Quote from: chaosvoyager;581337But isn't this kind of encounter technically 'Fair Warning', because the characters could potentially have a chance to asses those traits before/after entering, depending on their skills/actions?

Possibly, but not necessarily.  Virtually all dungeons are unmaintained underground tunnels, and parties often don't have anyone who is skilled in mining work.  If  a cave-in kills the entire party in a standard dungeon, I don't think it would mollify the players a lot if I told them "I secretly rolled Knowledge: Stonework defaults for all of you and no one got the DC 25 needed".  

Quote from: Exploderwizard;581366So go check shit out and quit crying about danger. Oh, and also don't bitch about getting killed. Adventuring is a dangerous profession, just roll a new character and keep playing.

I note that it was Opaopajr who first complained that a cave-in killing all the PCs would be a dick move.  I'm saying that it might be OK - but for some groups, both DM and players might be happier if the DM avoided events like that.  

From the DM side, I've seen a number of DMs thoroughly frustrated if my PC says something like "Heck, no, I'm not going in that dungeon.  It looks too dangerous, and we've got better odds in wilderness encounters." - thus spoiling the many hours of work they put in to write up the dungeon.  DMs often want the players to take on challenges presented.  To assure that, there may be an tacit agreement that the challenges presented will give the PCs a fair chance.

Wait, please let's not get lost in examples. I just wanted clarity upon "Life's Not Fair" and I gave my interpretation of that phrase being "impossible to prepare for and night-guaranteed instant death." Apparently that is not the definition, correct?

(Just for clarity I mean wholly Deus Ex Machina cave-in. As in analogous to the freak thunderbolt from a bright sun shiny day. A dangerous old unmaintained cave or dungeon I'd have descriptors of old wood joists looking rotten and unstable, or a path here or there caved-in with rubble. Something immediately obvious not requiring "dungeon-engineer science." Which would put it in the Fair Warning column, personally.)

So that's clearly not the meaning of "Life's Not Fair."

However, with your Air Elemental example, I'm still confused how is that not "Fair Warning"? Do you have your guardian elementals immediately behind a door waiting to go aggro full tilt, chasing people down even if they run out of range of the object being guarded? What happened to Encounter Distance and Reaction? What happen to guardianship locus? When the ogres set it off does the air elemental kill everything around it in the keep, like rats and mildew? It sounds like a really weird example to me.

Quote from: jibbajibba;581282Re sandboxes not benong Wow Levels based.... its sometimes true but I have found not very often there is usually a thought process going on about the areas safer for lowerlevel PCs etc.
re Apex predators that might happen when its a tiger or a lion I doubt that it happens when its an ancient red dragon or another D&D style intelligent magically powerful Apex predator.

Clipping because it's getting way too large... And now, wall of text!

A thought process where there's high level of civilization affecting surroundings isn't metagaming; it's being true to spheres of influence. Look at old TSR books where terrain encounter tables are altered by the distance from civilization. I'm currently perusing grey box FR books -- no maps, but a nice score from Half Priced books. Inside there were civilized, borderlands, wilderness columns to adjust encounter tables, giving a general distance for civilization's influence. It's really a great idea to maintain verisimilitude -- with mixed encounter probabilities within a given realm -- without creating that artificial WoW region design.

About ancient red dragons -- we'll just never know now will we. That's all up to setting. However, I easily give an ancient red dragon the "gravity well" to influence his surrounds just as much as a humanoid civilization. Whether that means towns or goblin warrens end up giving livestock tribute is dependent upon your setting. But that make more sense to me than an ancient wyrm regularly foraging in a wilderness -- regardless of how successful its hunts may be.

I still have trouble wrapping my head around the offering of the space alien Predator and criminal mastermind Baba Yaga being examples of guaranteed "Life's Not Fair" TPK.

About Predator, something that lethal there all the time, every time, and nothing gets out to tell the tale? Wouldn't the place around for miles upon miles then be total terra incognita, as in assumed to be super-duper lethal? Even the Predator movie had mythology about it from communities of "really low level npcs" that survived its hunting times. The movie also had two survivors at the end, one being assumed defenseless, and the creature did have a vision weakness. It wasn't a TPK. However something that lethal, native, and with a large sphere of influence wouldn't be 'oh here's the GM setting us a plot hook,' it'd have real NPC warnings of wild-eyed fear and any nearby people trying to decamp and move away. It'd leave a notable impact on the setting. Life with its farming and gathering firewood wouldn't just go on. There'd be, y'know, "Fair Warning" and stuff.

And criminal mastermind witch, conveniently attacked by goblins out of the blue (who say nothing of import during the raid), and host to a larder of some of the best ingestible poisons (colorless, odorless, tasteless), all ingested around the same time, all triggering within the same round (the best I can find from 2e is onset time 1-4 minutes, and is very rare 1520 gp a dose!), all working without a successful save, and rendering the party 100% helpless/dead? Well, shit I've had my time working with AD&D poisons and wished I could pull that coordination off. Firstly, my die rolls as a GM were never that awesome. Secondly, I find myself lucky to get the entire party to go to bed at the same time in an inn, let alone eat together at a table simultaneously and not start something. So let me say, kudos!?

Hey, maybe it's trivial in your experience to pull off these sorts of TPKs without Deus Ex Machina. However given how much description I give my players, and how they often start investigating further (or just getting into trouble) it's an impressive level of coordination to pull these off with no one the wiser. With that and random dice rolls getting in the way, this does sound pretty impressive to me.
:hatsoff:

If that's what "Life's Not Fair" means, where the players wander blind into the GM rolling up a Yahtzee, then yeah... I guess that's a form of GM metagaming I haven't had the fortune to partake of. Still doesn't sell me on why it's a relevant excuse to the topic's metagame issue, but is a curious bit of GM serendipity to ponder.

Quote from: Opaopajr;581457Clipping because it's getting way too large... And now, wall of text!

A thought process where there's high level of civilization affecting surroundings isn't metagaming; it's being true to spheres of influence. Look at old TSR books where terrain encounter tables are altered by the distance from civilization. I'm currently perusing grey box FR books -- no maps, but a nice score from Half Priced books. Inside there were civilized, borderlands, wilderness columns to adjust encounter tables, giving a general distance for civilization's influence. It's really a great idea to maintain verisimilitude -- with mixed encounter probabilities within a given realm -- without creating that artificial WoW region design.

About ancient red dragons -- we'll just never know now will we. That's all up to setting. However, I easily give an ancient red dragon the "gravity well" to influence his surrounds just as much as a humanoid civilization. Whether that means towns or goblin warrens end up giving livestock tribute is dependent upon your setting. But that make more sense to me than an ancient wyrm regularly foraging in a wilderness -- regardless of how successful its hunts may be.

I still have trouble wrapping my head around the offering of the space alien Predator and criminal mastermind Baba Yaga being examples of guaranteed "Life's Not Fair" TPK.

About Predator, something that lethal there all the time, every time, and nothing gets out to tell the tale? Wouldn't the place around for miles upon miles then be total terra incognita, as in assumed to be super-duper lethal? Even the Predator movie had mythology about it from communities of "really low level npcs" that survived its hunting times. The movie also had two survivors at the end, one being assumed defenseless, and the creature did have a vision weakness. It wasn't a TPK. However something that lethal, native, and with a large sphere of influence wouldn't be 'oh here's the GM setting us a plot hook,' it'd have real NPC warnings of wild-eyed fear and any nearby people trying to decamp and move away. It'd leave a notable impact on the setting. Life with its farming and gathering firewood wouldn't just go on. There'd be, y'know, "Fair Warning" and stuff.

And criminal mastermind witch, conveniently attacked by goblins out of the blue (who say nothing of import during the raid), and host to a larder of some of the best ingestible poisons (colorless, odorless, tasteless), all ingested around the same time, all triggering within the same round (the best I can find from 2e is onset time 1-4 minutes, and is very rare 1520 gp a dose!), all working without a successful save, and rendering the party 100% helpless/dead? Well, shit I've had my time working with AD&D poisons and wished I could pull that coordination off. Firstly, my die rolls as a GM were never that awesome. Secondly, I find myself lucky to get the entire party to go to bed at the same time in an inn, let alone eat together at a table simultaneously and not start something. So let me say, kudos!?

Hey, maybe it's trivial in your experience to pull off these sorts of TPKs without Deus Ex Machina. However given how much description I give my players, and how they often start investigating further (or just getting into trouble) it's an impressive level of coordination to pull these off with no one the wiser. With that and random dice rolls getting in the way, this does sound pretty impressive to me.
:hatsoff:

If that's what "Life's Not Fair" means, where the players wander blind into the GM rolling up a Yahtzee, then yeah... I guess that's a form of GM metagaming I haven't had the fortune to partake of. Still doesn't sell me on why it's a relevant excuse to the topic's metagame issue, but is a curious bit of GM serendipity to ponder.

In which case we have nothing to discuss I suspect.

I will say one thing. If we really are talking about top apex predators in a fantasy world and we are talking about a predator that eats people then putting it far away from the human population is a bit like saying lions ought to live a long way from wildebeasts.

The "Life's Not Fair" thing reminded me of this...so I thought I'd put it up for comment...
 
 (full thing is here...    http://www.allenvarney.com/rev_04a.html   )
 

QuoteROLEPLAYING REVIEWS (Sidebar):
 
AMBER DICELESS ROLEPLAYING: Thoughts at Non-Random
 
by Allen Varney
[Published as a sidebar to Lester Smith's review of Amber Diceless Roleplaying (Phage Press, 1992) in Dragon #182, June 1992]
My friend John Brunkhart tells about a 1989 game session at Iron Crown Enterprises. John, who had recently joined Customer Service at ICE, had played the Hero System for years but had never tried ICE's SPACE MASTER science-fiction RPG. An ICE hanger-on who ran a campaign invited John to sit in. He spent two hours generating a character and joined the veteran players (mostly fellow ICE employees) as a new adventure got underway.
For starters, the characters embarked on a space journey to the world where they would receive their mission. En route, their ship entered a dangerous asteroid belt. John rolled his character's Piloting skill and achieved a critical success. Like Han Solo, he sent the ship barreling flawlessly through the field. Except....
As I understand it, in SPACE MASTER there is an unmodified percentage chance that a ship in an asteroid field will hit something. The gamemaster rolled this chance, right out where everyone could see the dice: collision! Then he rolled the size of the surprise asteroid: about as big as the Moon, the way John tells it. Then he rolled for location: the drives. Then he rolled damage: maximum. Before the scenario had properly begun, the ship exploded, killing all aboard.
The gamemaster apologized but didn't retract the results. He wanted to keep the players' respect by respecting the dice. It worked, mostly. These guys played ICE games, after all, and they obeyed dice slavishly. "Yeah," they told each other, "that's probably what would really happen -- asteroid fields are dangerous --" But John, who had expected to take part in an adventure story, was baffled and apoplectic by turns.

Quote from: jibbajibba;581467I will say one thing. If we really are talking about top apex predators in a fantasy world and we are talking about a predator that eats people then putting it far away from the human population is a bit like saying lions ought to live a long way from wildebeasts.

So humans would just casually go about their business while there was something eating them on a regular basis?  Humans aren't wildebeasts.

Humans will gather in numbers, organize hunting parties, and kill whatever threatens them. If they are unable to kill it, then they will move. If the creature moves with them and remains unkillable then the humans will die out.

An intelligent predator, such as a dragon could terrorize a population by demanding regular sacrafices in exchange for leaving the general population alone but people in general don't ignore creatures just casually snacking on them.

I am very much interested in developing a great deal of attachment to my characters. That's essential for me to enjoy playing, since I play for Immersion, and having a deep intuitive connection to my PC is essential for me to do that.

So naturally, neither I nor my character want the character to die. We're both going to try to avoid being killed. However, my character also wants to be an adventurer (and his personal reasons for doing so are going to vary depending on who he is) and thus my character is more interested in engaging in risky behavior than I am, and when it's time to make that decision on risk, if Immersion has been achieved, his desires are going to win out over mine.

So naturally since I have this deep connection to my character and don't want them to die, I must not want a game where death is a risk, right? Wrong. Because that Immersion I need to achieve to enjoy the game depends on my being able to suspend disbelief and buy in to my character being a Real Person living in a Real Place. I need to see it as an alternate reality, not as a storybook.

So if it seems that I constantly miraculously escape death despite all logic and odds, then it stresses that disbelief, it shows the cracks, the strings pulling the puppets, the man behind the curtain. It makes the character and the game less real to me, and thus I am less engaged, and thus the game loses it's fun factor. The point of play has been ruined.

There also seems to be an assumption that if death is always a possibility that it must therefore always necessarily always happen. This is a false dichotomy. While my character is engaging in risky behavior, because he doesn't want to die, he's going to try to mitigate that risk as much as possible. In my experience, death in these kinds of games tends to be occasional, not constant.

I think the assumption is that because early Dungeon Modules were unbelievably lethal (i.e. Tomb of Horrors), that this is how the game was always played, and it wasn't. The thing about those dungeon modules is that they were, according to Old Geezer, designed for Tournament Play where a series of groups would run the same dungeon and the group that made it furthest from the entrance before being TPK'd would win. That's not typically how we played (however, I have seen an Actual Play of a group of total newbs running the Tomb of Horrors and managed to survive it successfully, so even something as nightmarishly lethal as that isn't a death sentence).

But yes, death does loom like a specter over engaging in combat or exploring ancient ruins. AS IT SHOULD. Combat should be potentially deadly: engaging in violence is a serious thing. Violence is dangerous, messy, and not something that should be done lightly. Which means that one should be motivated to find non-violent solutions unless you're really sure of victory... much like in real life (which is why I am baffled whenever someone claims Old School play results in "murderhobos": such people wouldn't survive long).

Life or death situations need to be life or death situations to seem real.

Now, obviously we'll never get a perfect simulation, no, and some metagame concerns are unavoidable. That's true. But to then say that since it can never be perfect, we should just accept all metagaming as being just as valid is a Perfect Solution Fallacy. It doesn't need to be perfect, but that doesn't mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater and just resort to storygaming. It's ludicrous.

Quote from: jibbajibba;581467In which case we have nothing to discuss I suspect.

I will say one thing. If we really are talking about top apex predators in a fantasy world and we are talking about a predator that eats people then putting it far away from the human population is a bit like saying lions ought to live a long way from wildebeasts.

This assumes that the predator only eats humans, and has no other, more readily available food source where it's currently located.

Quote from: jhkim;581373From the DM side, I've seen a number of DMs thoroughly frustrated if my PC says something like "Heck, no, I'm not going in that dungeon.  It looks too dangerous, and we've got better odds in wilderness encounters." - thus spoiling the many hours of work they put in to write up the dungeon.  DMs often want the players to take on challenges presented.  To assure that, there may be an tacit agreement that the challenges presented will give the PCs a fair chance.

This goes contrary to sandbox play, however. The whole idea of a sandbox is the players have freedom to go wherever they like and do whatever they wish within the game world, exploring freely. So, as a GM, I never assume the players will go into the dungeon, or to the city, or to the wilderness. Those places may exist for them to explore, but if they decide instead to get on a ship and go across the sea leaving those things behind, then that's their choice.

Yes, GMs have to be more flexible in Sandbox play. But that's fine with me as a GM, I wouldn't have it any other way, since sandbox style play is all I am really interested in. I'm not about to start railroading people into adventures just because I think "hey dungeons are cool! I want them to go to this dungeon!"

That means that, as a GM for a sandbox, you either need to enjoy worldbuilding as an activity unto itself so your time isn't "wasted" or you need to use an established and well-fleshed out published world and be good at filling in the gaps more or less on the fly.

Quote from: Doctor Jest;581480This assumes that the predator only eats humans, and has no other, more readily available food source where it's currently located.

It depends on lots of things.  DMs can justify a lot when/if the need arises.

Quote from: Doctor Jest;581481This goes contrary to sandbox play, however. The whole idea of a sandbox is the players have freedom to go wherever they like and do whatever they wish within the game world, exploring freely. So, as a GM, I never assume the players will go into the dungeon, or to the city, or to the wilderness. Those places may exist for them to explore, but if they decide instead to get on a ship and go across the sea leaving those things behind, then that's their choice.

Yes, GMs have to be more flexible in Sandbox play. But that's fine with me as a GM, I wouldn't have it any other way, since sandbox style play is all I am really interested in. I'm not about to start railroading people into adventures just because I think "hey dungeons are cool! I want them to go to this dungeon!"

That means that, as a GM for a sandbox, you either need to enjoy worldbuilding as an activity unto itself so your time isn't "wasted" or you need to use an established and well-fleshed out published world and be good at filling in the gaps more or less on the fly.

One of the big gorillas in the room that no one seems to mention is that 1e's mechanics are more conducive in sandbox than later edition mechanics.

BSJ that story is pretty awesome. And illuminating to how two groups of people can come up with two very different interpretations of the results. However I believe the familiarity of ICE systems had a hand with how the veterans took in stride what left the new player agog.

Which does get back to Lord Vreeg's comment that setting will adjust to system at some point. If the system is gritty, GM rolling a Yahtzee! was within probability just by the crew choosing to go through the asteroid belt, and thus "Fair Warning." If the system is heroic, GM rolling the same would be considered in bad form, and thus a "Life's Not Fair." Poe-tay-toe, poe-tah-toe.

Quote from: Opaopajr;581493BSJ that story is pretty awesome. And illuminating to how two groups of people can come up with two very different interpretations of the results. However I believe the familiarity of ICE systems had a hand with how the veterans took in stride what left the new player agog.

Hell yeah. For folks used to tripping over invisible turtles when making move maneuvers, getting blown up in an asteroid field is pretty tame.

Quote from: Doctor Jest;581479Life or death situations need to be life or death situations to seem real.

Now, obviously we'll never get a perfect simulation, no, and some metagame concerns are unavoidable. That's true. But to then say that since it can never be perfect, we should just accept all metagaming as being just as valid is a Perfect Solution Fallacy. It doesn't need to be perfect, but that doesn't mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater and just resort to storygaming. It's ludicrous.

OK, I'd agree with that.  Do you think anyone is arguing that we should accept all metagaming?  I haven't seen that claim so far, but maybe I missed something.  

Personally, I've been talking in the context of fairly standard D&D (or D&D-like) play.  All of the options I outlined ("Fair Fight", "Fair Warning", and "Life's Not Fair") are compatible with an actual-death, old-school game.  Fair Fight doesn't mean the PCs always win, and even if the PCs win they could take losses.  Fair fights might regularly kill PCs, especially if you're using a highly lethal system.  Now, Fair Fight and Fair Warning play do inherently have some metagame influence.  However, I don't think that my playing through a typical AD&D1 module designed for 4th - 6th level characters (which falls under Fair Fight) qualifies as storygaming.  

My biggest beef is that many people were claiming "the GM shouldn't make things fair for the players" - while simultaneously always citing examples of how when the PCs died it was their own fault.  If the GM doesn't metagame to make things fair, then things won't be fair.  The PCs will die sometimes not because they were stupid, but because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.  

Re: the PCs walking away from challenges

Quote from: Doctor Jest;581481This goes contrary to sandbox play, however. The whole idea of a sandbox is the players have freedom to go wherever they like and do whatever they wish within the game world, exploring freely. So, as a GM, I never assume the players will go into the dungeon, or to the city, or to the wilderness. Those places may exist for them to explore, but if they decide instead to get on a ship and go across the sea leaving those things behind, then that's their choice.

This might be true in abstract principle, but in practice many real GMs would still be annoyed if - after preparing a bunch of local material - the PCs decided to get on a ship and go across the sea.  That doesn't mean they'd switch from sandbox to railroading, but they would have some negative feelings.  So for many people, that is a drawback of the style - which should be weighed against the drawbacks of other styles like a not-quite-pure sandbox where the PCs make real choices, but there is some balancing and limits to the choices.

Quote from: MGuy;580925To avoid getting too technical (with quantum physics stuff) I will clarify. None of us thinking people can copy what "reality" does. We just don't have the processing power.

But we can tap into the forces that do. Or at least, I can. But really, so could anyone else.

RPGPundit

Realistically, humanity would have never progressed from the small bands of hunter gatherers hiding in caves to full blown civilization if Earth's megafauna were gargantuan, flying, immortal, magic wielding geniuses as is the case in D&D.    

I don't think numbers even count for much given the historical distribution and total population of the Earth sans flying, immortal, genius behemoth's.  Fact of the matter is, it's not until way, way after humans tamed their environment and displaced (possibly by no act of their own) the considerably more mortal, vastly stupider fauna, that human population exploded, and it only did so due to advents of civilization, like farming, in the first place.

You'll never get to a point where you have lots of humans until you have a situation where you can feed them, and you'll never get to even late antiquity or medieval levels of population until you have a situation where society desires even marginally productive members live to adulthood and breed, because they are producing surplus.

Stupid, small predators were a serious problem for early pastoral peoples; insects, rodents, weather for agricultural.  Maybe if humans were an underdark species.  At least the Beholders might see some use in hands.  I don't know if these eyeless molemen could qualify as 'human' or having a 'civilization' as Beholder slaves though.