think in terms of "what would be here?". If the answer is "A vast lizard man tribe consisting of 10,000 members, complete with powerful shamans for spell support, and the ability to track and trap the entire swamp the PCs want to travel through", then that's what's there. The PCs had better figure out a way to get through the swamp that isn't just "kill off the swamp denizens one patch ground at a time", right? That's where "take the time to learn the environment" comes into play. And yes, where you as the GM can shine by also creating some things that these NPCs might want in return for passage through their territory.

Now maybe it's "small group of bandits in the hills", or "20 or so cultists operating under the haunted house", or even "small orc war band". Those are things the PCs should be able to handle in a single "chunk". And yeah, you can do some math in terms of how tough that chunk of enemies should be. But I never think in terms of size/number of encounters for the PCs. I think in terms of numbers/resources the NPCs have, and then how those would reasonably be deployed at any given time. And then adjust those based on changes, especially based on PC actions. Which means that if the PCs are reasonably smart, they can burn through the bandits, or cultists, or orcs, taking them out in reasonably bite sized pieces. But if they are dumb, they will face much more difficult situations. But I'm not determining that ahead of time. I'm just determining what is there, and letting the decisions of the PCs determine how they engage with those things.

And yeah. This means that sometimes players will bite off far more than they can actually chew. You're free as the GM to warn them ("um... maybe you should find out how many lizard men are in this swamp before you just start killing them", or "um... maybe attacking this one thieves guild safe house in this big city is going to result in a whole lot of other folks being mad at you"). But if they foolishly do things like this, you have to let them suffer the consequences. That's how they learn. And yeah, you can be a "nice GM" and find ways to give them outs when/if they do stuff like this, but again that's a learning experience for the players and will make your game better over time.

If the players learn to expect that they will never ever encounter anything that is beyond their ability to defeat, then yeah, the only way they can ever "lose" is if they attempt to have more encounters per day than they should. So you should not be surprised that their way of dealing with this risk is to avoid having any more encounters per day than necessary. If, instead, literally anything they encounter could turn out to be far far more than they can possibly handle, then they'll learn to think and ask questions first instead of just treating everything as an enemy to be defeated for exp/loot. The "caution" comes in learning what is in front of them first. Then deciding if they can handle it. And then having to handle "all of it" (or risk response/retribution/reprisal/whatever), which may/should involve multiple encounters between rests.

That would be really great.

But in my experiance, balance is everything.

I have never sat at a table that would allow it.

The players I have played with have always been obsessed with balance, and would consider the above to be the equivalent of showing up to poker night with marked cards.

It would be the last game, and for years to come they would tell stories of what a horrible dirty cheater I was.

[ahyangyi]

That would be really great.

But in my experiance, balance is everything.

I have never sat at a table that would allow it.

The players I have played with have always been obsessed with balance, and would consider the above to be the equivalent of showing up to poker night with marked cards.

It would be the last game, and for years to come they would tell stories of what a horrible dirty cheater I was.

Well, decisions should have consequences. If we destroy that kind of causal relationship in the name of balance, then the world no longer has causal relationships.

[Vahnavoi]

At some point, there's going to have to be a jumping off point from reality. Your average adventuring party isn't equipped to take and look after prisoners, and gameplay wise it would be annoying for a party member to have to sit out the adventure because they have to guard them.

Great, so employ a gameplay conceit that doesn't require a player to sit out the adventure for that reason. Such as a Pokeball or, you know, restraints that allow dragging the prisoner with them.

Put differently, these types of arguments are based on only considering "average adventurer" of past games, and only one format of dealing with aftermath of combat. They aren't compelling. Mostly, they just show lack of imagination.

Realistic tactics tend to be annoying to deal with, because they're designed to work, while gameplay tactics are designed to give the players at least a fighting chance.

Both halves of this are just truisms. Realistic tactics and players having a fighting chance are not mutually exclusive - just make a scenario where players have a realistic fighting chance.

The argument seems to be based on the idea that "tactics that work" means "enemies win, players lose". This is horse hockey. That's not what realism means. To wit, realism means attempt to present reality as it is, without romance, idealization or abstraction. Tactics, means doing what you can with what you have, in pursuit of objectives set by strategy. Put together, "realistic tactics" means enemies doing what they think would be best for their goals, given their actual position, knowledge and resources. Nowhere is it guaranteed that this doesn't give players a fighting chance. It's only annoying to deal with, in the same sense as dealing with an actual intelligent opponent in a real scenario would be. Case in point:

A realistic gang of bandits are probably not interested in fighting at all, they want to get the maximum profit from the least risk, so they'd do things like 'I'll draw their attention, you grab a sack of flour and run, if they follow, kill the horse.' If a party of armed adventurers passed by, they probably wouldn't attack at all.

And what about this is supposed to be so annoying to deal with? The bandits won't attack visibly armed strangers? This is great news! Now, even a party that would be weak in a fight can dress up in fake armor and even carry fake weapons to lower their chance of being attacked. A stronger party, maybe one that has been hired to capture the bandits, can instead dress up like civilians to lure them out of hiding. A savvy negotiator might be be able to convince the bandit to give up banditry altogether, by explaining that joining the party as retainers will net them a share of treasure while lowering risks for all involved.

Part of that is straight out of Art of War, by the way. "All warfare is based on deception" and "When you are weak, act strong, when you are strong, act weak." This is what realist tactics actually does: allows players to use non-game resources and ordinary strategic reasoning to come up with valid plans.

Of course, we can presume a prospecting bandit leader may have read Art of War or its equivalent. Which means they're now aware not all "armed adventurers" can defend themselves, and not all civilians are what they seem. Which means they no longer have a single safe tactic. Barring further information, there's a rock-paper-scissors like dynamic, where whatever he does, there's a chance his mark chose the superior tactic, and he's going to lose.

Or, maybe a realist bandit is not that smart. Maybe they're a desperate, illiterate commoner who can't think far enough to spot a deception and will walk into a trap every time. But whichever it is, nowhere does it follow that the players don't have a fighting chance against the bandits.

The players here are exploiting gameplay mechanics, in the knowledge that their enemies will not. But if you do a mechanical fix that makes that less effective, they will probably just double down and be even more cautious.

This depends on the specific fix, and whether players are smart enough to realize what are efficient tactics in the first place. Again, there's a rock-paper-scissors type dynamic here. Double down when the fix makes your cautious strategy worse? Bam, you lose. Savvy player, at this point, will re-evaluate their approach. Less savvy players double down further, and lose harder.

---

1) Because players like to feel special.
2) Because it is tedious to track and have to whittle down meta resources and HP bloat from enemies who don't exist when they are off camera.
3) Because the game is unfulfilling for everyone involved if it ends suddenly without resolution.

These are all bad reasons to withhold from thinking like an enemy strategist and considering what their goals and objectives are. I added in numbering so I don't have to chop the quote blocks so small. Let's go through with them in order:

1) this is not mutually exclusive with strategy. If anything, thinking like an enemy strategist can directly contribute to this feeling. If specialness of player characters is known? Now they are worthy of special consideration. If specialness of player characters is not known? Now they get to enjoy being the unexpected factor that was not considered in the enemy's plan. This ties to this statement of yours: "The players tend to have an unusual concentration of supernatural abilities. That is known." Known to who? You don't need a system level statement about whether these abilities are known to enemies. You can, and likely should, vary it from enemy to enemy.

2) You are your game's designer, how tedious tracking offscreen enemies is, is on you. There are lot of ways to make this fast and simple. For example, I've talked of keeping calendar before. One of the faster way to track enemy recovery is to jot down the date when they are first fought. Then, if the enemy force survives, you estimate how much time it takes for them to recover, and jot down that future date. Then? You just don't worry about it much. You only need to check their state when they are actually encountered again - if it's before recovery date, they are at the strength players left them at, if it's after, they fully recovered. Thinking like an enemy strategist, considering what objectives they have and how they are pursuing them, does not actually require tracking everything they do in the same detail as the player characters. Furthermore, where mechanics and goals are symmetric, you can literally use what your players do as a model for what the enemies do. When you do this, players, with their own actions throughout normal gameplay, supply you with details for how enemy troops would also act.

3) Thinking like an enemy strategist does not lead to games ending suddenly or without resolution as any kind of general rule, so what are you even on about? What kind of goals and objectives are you implicitly assuming, for this to happen? Remember, the context is explicitly looking past simply killing the player characters or reducing their resources by some quota.

The rest of it is stuff handled on a mechanical level and mostly represents survivor bias, this is not something that is known to anyone in setting except for those few wizards who can read people's destinies.

Which means, you can ignore it when strategizing from the enemy's viewpoint. All that means is that the player characters win a bit more often than they should based on what the enemy knows, but this is of no concern, because that is what you want.

Only if you greatly restrict yourself. I would wager less than 5% of the monster manual has spells that recharge on a per day rest.

Even if you restrict yourself to enemies that share type with player characters, you have dozens of options with hundreds of different permutations - enough for more games than most people ever care to play. The actual point, which your comment doesn't address in the slightest, is that you, as game and scenario designer, make the choice of who the relevant opponents are for your players.

And I would wager that those monsters who do are already balanced around going nova and casting their most powerful spells every fight.

Functionally, a monster that attacks, casts its most powerful spells, and then runs away and repeats the same day, is just a slightly easier version of having two encounters against two seperate monsters.

Neither of these holds well even in D&D, and don't hold for other games as any sort of general rule. In fact, often it's the opposite: in several games, if enemies opened up with their most powerful attacks, players would just lose. They are deliberately coded to not do that just to give the players a chance, the balance point is literally reverse of what you wager. Since you are your game's designer, which way it goes is a decision you have to make, and looking at other games isn't particularly instructive if you don't know why they do things their way.

But, even if you opt to go with a model that boils down to "just a slightly easier version of having two encounters against two seperate monsters", so what? That's not some terrible calamity that you need to avoid at all costs.

Also, monsters can't have the same access to magic items as player characters because then the power curve becomes exponential and unsustainable as every victory doubles the player's loot.

Angband already teaches by example how to avert this, and I already told you how. Or are you talking about D&D? Because what you say is just false. If party has X resources and enemy has X resources, the players end up with 2X resources upon victory. If enemy recovers up to X resources, then next victory gets players up to 3X resources. You seem to assume the enemies would need to get 2X resources as well, but this is an unnecessary extra step. Also, since many item costs are exponential, 2X resources does not get players double power; they cannot, say, wear two pieces of leather armor for double bonuses, and if they sell one, they won't even get enough money to upgrade to the next better type of armor. These principles apply for both mundane and magic items.

The mathematical trend is towards diminishing returns, not exponential growth.

For contrast, if enemies do always get equal resources to players? That is called an equal encounter. There might be an exponential curve on paper, but in practice, players end up in fights that are just as hard as the ones before. It's only "unsustainable" in the sense that at some point, players beat the last enemy that matters and complete their campaign, or the enemies beat them and the game ends. You know, business as usual.

And yeah, I guess you could say I am causing the asymmetry in my system, but that's because I am trying to create a fantasy world with a variety and mythical monsters rather than just a collection of homicidal wizards.

That's fair.

It's not an argument against thinking like an enemy strategists and giving those mythical monsters goals and objectives beyond killing player characters or reducing their resources by set quota.

When I am playing the monsters I am thinking like a strategist.

When I am setting up the scenario, I am looking for one that will result in a fun adventure; not one where the PCs are murdered in their sleep without a chance to fight back or where the local militia has already killed all the monsters and tells the PCs to keep walking.

Great, so you DO understand thinking like an enemy strategist does not mean being a strawman who only sets up unwinnable scenarios. Why are you arguing with me, again?

Monsters that run away are guaranteed to be a pain in the butt for everyone involved. The PCs will chase them down and kill them, and will not have fun doing it. It doesn't actually gain the monsters anything, they are still dead, all it did was save the PCs some resources in exchange for wasting time. (Honestly.... this sounds a lot like the 15MWD itself).

Now, obviously, this assumes a normal scenario. I have had several situations where it made tactical sense for the monsters to fall back and regroup for a future attack, and these few occasions are what the players always point to when they justify their genocidal take no prisoners scorched earth tactics.

You are, again, suffering from brain rot caused by your particular players. What fleeing gains for the monster, is a chance of survival, because not all opponents will chase them down. Why? Because it's not "fun" for the pursuer, it is work, with additional risks that the pursuer can avoid by letting the monster go. Your players just aren't savvy enough to see this far, and cannot distinguish a monster that's no longer a threat from one that is. Which is why they end up doing things like cornering a fleeing beast to its lair and getting mauled by it, when they could've walked away.

In short, they are bad at this. Stop appealing to worst instincts of your players.

Why do you assume [the fleeing wizard] shouldn't have been worth XP?

The wizard was two or three levels above the party, it's just that because they "defeated" him half a dozen times they demanded a ludicrous amount of XP for an enemy who was two or three levels above them.

Because if you were okay with the fights giving experience, the system was working exactly as it's made to work, and your players were just reminding you to give them their due. No horror story there, just business as usual.

I am curious what this would actually look like in practice though, especially how it would actually work to pace the game. To me it just seems like slower easier fights that give less XP and require more bookkeeping, so I am probably missing something.

Enemies having a chance at fleeing or surrendering at 20% actually means individual fights end faster, other things being equal; I would know, given I play under rules where morale leads to this happening. If 80% of XP is gained when they do, this also means faster advancement - this, I don't see in my games, but the reason is because XP given for fights is low compared to what is required for level up. (Farming hence does not work, because the number of combats required to advance in level is so high a character is overwhelmingly likely to die before amassing enough experience.)

Book keeping does increase, but the increase is small - see the calendar trick I explained above.

Beyond this, it's hard to say, because it depends on what strategy and tactics players choose. If they follow the strategy I outlined for Angband, each individual fight takes less time, but overall amount of repeating fights goes up as the players try to stave off diminishing returns. In the long term, if they're savvy, they move on when diminishing returns means they no longer get anything out of fighting the same opponent. If they're not, they fight the same opponent until they die of random chance, boredom or old age.

I did think of a system where the first encounter is worth 1/4 XP, the second 1/3, the third 1/2, the fourth 3/4, and then the fith and beyond give full XP. That might produce similar results.

That's just gambling and you're hoping on players to double down. Instead of fractions, you could just give a multiplier for subsequent encounters, the only difference is phrasing. Risk-averse players will still just do one encounter, neither winning big nor losing big.

[GloatingSwine]

Great, so employ a gameplay conceit that doesn't require a player to sit out the adventure for that reason. Such as a Pokeball or, you know, restraints that allow dragging the prisoner with them.

The real question is "is the NPC an interesting prisoner?"

Parties are only going to take prisoners on special occasions because most NPCs aren't going to be interesting enough to take prisoner. The only thing a prisoner can do is be inconvenient until cashed in on.

[Vahnavoi]

Yes, which is why franchises such as Pokemon and Shin Megami Tensei devote a lot of time and effort on character design and various associated mechanics, so that you want to capture the enemy. Though I'm rather skeptical of your statement of what prisoners can or cannot do. Even real militaries have found various uses for PoWs, even using them as negotiating chips involves several different tactics. A prisoner doesn't have to be left to rot in a corner in chains, people.

[GloatingSwine]

Yes, which is why franchises such as Pokemon and Shin Megami Tensei devote a lot of time and effort on character design and various associated mechanics, so that you want to capture the enemy. Though I'm rather skeptical of your statement of what prisoners can or cannot do. Even real militaries have found various uses for PoWs, even using them as negotiating chips involves several different tactics. A prisoner doesn't have to be left to rot in a corner in chains, people.

You want to capture the first copy of each critter you see, but after that they're just another one and you want to crunch through them as efficiently as possible.

And sure, you can cash in prisoners sometimes but do you know in any given generic encounter whether you'll get anything valuable for doing so? Probably not, because it's situational based on the GM not system level. So unless the situation gives a realistic expectation of value in advance (a bounty for an infamous bandit, a ransom for an enemy noble, etc.) players aren't even going to think of taking a prisoner when all they can do is be annoyed by them trying to escape (because you will note you didn't actually present any interesting things they can do whilst they are still prisoners, only in the manner of their disposal).

[Vahnavoi]

I'm well aware it's a matter of scenario design, which is why I've been telling to people to pay attention to scenario design. That includes players. Why the hell do people presume players come up with their tactics based on spherical-cows-in-a-vacuum system level considerations instead of the situation actually presented to them?

[King of Nowhere]

I have had very few casualties (typically 1-2 a campaign) and very few PC losses (93% of missions are successes, and they win 99.5% of fights), with about 1/3 sessions has a close call.

you actually kept track of statistics like that? 1/3 may just be eyeballing, but 93% looks oddly specific

That would be really great.

But in my experiance, balance is everything.

I have never sat at a table that would allow it.

The players I have played with have always been obsessed with balance, and would consider the above to be the equivalent of showing up to poker night with marked cards.

It would be the last game, and for years to come they would tell stories of what a horrible dirty cheater I was.

even if the danger is telegraphed?

I mean, I create a world with set-up powers. there are high level people around. if you mess with the evil empire, the evil empire top echelon include a 20th level party, and while they are certainly not going to show up for you when you're a nobody dealing minor acts of resistance, the point stands that the empire has resouces and if you make too much noise, they will use them.
even when the players are level 20 with demigod status and are the most powerful people in the world, the evil empire still controls enough mid-high level people that they could easily swarm the party and destroy them, if the party gave them an opportunity. the party had to bring alliances to defeat the evil empire.

but the thing is, the players know it. their bosses told them all they need to know about the evil empire and the powers it can call. they know that, after they just defeated the mid-level party sent after them, they best flee, because soon somebody stronger may teleport in place.
and when they decided to skip the line of increasingly stronger foes and directly try to ambush the empire top assassin, they got their asses handed to them and they didn't complain; they knew exactly that she was a 20th level rogue/assassin, they knew her fighting style, they even had a good idea of her items, they decided to try anyway, trusting in the advantage of surprise and planning (to their credit, a similar tactic worked in a previous campaign, and they got totallly level-inappropriate loot for it).
So they knew they were taking a high-risk, high-reward venture. they could even see what went wrong: they didn't factor in the rogue's stellar spot and listen checks, letting her become aware of the ambush and turn it on the party. they have nothing to blame but their own planning, and perhaps the cleric's poor roll on move silently. their reactions varied from "it was worth a try" to "we should have thought that as a rogue she'd be likely to have high perception" to "when she killed everone in the party capable of teleport, we were totally badass managing to disengage anyway!"

if the party wandered into a swamp, and met a goblin hunter, and surprise! the goblin was 20th level because you rolled 100 on the random encounter table, that would be a completely different feeling. this would truly be character death on a random roll, or apparently by dm fiat.

if your party knew in advance that a villain is too strong for them, and had any chance to steer clear from him, do you think they would still get angry at you if they decided to face him anyway?
[knowing your party, i expect the answer is yes, but worth asking]
you say that death can happen if it stems from a player doing something really stooopid, and I'd call "insisting on picking a fight with someone who's clearly out of your league" as pretty spot on.

[Talakeal]

So, I played again.

Man, the advice about having the NPCs react to the PCs was golden.

It doesn't always make sense, there are large sections of the dungeon which are inhabited by animals or undead, but the first floor is kobold territory, and when the players hit them and fell back, it gave the kobolds the chance to fortify their domain and go all Tucker's on the PCs.

Long story short, the PCs actually surrendered to kobolds! My. Players. Surrendered. !!!!!!!

They worked out a deal with the kobolds, although they are still planning on betraying them when they get strong enough.

Not sure what, if any, lesson they took from it though.

you actually kept track of statistics like that? 1/3 may just be eyeballing, but 93% looks oddly specific.

As I run primarily home brew systems I tend to keep track of data like that as part of the play-testing process. I also keep at least an outline of every session as I like to do campaign diaries, primarily h to keep the story consistent in my head and to practice prose writing.

That being said, the 93% number is a few years out of date and is probably not exact anymore, but the win to loss ratio is still right around 1/20.

you actually kept track of statistics like that? 1/3 may just be eyeballing, but 93% looks oddly specific


even if the danger is telegraphed?

I mean, I create a world with set-up powers. there are high level people around. if you mess with the evil empire, the evil empire top echelon include a 20th level party, and while they are certainly not going to show up for you when you're a nobody dealing minor acts of resistance, the point stands that the empire has resouces and if you make too much noise, they will use them.
even when the players are level 20 with demigod status and are the most powerful people in the world, the evil empire still controls enough mid-high level people that they could easily swarm the party and destroy them, if the party gave them an opportunity. the party had to bring alliances to defeat the evil empire.

but the thing is, the players know it. their bosses told them all they need to know about the evil empire and the powers it can call. they know that, after they just defeated the mid-level party sent after them, they best flee, because soon somebody stronger may teleport in place.
and when they decided to skip the line of increasingly stronger foes and directly try to ambush the empire top assassin, they got their asses handed to them and they didn't complain; they knew exactly that she was a 20th level rogue/assassin, they knew her fighting style, they even had a good idea of her items, they decided to try anyway, trusting in the advantage of surprise and planning (to their credit, a similar tactic worked in a previous campaign, and they got totallly level-inappropriate loot for it).
So they knew they were taking a high-risk, high-reward venture. they could even see what went wrong: they didn't factor in the rogue's stellar spot and listen checks, letting her become aware of the ambush and turn it on the party. they have nothing to blame but their own planning, and perhaps the cleric's poor roll on move silently. their reactions varied from "it was worth a try" to "we should have thought that as a rogue she'd be likely to have high perception" to "when she killed everone in the party capable of teleport, we were totally badass managing to disengage anyway!"

if the party wandered into a swamp, and met a goblin hunter, and surprise! the goblin was 20th level because you rolled 100 on the random encounter table, that would be a completely different feeling. this would truly be character death on a random roll, or apparently by dm fiat.

if your party knew in advance that a villain is too strong for them, and had any chance to steer clear from him, do you think they would still get angry at you if they decided to face him anyway?
[knowing your party, i expect the answer is yes, but worth asking]
you say that death can happen if it stems from a player doing something really stooopid, and I'd call "insisting on picking a fight with someone who's clearly out of your league" as pretty spot on.

I tend to run linear adventures.

That being said, the players can and often do go off the rails and provoke someone or something that is way beyond their capabilities, and when that happens I don't usually pull my punches. Bob and Dave in particular doen't like being told what to do and will often suicide their characters to prove a point by attacking a powerful NPC whgo asks them not to do something.

[Satinavian]

People on the forum, Quertus primarily, equate being cowardly with being smart, and I am trying to explain that, by definition, a successful adventurer is going to have to be both cunning AND brave.

The problem is that you don't demand that the characters are cunning and brave, you demand that the players are cunning and brave. And if the players' plans happen to be not particularly smart, you let them fail and tell them it is their fault. And if the players are not sure about their abilities and act with caution, you complain about characters acting not brave enough.


The players won't get smarter nor braver just because you want them to. They likely never will.


If you want to test the characters, use the character stats. There are systems out there that give stat bonuses when being weakened or hurt or outnumbered. The idea is that this will incentivice the players to take more risk and make them more able to triumph in the end. There are systems where being smart (or lucky) let's you invoke certain boni on the fly whenever you need them. Because you are retroactively prepared for it (or your luck strikes again).

That is how you could try to make the trope of the cunning and brave adventurer happen. Not by demanding that the players action conform with your idea of roleplaying adventurers in sight of it being neither mechanically benefitial nor necessarily how they imagine their characters.

[Talakeal]

The problem is that you don't demand that the characters are cunning and brave, you demand that the players are cunning and brave. And if the players' plans happen to be not particularly smart, you let them fail and tell them it is their fault. And if the players are not sure about their abilities and act with caution, you complain about characters acting not brave enough.


The players won't get smarter nor braver just because you want them to. They likely never will.


If you want to test the characters, use the character stats. There are systems out there that give stat bonuses when being weakened or hurt or outnumbered. The idea is that this will incentivize the players to take more risk and make them more able to triumph in the end. There are systems where being smart (or lucky) let's you invoke certain boni on the fly whenever you need them. Because you are retroactively prepared for it (or your luck strikes again).

That is how you could try to make the trope of the cunning and brave adventurer happen. Not by demanding that the players action conform with your idea of role-playing adventurers in sight of it being neither mechanically beneficial nor necessarily how they imagine their characters.

IMO player skill should have an impact on performance. That is a fundamental aspect of playing a game.

My players are not dumb. In fact, they can be downright brilliant when they want to be. Honestly, dumbing down the monsters so that the players skill / effort doesn't result in increased effectiveness is exactly the sort of "rubber-banding" that Quertus (and others) are so vehemently against.

As for brave, that isn't for the players, that's for the characters. The players tell me they want to play a game about action and adventure, and cowardly people don't go on action-filled adventures (except temporarily with damn good incentive). Bringing a cowardly character to such a game is just not appropriate anymore than, say, bringing in a axe-wielding barbarian to a modern police procedural game or a paladin to a mafia game.


Edit: You know, I am having trouble actually picturing what a game would look like where players couldn't play so poorly they lose, or where they can't be blamed for doing so. Like, I can't actually imagine how an RPG would work unless the GM fudges everything like crazy and throws consistency and verisimilitude out the window. Nor can I imagine a single player video game or traditional multi-player board game (either competitive or co-op) that would work like that.

[ahyangyi]

I just played some ToME4 this weekend. Not my favorite type of roguelike so far, but it does showcase how a roguelike with absolutely zero resource management can be done. If you have trouble imagining a game world where "throwing all your power" does not lead to guaranteed win, then playing this might help. (It never troubled me, because the enemy also throws all their powers, why would one side magically win?)

Anyways, I think "my players are smart when they tried" is a worse attitude than "my players are dumb". If you want roleplaying and/or realism, shouldn't you downplay the "smart" thing?

And, what is "lose"? If my character is forced to choose between death or a deal with a devil, is death "lose" and the deal "win"?

[Talakeal]

Anyways, I think "my players are smart when they tried" is a worse attitude than "my players are dumb". If you want roleplaying and/or realism, shouldn't you downplay the "smart" thing?

From a simulationist perspective, yes. And that is normally my mindset.

My players tend to be more gamist and look at things from a perspective of challenge and balance.

Often times, it is hard to draw the line between the two though.

For example, my character knows what she is doing in a fight, but her tactics are limited by what I, the player, can come up with. And I don't think the game would be improved by the DM imposing what they feel to be superior tactics upon me.

And, honestly, if you are playing a stupid character and they die a stupid death, that's fine by me. But I have a feeling that if you get the rest of the party killed as a result they won't be so happy, and most of my players won't accept mistakes and will blame me for their "stupid" deaths.

Although, to be fair "stupid" generally isn't really the right word. More often a "stupid" death is caused by being stubborn, or overconfident, or selfish, or paranoid, or just plain not paying attention. And this isn't really a matter of anything on the character sheet but how the player chooses to play their character.

And, what is "lose"? If my character is forced to choose between death or a deal with a devil, is death "lose" and the deal "win"?

That's probably a lose / lose situation.

[King of Nowhere]

As for brave, that isn't for the players, that's for the characters. The players tell me they want to play a game about action and adventure, and cowardly people don't go on action-filled adventures (except temporarily with damn good incentive). Bringing a cowardly character to such a game is just not appropriate anymore than, say, bringing in a axe-wielding barbarian to a modern police procedural game or a paladin to a mafia game.

I think you are confusing bravery with fool-hardyness here.

yes, brave people go to action adventures, cowardly people don't. but just because brave people take risks, it doesn't mean they take needless risk. quite the opposite: brave people stay alive by controlling extremely well the risks they take.
think of special forces assigned a special task, like storming the house of a terrorist to capture/kill him; that's the closest equivalent to a dungeon run in real life. those guys do not get in and start shooting, like in movies. those guys set up a careful intelligence work so that they can know exactly how many people are in the house, where they are likely to be, they consider all the variables to find the right moment to strike. they go as far as building a replica of the target house and try rehearsals of the incursion. and before they go, they make sure that all their gear is in order, and that they have a fallback strategy.
now, those soldiers do not retreat after the first gunfight because they expended bullets and have to reload. but that's only because their target would flee. if those soldiers could retreat, rest, come back, and find the house in the same exact situation as they left it? they'd totally do it. whatever minimizes the actual risk.

So brave characters on an action adventure and careful planners painstakingly evaluating every danger, gathering every possible information, spending whole gaming sessions in planning and retreating as soon as things don't go according to plan are not mutually exclusive.

on the other hand, I had a cowardly player once. one whose first reaction to a fight was to start running in the other direction. if your players are like that, I can see your disappointment.

It doesn't always make sense, there are large sections of the dungeon which are inhabited by animals or undead, but the first floor is kobold territory, and when the players hit them and fell back, it gave the kobolds the chance to fortify their domain and go all Tucker's on the PCs.

Long story short, the PCs actually surrendered to kobolds! My. Players. Surrendered. !!!!!!!

Yay!
great job on enforcing consequences. if you attack the same enemy multiple times, the enemy will try to prepare for you. trying to clear the dungeon in one go is dangerous, but giving the enemy time to organize is also dangerous, there's a tradeoff.

of course, your players being your players, I expect all kinds of wrong lessons learned.
"the dm set us up to fail"
"next time, we have to try hard to kill any kobold, anywhere"
"let's never rest again, or this will happen. let's keep facing encounters even though we are out of spells and severely wounded"
"we were defeated, but ultimately the dm gave us a way out. we don't need to worry for our safety, the dm will always save us. let's go chase the tarrasque!"
"the dm will fudge things so that, no matter what we do, we fail"
"the dm will fudge things so that we have to choose the path he wants us to"

[Talakeal]

I think you are confusing bravery with fool-hardyness here.

yes, brave people go to action adventures, cowardly people don't. but just because brave people take risks, it doesn't mean they take needless risk. quite the opposite: brave people stay alive by controlling extremely well the risks they take.
think of special forces assigned a special task, like storming the house of a terrorist to capture/kill him; that's the closest equivalent to a dungeon run in real life. those guys do not get in and start shooting, like in movies. those guys set up a careful intelligence work so that they can know exactly how many people are in the house, where they are likely to be, they consider all the variables to find the right moment to strike. they go as far as building a replica of the target house and try rehearsals of the incursion. and before they go, they make sure that all their gear is in order, and that they have a fallback strategy.
now, those soldiers do not retreat after the first gunfight because they expended bullets and have to reload. but that's only because their target would flee. if those soldiers could retreat, rest, come back, and find the house in the same exact situation as they left it? they'd totally do it. whatever minimizes the actual risk.

So brave characters on an action adventure and careful planners painstakingly evaluating every danger, gathering every possible information, spending whole gaming sessions in planning and retreating as soon as things don't go according to plan are not mutually exclusive.

on the other hand, I had a cowardly player once. one whose first reaction to a fight was to start running in the other direction. if your players are like that, I can see your disappointment.

I don't think we are disagreeing.

So, my players don't (or rather rarely, as I said they can be brilliant) do any reconnaissance or planning. They kick in the door, charge the monsters, and don't usually do anything during combat to communicate or coordinate with one another.

Then they take more damage than anticipated. Then they either (in a timed mission) complain about how the fight wasn't balanced or (in a sandbox game) claim that continuing would be chasing good money after bad and fall back to rest up at their base.

Yay!
great job on enforcing consequences. if you attack the same enemy multiple times, the enemy will try to prepare for you. trying to clear the dungeon in one go is dangerous, but giving the enemy time to organize is also dangerous, there's a tradeoff.

of course, your players being your players, I expect all kinds of wrong lessons learned.
"the dm set us up to fail"
"next time, we have to try hard to kill any kobold, anywhere"
"let's never rest again, or this will happen. let's keep facing encounters even though we are out of spells and severely wounded"
"we were defeated, but ultimately the dm gave us a way out. we don't need to worry for our safety, the dm will always save us. let's go chase the tarrasque!"
"the dm will fudge things so that, no matter what we do, we fail"
"the dm will fudge things so that we have to choose the path he wants us to"

I think that will depend on how it goes down when they (inevitably) betray their newfound allies.

I did get one great quote from Bob though:

"We don't have the training for this.
We don't have the skills for this.
We don't have the gear for this.
We aren't prepared for this.
We aren't adventurers, we are a group of idiots who wandered into a dungeon.
We got our asses kicked by kobolds!
Three times!"

[ahyangyi]

I mean, communication/coordination could as well mean slow combat and/or alpha gamers. There's a reason that the most popular cooperative wargaming boardgames (Gloomhaven) also comes with restrictions on player communication.

If your players prefer to have no or little communication during combat, then... what's wrong with that?

Can't we try to find the advantages and strengths of the current playstyle instead of focusing on the drawbacks?

[Vahnavoi]

I mean, communication/coordination could as well mean slow combat and/or alpha gamers. There's a reason that the most popular cooperative wargaming boardgames (Gloomhaven) also comes with restrictions on player communication.

If your players prefer to have no or little communication during combat, then... what's wrong with that?

Can't we try to find the advantages and strengths of the current playstyle instead of focusing on the drawbacks?

Gloomhaven, and many other co-operative games, put restrictions on co-operation because that is part of the challenge. It isn't just to prevent socially dominant players from making all the decisions or just to keep play from slowing down. Chinese Whisphers and its derivatives make even better examples than Gloomhaven: fundamentally, the point is just to pass a message from one end of a chain to another. Yet the rules mostly just exist to make this task difficult and good chunk of entertainment comes from the ways people fail in passing the message.

In other games the challenge is elsewhere and poor communication and co-ordination just means the players suck. It's not "wrong" in some absolute sense, nor is it against the rules. It's just bad play. It isn't actually given there is any advantage to current playstyle of Talakeal"s players in the type of game they're currently playing.

[Quertus]

I frequently get told on the forums to stop worrying about verisimilitude and instead worry about player fun, I really am not sure how doing the opposite would be helpful.

the forum is made of many people with different opinions. You are probably thinking of quertus here. but many other people tell you that you should apply more verisimilitude instead - namely, the kind of verisimilitude that would let enemies be more effective. basically, the same point vahnavoi makes here

Some you are advocating for a "games rules as physics" approach lit-RPG style? If so, then yes, Quertus is just about the only person who advises me to have more "verisimilitude".

I really wish you would stop saying I really on stories, that isn't true. Narrative gaming blows screaming chunks to the moon, and story structure is the last thing in the world on my mind when designing a scenario or a ruleset. Now, I may use a story or a real-life anecdote when trying to illustrate a point, but my goal is never to recreate a dramatic experiance.

Adventuring is a dangerous business. Cowards don't become adventurers, and idiots don't survive being adventurers.

People on the forum, Quertus primarily, equate being cowardly with being smart, and I am trying to explain that, by definition, a successful adventurer is going to have to be both cunning AND brave.

OK, OK, I get it, I'll post in the thread more.

I'm a little confused why people think I hold the opinions I'm stated as holding, however.

I usually push more towards Simulationist/realism/verisimilitude, simply because most games/systems/GMs push more towards Gamist/gameplay/stats(like "balance"). I recognize it can be a difficult set of concerns to balance. Which is why i usually push more towards the middle, thereby advising an increase in Simulationist concerns, but really advocate, "give them promises, and ask the players to find their own fun" as my general solution to this problem.

As was said in a quote I missed, being cowardly isn't smart, being smart is smart. That said, my characters whose smarts were overridden by their bravery, overconfidence, nobility, goodness, self-sacrificing nature, etc, have most all died at this point. Leaving more careful, intelligent, and cowardly characters to make up the bulk of my remaining roster.

Although, to be fair "stupid" generally isn't really the right word. More often a "stupid" death is caused by being stubborn, or overconfident, or selfish, or paranoid, or just plain not paying attention. And this isn't really a matter of anything on the character sheet but how the player chooses to play their character.

Did you mean "selfless" or "self-sacrificing" instead of "selfish" there? Because selfishness and intelligent self-interest rarely result in death, IME. Whereas being "kind", and wanting to take the bandits alive, eating (in, say, D&D) a -4 penalty to hit for dealing subdual damage, can result in a "stupid" death (or even TPK!) against opponents that otherwise wouldn't have posed a threat. That's the problem with choosing such a suboptimal path of "goodness" over pragmatic cowardice and self-interest.

And "paranoid" sounds like the kind of trait that keeps one from dying a stupid death - "I was playing perfect 5d Wizard Chess, to the point that even my Contingencies had Contingencies, and that's why I died" has said no PC ever. "Overconfidence" and "lack of paranoia", OTHO, have claimed many a noob.

I did get one great quote from Bob though:

"We don't have the training for this.
We don't have the skills for this.
We don't have the gear for this.
We aren't prepared for this.
We aren't adventurers, we are a group of idiots who wandered into a dungeon.
We got our asses kicked by kobolds!
Three times!"

I'm really concerned that you got this result after asking them to be braver. I'm more concerned that you're not concerned. And I'm a different kind of concerned that you went Tucker's on them after years (decades?) of none of their attempts to trap your monsters working, "because realism".

With how explosive and irrational your group is, just don't haunt me if they suffer a homicidal blowup over this. On the bright side, maybe this will finally be the catalyst that makes them start to learn, and travel down my path of KiaZen? Given how violent some of the groups I"ve been in have been, it's not a method I ever would have in good conscience suggested without appropriate warnings, but maybe in Bizarro World you'll actually see good results from showing such a volatile group of players that they're "a group of idiots". One can hope.

[Vahnavoi]

As was said in a quote I missed, being cowardly isn't smart, being smart is smart.

Such a wonderfully unhelpful statement.

Here. I think you'll both benefit from this.

Long story sort, "being smart", or rather, functional intelligence, is a matter of being able to reason and take actions effectively towards some goal. This is at the root of why I've repeatedly asked Talakeal to think about and specify what players and characters are working towards when using words like "optimal" and "effective". "Smart" and "stupid" are in the same boat.

So, this kind of stuff:

Although, to be fair "stupid" generally isn't really the right word. More often a "stupid" death is caused by being stubborn, or overconfident, or selfish, or paranoid, or just plain not paying attention. And this isn't really a matter of anything on the character sheet but how the player chooses to play their character.

... is kind of silly. In order for these behaviours to not be stupid, we have to posit some goal towards which they are effective. What is that? If no such goal can be identified, and these behaviours demonstrably hinder player progress in a game, then you've just given a list of particular ways to be stupid in your game.

As far as "selfishness" goes, ordinary selfishness is not the same as (economic or game) theoretical selfishness, and people really should stop making that conflation. Ordinary everyday selfishness revolves around delayed gratification. Ordinary everyday selfishness is typified by choosing short-term gratification over longer-term goods, often because a person does not have capacity to consider the long term. That is why selfishness often leads to stupid actions in real life: the selfish action only makes sense considering a very narrow time window or set of consequences, and fails to serve a person's stated goals when extrapolated into the future.

If you want to analyze this in context of rationally self-interested agents, contrast simple Prisoner's Dilemma with iterated Prisoner's Dilemma without a known end. The simple version is called a "dilemma" because it appears two rational agents will end up with a worse outcome than irrational agents, but unilaterally acting less rational can only lead to a worse outcome; rational self-interest seems to end up acting against itself. But the iterated version without a known end has a different payoff matrix and within that version, rational self-interest can find the better solution.

Now think of an actual person in a situation similar to Prisoner's Dilemma. Even if they do their best to act on their rational self-interest, their ability or inability to consider their situation as part of a series makes a world of difference for their actions. Short-sighted selfishness that only considers the simple version will pick the wrong solution for the long version.

There is another sense of "selfishness" that is also relevant: egoism. An egoist person projects their internal life on the external world. One of the most basic forms of this is assuming others have the same goals as you. This leads to judging other people "smart" or "stupid" based on what you'd want in their place, not what they actually want. Where extrapolating wrong motives into the future leads to faulty predictions, this of course has a high chance of proving the egoist person quite stupid themselves.

[Satinavian]

My players are not dumb. In fact, they can be downright brilliant when they want to be.

Being dumb vs being brilliant is (nearly) never a decision one can make.

Your players seem to make both moves that you think are dumb and moves that you think are brilliant. That is not strange. But don't conclude from the existance of moves you think are brilliant that your players could be brilliant all the time if they only wanted to. That is not how it works. And trying to present obstacles that the brilliant ones master and the dumb ones fail will make them occasionally fail and then get extra cautious or complain about stuff being too harsh.

The players tell me they want to play a game about action and adventure

They want to play a game about action and adenture, where they always succeed.

Nor can I imagine a single player video game or traditional multi-player board game (either competitive or co-op) that would work like that.

I think you have missed a lot of "easy modes" and "story modes" then. Especially in a story mode video game RPG you will still see a story about action and advetnture, just not one that actually has any challenges for the player.

Playing an RPG this is very much possible and not strange at all. It is not even an inconsistent approach. It is just that it would be boring for you. Be honest about why you don't do so.

[Talakeal]

They want to play a game about action and adventure, where they always succeed.

They have never vocalized that last though. They have told me they want more action and adventure. They haven't said they want to always succeed, because admitting that would hurt their egos, just like losing does. Far better to demand a balanced game (as they do all the time) and then whine that it was unfair when they lost.

Because that is what 90% of my games problems come down to, people who are looking for blame other people for their own weak ego.

Playing an RPG this is very much possible and not strange at all. It is not even an inconsistent approach. It is just that it would be boring for you. Be honest about why you don't do so.

It would be boring for me and 5/6 players (and I suspect the sixth would still get bored of it fairly quickly).

And the same players who need to prove their dominance are the ones who are most into crunchy mechanical stuff and would least enjoy a "story mode" game.

There is another sense of "selfishness" that is also relevant: egoism. An egoist person projects their internal life on the external world. One of the most basic forms of this is assuming others have the same goals as you. This leads to judging other people "smart" or "stupid" based on what you'd want in their place, not what they actually want. Where extrapolating wrong motives into the future leads to faulty predictions, this of course has a high chance of proving the egoist person quite stupid themselves.

Is that the word for that?

I have often thought that about myself, I want other people to be happy and will sacrifice to help others, but I have a hard time internalizing that what makes other people happy can be so different from myself.

Did you mean "selfless" or "self-sacrificing" instead of "selfish" there? Because selfishness and intelligent self-interest rarely result in death, IME. Whereas being "kind", and wanting to take the bandits alive, eating (in, say, D&D) a -4 penalty to hit for dealing subdual damage, can result in a "stupid" death (or even TPK!) against opponents that otherwise wouldn't have posed a threat. That's the problem with choosing such a suboptimal path of "goodness" over pragmatic cowardice and self-interest.

And "paranoid" sounds like the kind of trait that keeps one from dying a stupid death - "I was playing perfect 5d Wizard Chess, to the point that even my Contingencies had Contingencies, and that's why I died" has said no PC ever. "Overconfidence" and "lack of paranoia", OTHO, have claimed many a noob.

I wish I had a problem with selfless characters sacrificing themselves, but no.

When I say selfish or paranoid I mean refusing to work with party members / friendly NPCs because you don't trust them or think you know better than they do.

Take a look at actual real-life paranoia sometime. One of my (former) game members suffers from it, and he has a history of refusing to take his medicine and assaulting people because of it, hardly conductive to a long and healthy life.

I'm really concerned that you got this result after asking them to be braver. I'm more concerned that you're not concerned. And I'm a different kind of concerned that you went Tucker's on them after years (decades?) of none of their attempts to trap your monsters working, "because realism".

That's a bit extreme.

What I said is that it's unrealistic that PCs would be brought in to defeat a monster that the commoners could take out themselves with zero risk, so I would come up with a scenario where the beast isn't stupid enough to simply wander into obvious death traps when designing such an adventure.

Its not that none of their traps work. There are plenty of times when the PCs come up with a smart trap or face a stupid monster. Its just that a monster who has been established as smart won't (usually) fall for a dumb trap.

Although, I am not sure what the connection is here. You are surprised that I play smart monsters as smart because I have a history of playing monsters as smart?

The only thing I can think of is you are objecting to an asymmetrical knowledge thing where the DM knows if something is a trap or not beforehand so traps are unfair when used by the DM?


EDIT: And, on second thought, I don't think I have ever even done that much. The story about the smart wolf was a different DM where I was a PC. I can't recall ever having the PCs set a trap that the monster ignored, although that maybe because I set the stage well enough they knew not to try. I did say that, in combat, I put more thought into the monsters tactics when they are losing than when they are winning to give the PCs a break and RP overconfidence / desperation, but that is hardly the same thing.

With how explosive and irrational your group is, just don't haunt me if they suffer a homicidal blowup over this. On the bright side, maybe this will finally be the catalyst that makes them start to learn, and travel down my path of KiaZen? Given how violent some of the groups I"ve been in have been, it's not a method I ever would have in good conscience suggested without appropriate warnings, but maybe in Bizarro World you'll actually see good results from showing such a volatile group of players that they're "a group of idiots". One can hope.

Its just so refreshing that they are actually looking inward after a defeat rather than insisting that I am cheating and are actually connecting the natural consequences of their actions.

You seem to have put 2 and 2 together and realized that by provoking the kobolds and then falling back to rest that is what caused the kobolds to fortify their lair and prepare for the PC's return.

And that's progress.

I mean, communication/coordination could as well mean slow combat and/or alpha gamers. There's a reason that the most popular cooperative wargaming boardgames (Gloomhaven) also comes with restrictions on player communication.

If your players prefer to have no or little communication during combat, then... what's wrong with that?

Can't we try to find the advantages and strengths of the current playstyle instead of focusing on the drawbacks?

I find those games extremely stressful and counter productive.

I would not play a team game that operated under such rules, I would rather just stay home and play a video game than participate in a social activity where I couldn't socialize.

Also, it makes no sense from a RP perspective; what is stopping the characters from talking and how does the setting function so that teamwork doesn't help with success?

[Vahnavoi]

Being dumb vs being brilliant is (nearly) never a decision one can make.

Playing or not playing to the limit of one's intelligence, on the other hand, is a decision almost anyone can make. How convinced are you that Talakeal's players are playing to their actual limit?

---

Is that the word for that?

I have often thought that about myself, I want other people to be happy and will sacrifice to help others, but I have a hard time internalizing that what makes other people happy can be so different from myself.

It's a word. "Egocentric" and "self-centered" can sometimes be better, since "egoism" has other meanings in other contexts.

[King of Nowhere]

Did you mean "selfless" or "self-sacrificing" instead of "selfish" there? Because selfishness and intelligent self-interest rarely result in death, IME. Whereas being "kind", and wanting to take the bandits alive, eating (in, say, D&D) a -4 penalty to hit for dealing subdual damage, can result in a "stupid" death (or even TPK!) against opponents that otherwise wouldn't have posed a threat. That's the problem with choosing such a suboptimal path of "goodness" over pragmatic cowardice and self-interest.

And "paranoid" sounds like the kind of trait that keeps one from dying a stupid death - "I was playing perfect 5d Wizard Chess, to the point that even my Contingencies had Contingencies, and that's why I died" has said no PC ever. "Overconfidence" and "lack of paranoia", OTHO, have claimed many a noob.

disagreement here.
first, you specifically mention intelligent self-interest. well, intelligent selflessness is also rarely going to result in death, and if it does, you generally accepted the possibility.
being selfish leads to being isolated. being isolated leads to having no friends. no friends means nobody will bail you out when you're in trouble. and you'll have more enemies.
paranoia also leads you to distrust, which leads to losing allies.
stupid evil is as dangerous as stupid good.

"I was playing perfect 5d wizard chess, and then twenty high level npcs assaulted my fortress and overcame all my defences and there was nothing I could do, because I pissed them off, each one of them"

I mean, if selflessness wasn't actually good for your own survival in a variety of scenarios, evolution wouldn't have preserved it.

EDIT: in the case of talekeal players, they betray anyone in their selfish interest, and their paranoia leads them to chasing and killing any enemy that tries to escape. this will lead to harder fights, and nobody will surrend anymore, and they may not have a chance to surrender themselves the next time.

[Vahnavoi]

Evolution is context-dependent process. If anyone has evolved selfless tendencies, it's because such tendencies served their ancestors in the past, with no guarantee that they will continue to serve them in the future.

Of course, the reverse is just as true. The selfish impulses that made your ancestor succeed might be detrimental or self-destructive to you.

But the real kicker is that in rational analysis, selfless and sufficiently long-term selfish thinking can be congruent and lead to the same conclusions. Sometimes the distinction doesn't matter, if it can be made at all.

[Talakeal]

It's a word. "Egocentric" and "self-centered" can sometimes be better, since "egoism" has other meanings in other contexts.

To me Self-centered means selfish.

I don't think of myself as selfish, I just have trouble internalizing other people's preferences.

For example, I might see someone who looks hungry and go out of my way to, say, buy them an expensive steak, without even considering that they might be a vegetarian or prefer pork chops.

[Satinavian]

Playing or not playing to the limit of one's intelligence, on the other hand, is a decision almost anyone can make. How convinced are you that Talakeal's players are playing to their actual limit?

In every single disagreement that Talakael described his players acting dumb, they always seemed convinced to not have acted dumb. If they were just playing dumb, they would have defended their action by saying so.