Quote from: jhkim on September 27, 2023, 12:11:49 PM
If the ranger hadn't been there, what was the party supposed to do about the four wights? In general, if an NPC is scared and runs away from what's inside a dungeon, what should the players do? Is the idea that because the NPC dwarf was scared, the PCs should just back away and not fight what is down there?

My three top choices would be
1)  Scout.  Listen at the door or use magic to determine what's on the other side.
2)  Go another way.
3)  Set up first.  Two armored characters in front.  Casters and and archers at a short distance behind.  Preferably use knock to open the door without anyone too close.  That way the whole party gets to fight immediately and not just the one fool.

I'd go with #3.  Anyway, the guy was dumb, and his foolishness not only hurt him it endangered the rest of the party.  He deserved what happened, even if his character was legit.

I have no idea what Gary was like as a GM but I know from watching his interview on 60 Minutes that he was terrible at communicating his ideas.  Also, over the years, he made many contradictory statements that have caused no end of arguments between RPG hobbyists.  I'm at a point where I will read his stuff on running games but I take it into careful consideration and with a small pinch of salt.

Aside from the specific example and my opinions on how well this is for game play, I think RPGs are all about making decisions and dealing with the consequences.  If that's not what's happening, then it's not an RPG.  (I will die on this hill.)

Quote from: Lunamancer on September 27, 2023, 12:18:52 PM
The proto Leeroy Jenkins dwarf charged through the doors. But the dwarf didn't lose 4 levels. It doesn't sound like Gary even rolled any dice. He just took control of the dwarf for a moment, had him step out, and give the party a warning. This not only showed the dwarf's player leniency, it also gave the party fair warning. So when the Ranger went through the door after being fairly warned, he had it coming to him.

I had thought that the dwarf was an NPC, since the GM was controlling him. If the dwarf was a PC, then on what grounds does the GM get to snatch the PC away from player control and decide what the PC dwarf says and does? The GM plays the world, he doesn't get to decide what the PCs do.

Wights don't have a Fear effect. The dwarf player should be able to decide for himself what he does when he sees the wights, and what he tells the other players.

Quote from: Lunamancer on September 27, 2023, 12:18:52 PM
In Gary's later modules, he including notes on these sorts of leniency considerations. In Hall of Many Panes, he used the example of a barbarian acting brashly, and the dwarf in this example sounds exactly like what he was writing about.

I'm not familiar with Hall of Many Panes. What is the example of a barbarian acting brashly?

Quote from: jhkim on September 27, 2023, 12:31:22 PM
I had thought that the dwarf was an NPC, since the GM was controlling him. If the dwarf was a PC, then on what grounds does the GM get to snatch the PC away from player control and decide what the PC dwarf says and does? The GM plays the world, he doesn't get to decide what the PCs do.

Wights don't have a Fear effect. The dwarf player should be able to decide for himself what he does when he sees the wights, and what he tells the other players.

That seems really unjustifiable. Also, it was not necessary for the effect he wanted to give. The ranger would roast himself sooner or later... Don't tell me he did this kind of thing regularly or argued for its usage

Using the 'Brave Sir Robin' strategy is often the best one in dungeons - e.g. in the old giants module G1, where avoiding the hill giants and their giant mates all congregated in the chief's hall and making alliances with the orc slaves to do the fighting for you is the path to success. Taking on every fight will just make your character the worgs' meat very quickly.

Seems to me that Gary was using a common referee hint ('the fleeing NPC trope') to tell the players that hack and slash was not the best course of action in the next encounter. Given such a hint, most players (at least the ones I have played with) would understand they were being told to avoid a full frontal assault. They would do more investigating, like using ESP or Wizard Eye to case the room, or getting a thief to hide in shadows and open the door to see what is inside from a distance. Then the players could use missile weapons/magic/cleric turning in more safety by hanging back from the frontal encounter. Or, depending on the room, they could have avoided the encounter altogether.

If anything, by having the dwarf telegraph a difficult encounter, Gary was being more merciful than many of the old crew used to be.

Quote from: shoplifter on September 27, 2023, 11:15:25 AM

Quote from: Ratman_tf on September 27, 2023, 11:07:25 AM
While I agree that players should play smart, I think Gary's own examples in that article are kind of dumb. The kind of dumb were it's like: why go adventuring? It's dangerous. The smart move for any adventurer is to stay home and farm gong. There has to be some amount of leniency for players adventuring and sticking their noses into things and generally getting into trouble. Because that's where the fun is at.

I don't have a problem with it under the context of Gary clearly knowing the player was basically cheating and breaking an unwritten code of honor in the community. Gary decided to make an example of the guy.

Exactly. Instead of acting like an Adult, Gary wanted to make an example of him by acting all passive aggressive, pretending everything was OK, and then whipping out his DM dong.
He should have just told the guy his character was too high level compared to the rest of the group. Assuming the story wasn't creatively embellished for Dragon Magazine in the first place.

There are many different ways to have fun. I'm not going to sit here and pretend there's a "right way" to play, or that'd make me no different than the emotionally-stunted children on reddit. If people want fluffy little games where the world's reality bends to the players' whims, fine. I don't want to be in those games, and I don't want those players in my games. I'm perfectly fine with giving them their own little corner at the kid's table.

I will say this, though. Going back to its war-gaming roots, table top gaming has been about strategy and wits. It's a "game" in the same sense that chess is a game. There are rules, and stupid mistakes have consequences. You won't enter a chess tournament and expect your opponent to hand you a win. You need to outsmart him. That was the point of the article; that the 13th-lvl ranger didn't earn those levels through merit. They were "unearned" levels. It's like saying you won a thousand chess games when all of your opponents let you win.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on September 27, 2023, 01:02:43 PM
Exactly. Instead of acting like an Adult, Gary wanted to make an example of him by acting all passive aggressive, pretending everything was OK, and then whipping out his DM dong.
He should have just told the guy his character was too high level compared to the rest of the group. Assuming the story wasn't creatively embellished for Dragon Magazine in the first place.

Quote from: El-V on September 27, 2023, 12:51:05 PM
Using the 'Brave Sir Robin' strategy is often the best one in dungeons - e.g. in the old giants module G1, where avoiding the hill giants and their giant mates all congregated in the chief's hall and making alliances with the orc slaves to do the fighting for you is the path to success. Taking on every fight will just make your character the worgs' meat very quickly.

Seems to me that Gary was using a common referee hint ('the fleeing NPC trope') to tell the players that hack and slash was not the best course of action in the next encounter. Given such a hint, most players (at least the ones I have played with) would understand they were being told to avoid a full frontal assault.

I understand that it was common back in the day, but I also strongly dislike this trope. As a GM, I play the NPCs as NPCs. NPCs are frequently wrong or misinformed or gave bad advice, because they are just people in the world -- not a mouthpiece for the GM.

NPC mouthpieces make for shitty gaming, because it messes with the believability of NPCs. It's important that NPCs act correctly, because then players can make correct conclusions based on the logic of the world -- rather than reading "what does the GM want us to do".

If a dwarf acted bravely and then suddenly scared, as a player, I might question what he was up to. Maybe the dwarf is genuine, but maybe he is a traitor trying to lead us into a trap by scaring us away from the unguarded entrance. Or maybe he was mistaken in what he thought he saw.

---

Quote from: Effete on September 27, 2023, 01:03:06 PM
There are many different ways to have fun. I'm not going to sit here and pretend there's a "right way" to play, or that'd make me no different than the emotionally-stunted children on reddit. If people want fluffy little games where the world's reality bends to the players' whims, fine. I don't want to be in those games, and I don't want those players in my games. I'm perfectly fine with giving them their own little corner at the kid's table.

I will say this, though. Going back to its war-gaming roots, table top gaming has been about strategy and wits. It's a "game" in the same sense that chess is a game. There are rules, and stupid mistakes have consequences. You won't enter a chess tournament and expect your opponent to hand you a win. You need to outsmart him. That was the point of the article; that the 13th-lvl ranger didn't earn those levels through merit. They were "unearned" levels. It's like saying you won a thousand chess games when all of your opponents let you win.

But D&D levels aren't actually a measure of tactical measure, because there is a huge variance in how difficult an individual DM makes it to earn levels. They are earned according to gold pieces found and monsters defeated, but the difficulty of a given monster varies massively with how the DM sets up the circumstances. Back in the day, it was common knowledge that DMs varied from the "Killer DM" (where even making it to 3rd level is a triumph) to the "Monty Haul DM" (who gives away easy prizes).

Further, D&D is a team game -- so you don't know if a given player was the weakest player on his team (and earned points based on his teammates skill) or whether he was the leader.

Between these, it's entirely possible for a player to get to 13th level without being tactically skilled.

As a shorter summation:

In a team game, the referee should never twist his calls to try to target an unskilled or dumb member of a team, and make play hard for them.

If he thinks that a player is cheating - then skilled or not - he should call out that player out of game and deal with it.

Quote from: jhkim on September 27, 2023, 02:04:28 PM
I understand that it was common back in the day, but I also strongly dislike this trope. As a GM, I play the NPCs as NPCs. NPCs are frequently wrong or misinformed or gave bad advice, because they are just people in the world -- not a mouthpiece for the GM.

NPC mouthpieces make for shitty gaming, because it messes with the believability of NPCs. It's important that NPCs act correctly, because then players can make correct conclusions based on the logic of the world -- rather than reading "what does the GM want us to do".

If a dwarf acted bravely and then suddenly scared, as a player, I might question what he was up to. Maybe the dwarf is genuine, but maybe he is a traitor trying to lead us into a trap by scaring us away from the unguarded entrance. Or maybe he was mistaken in what he thought he saw.

That's gold advice I haven't specifically heard being brought much to attention

Quote from: jhkim on September 27, 2023, 02:17:55 PM
As a shorter summation:

In a team game, the referee should never twist his calls to try to target an unskilled or dumb member of a team, and make play hard for them.

If he thinks that a player is cheating - then skilled or not - he should call out that player out of game and deal with it.

I don't really see any evidence in the story that Gary did that.  The encounters could have been there along, and the dumb player just muffed them

Quote from: Mishihari on September 27, 2023, 02:33:23 PM

Quote from: jhkim on September 27, 2023, 02:17:55 PM
In a team game, the referee should never twist his calls to try to target an unskilled or dumb member of a team, and make play hard for them.

If he thinks that a player is cheating - then skilled or not - he should call out that player out of game and deal with it.

I don't really see any evidence in the story that Gary did that.  The encounters could have been there along, and the dumb player just muffed them

He specifically says that he would "play the encounter differently" because the PC is overpowered, though he does qualify that he still wouldn't fudge the dice rolls. From the intro:

Quote from: Gary GygaxMany DMs have asked me how I handle characters that are obviously overpowered  "jumped-up" PCs that never really earned  their high abilities and survive by massive hit-point total, super magic, and unearned ease in attacking with sword or spell. To such inquiries, I respond that in recognizing this sort of character I simply play the encounters a bit differently, mainly in the presentation of information, not in "fudging'* of the dice rolls for monsters. Inept players will destroy their characters without having to resort to such methods.

(emphasis mine) It's unclear to me how the play would have gone if that 13th-level PC hadn't been there. But that's on him as author. Since he's giving the advice, he should have made clear what he was doing differently.

I think the handful of you asking if Gary would've played the module differently is missing the forest for the trees.

Yes, no shit he would've played differently. He absolutely constructed a scenario to humilate that player. And that's a good thing, frankly.  Bear in mind, there's very little mention of the other players or what the game was really about. This is a story of how Gygax dealt with a power-gamer. It focuses on the events of the story and not the entire game. Someone who came in with a high level character they didn't actually know how to play properly. This guy could've trolled or munchkined their way into completely destroying Gygax's campaign. I'd be annoyed at that too. The thing is, you can't just accuse people of things with no evidence. Sure Gygax could've just said "I think you cheated and fudged this character's stats" but he would've just looked like a fool with no way to prove this. Better to give that player just enough leeway to damn themselves and vindicate Gygax. If that player just knew and played their character properly nothing would've happened.  This was Gary's tournament style open MMO-ish games. Multiple groups. Possibly as many as 50 players spread across different groups as a suggestion if the DMG is to be believed. All of these games happen in a shared world where players compete for glory and riches. So if someone messes that up. The whole thing can crumble.  If he's letting a high level character in they better be competitive and honest. Or the hard work Gygax put into that is tarnished and his game would've been made a mockery of. It wasn't just for the sake of that player. It was a message to not cheat the DM. Earn your place. Earn your levels. Play fair or the GM won't be.   

Quote from: Ghostmaker on September 27, 2023, 11:30:24 AM
And even if he wasn't a cheater / Timmy Powergamer type, he was so rock stupid he deserved what he got. Good grief.

Hence my signature line.