Quote from: Skarg;925204I allow this in the form:
Player: "Is there a dumpster nearby that would work for me to do X with?"
or
Player: "Is there a blacksmith in this town?"

If they say, "I go to the blacksmith" then I check or if I don't know, assess chances and roll, and if so, "well yes there is a blacksmith" or if not "hmm you haven't seen a blacksmith here... do you want to ask someone where the nearest one might be?"

Exactly

Quote from: DavetheLost;925042Where I worry about crossing the line into illusionism is when I advance prepare little set piece encounters to drop into play. Usually just little colour encounters. "At the coaching inn a mysterious stranger will rush angrilly out the door, physically pushing the PCs out of his way, exchange heated words with a lady in a carriage then jump on his horse and ride off in the opposite direction to the coach. Examining the inn yard will reveal that he dropped a monogrammed silk handkerchief."  If the players decide to follow up on this it could become a plot seed, if they don't they may never discover the plot against the Crown that these two are engaged in.  Is it illusionism to place this little scene at "the next coaching inn the party visits"?

Good question.

Quote from: Omega;925165I've made maps to get around places before. Once while lost biking first time in a city. Helped figure out where I was and how to get back. Other time a convention hotel in MN. The place was a maze spread out and got lost a few times so started mapping the branches. (10 acres covered???) Wryly appropriate as the con was hosting a huge Deep Space 9 LARP. Sadly its been bought out and torn down. I've seen folk use maps at outdoor LARPs when the area covered was large. Not as often with smaller sites or places with well marked paths.

I amend my reply to add that making maps is not very common. Yes I seen people make maps before for various reasons. Most just learn to navigate by using landmarks and explain the lay of the land by using landmarks.

Quote from: Skarg;925202I also sketch and gesture and use physical objects when it helps.
How well one can see the surrounding terrain depends on what's blocking the view, if anything. Even when you can see a wide area, it's not the same as having an accurate top-down map let alone with a hex grid that your GM agrees defines correctly where you are. I greatly prefer your system to there being no map, as it provides tons of meaningful detail, doesn't reveal everything, and often many players may not care about including limits of knowledge, but it is giving a lot more/better info than people would really have, especially if they haven't explored the area before.

Well one thing about the maps I presented as part of my post is they are to areas that been settled a long time. If I was doing something that involved the exploration of a "new world". Then I would do something like this

The real map

[ATTACH=CONFIG]466[/ATTACH]

What the players would see
[ATTACH=CONFIG]465[/ATTACH]

Quote from: Skarg;925202Well, but it does give away several things, especially to someone who isn't from there and has never seen a map of the area. Even for someplace someone has lived all their lives, they may mostly know all the major places and how to get between them, but they don't have an accurate mental map of every detail, and all the shapes of the terrain and so on. A local may have effectively almost that level of information, especially if they are spatially oriented and travel it frequently, but that's an extreme and still isn't going to be perfect. It may be close enough that no player cares though, especially since the apathy scale often goes all the way to "who needs a map? are we at the dungeon yet?"

My view is that requiring players to map well settled areas as if it was the Amacui maps above is more gamey and unrealistic. However my method is a compromise from how it would go in life. I also presume a certain level of competency and knowledge from the character unstated life experiences. We have a bunch of folks looking for adventures, I assume during their downtime they are asking the NPCs about the region and where things are. But I only assume to a point hence my maps are a high level overview and unless something is a landmark (like the Temple of Mitra in Abberset) the players will have to roleplay to find out the details.

Quote from: Skarg;925202Generally people don't sketch maps, no. They don't need to. They form mental maps and memories of paths and landmarks between places. As you write, yes, it is faster and more effective/efficient to have an accurate map, especially in a game. It just loses the part about how less can be more, if you're interested in that. That is, if you might learn stuff by exploring, and things can be unknown and hidden, including just the what's there in detail. Or one might find it interesting to play out the effect of some people knowing a region better than another does, for pursuits, treasure hunts, intrigue and/or tactical advantage. Your Phandalin map in particular looks like it has many routes that no one would know about if they were just passing through, because of all the terrain that looks like it would block vision (well, if brown is high ground and dark green is woods). Again, of course, one can choose at what level it's better to make the info available easily, and what you want to make players learn in character.

The Dearthwood map is where there is a lot of hidden information that not known generally. People know there is a ridge of hills and where the rivers are but that about it. The Phandalin map is well settled. You can see the larger scale of the area in the upper left of the Dearthwood map. But even then with the maps it not telling you what people are doing and what they are using to get about. Even if they learn where something is (say the woods north of Salan). That still a green blog a 1/2 mile n-s and 3/4 mile e-w that they have to learn in detail. And again if the exploration of terrain is an important part of the campaign, then I use something like the Amacui map I posted above. I just disagree doing that as a general purpose technique.

Just so you know in the Phandalin map, the brown are ploughed field, the speckled dots are high ground. In my maps, color represent vegetation, and I use a transparent pattern for terrain. Dots for hills, a splotchy pattern for mountains. This allows me to represent vegetation and terrain in their natural shapes compared to Mystara style hex symbols or contours. Harn maps use this style a lot. In the Dearthwood map it hard to see the speckles because I saved it as a low res JPG. However the yellow represent regions with agriculture.

Quote from: Skarg;925202[/B]As you suggest there at the end, I do something between making people map everything and showing them the real map. If they really don't know much about where they are and they can't see very far, then it's verbal description, but otherwise I'll give sketches or they'll have some (often very) not-entirely accurate/complete maps. Often the map details are not known or important to convey, and it would be ridiculous to try to map anyway. Then short-range maps only come out for tactical situations, the PC's seeing where they are at the moment and yes, sometimes leaving the maps up where they just were.

That can work, now that you replied in more detail, I think our respective methods are closer than what the post I read suggested. Thanks.

From experience it seems what you want a map,or make one, for is usually at the start. Once you know where stuff is you stop relying on the map.

Even something as simple as Keep on the Borderlands its oddly easy to get turned around and lost in both the keep and more specifically the caves. I re-created it in Minecraft just to explore from that perspective and its surprising just how darn twisty such a seemingly simple layout is when you are actually IN said layout.

I live in a rural area, and I can find my way around pretty well. Both on and off the roads. I don't know that I could draw you anything like an accurate map for most of it. It's more like navigating from landmark to landmark. I orient my self by seeing something familiar, which can even be on the horizon, and knowing generally where I am.

A lot of old navigators piloted on dead reconing and lists of points along the way. No map.

I think we are more dependant on maps for our RPGs because we do not have the benefit of having spent lots of time walking over the physical ground of our settings. Especially in areas that the characters should be familiar with, like their hometowns. They know them better than we do.

If a character should know the way I will let the player say "I am going to the Slippery Eel for a drink," and not make them give me turn by turn directions.

In a strange city I might hide the map and just describe to them what they can see. Let them make navigation checks to help find their way, and to remember if that building is supposed to be on their right or on the left when they are going the right way.

Quote from: DavetheLost;925042Where I worry about crossing the line into illusionism is when I advance prepare little set piece encounters to drop into play. Usually just little colour encounters. "At the coaching inn a mysterious stranger will rush angrilly out the door, physically pushing the PCs out of his way, exchange heated words with a lady in a carriage then jump on his horse and ride off in the opposite direction to the coach. Examining the inn yard will reveal that he dropped a monogrammed silk handkerchief."  If the players decide to follow up on this it could become a plot seed, if they don't they may never discover the plot against the Crown that these two are engaged in.  Is it illusionism to place this little scene at "the next coaching inn the party visits"?

IMO, illusionism is any practice of invisible railroading -- i.e., it's railroading where the mechanism of the railroad can't be seen by the players. (Although often a pattern of behavior will nevertheless be detected.)

The method of "this will happen at the next coaching inn they visit" certainly qualifies as a method the players can't directly see. So the question is whether or not this is railroading.

As I discuss in The Railroading Manifesto, in order for a railroad to exist the GM must negate a player's choice in order to enforce a preconceived outcome. In this case there is a preconceived outcome (the encounter), but triggering the encounter does not appear to negate player choice. Ergo, not railroading. And, therefore, not illusionism.

(What would make it illusionism? Well, let's say that the PCs specifically say that they are going to try to enter the coaching inn without being noticed by anyone. You want to trigger the encounter, so you decide that their successful Stealth check is instead a failure so that they have to run into the mysterious stranger.)

Quote from: rgrove0172;925047Whats really amazing is that so many here seem to feel that the occasional 'rigging' if you want to call it that during a game somehow eliminates all the reward the players get in playing.

I don’t think we said it eliminates all reward. Just that for some it eliminates an important reward. Maybe even a crucial reward. Why look, here is me not saying that shell games eliminate all rewards.

Quote from: Bren;924974Clearly this type of a sense of accomplishment is not what RGrove and Co. play for and he seems to really not be able to grasp that some people want the chance for that sense of accomplishment in addition to (and even at times instead of) a feeling of "fun session," "cool adventure," "nice story," or "wow, that was exciting."

Quote from: rgrove0172;925047Its not as if the whole damn game is 'rigged'.

Of course not. Sometimes the PCs do what you want them to do and there is no need to rig things and rigging everything is way too obvious. Similarly, rigged gambling joints don’t rig every throw or spin. They rig the throws and spins against the player where the house has a lot of money riding on the outcome and occasionally for the player as a come on in the initial set up.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;925076"It's not as if I'm pissing in EVERY glass of beer I'm serving you! Most of the beer is actually perfectly fine. I don't understand why you feel this has ruined the beer-drinking."

This works and is much pithier than what I was going to say. (And if you say it aloud with a bit of a lisp it is pithy and a pun.)

Quote from: DavetheLost;925042Where I worry about crossing the line into illusionism is when I advance prepare little set piece encounters to drop into play. Usually just little colour encounters. "At the next coaching inn a mysterious stranger will rush angrilly out the door, physically pushing the PCs out of his way, exchange heated words with a lady in a carriage then jump on his horse and ride off in the opposite direction to the coach. Examining the inn yard will reveal that he dropped a monogrammed silk handkerchief."  If the players decide to follow up on this it could become a plot seed, if they don't they may never discover the plot against the Crown that these two are engaged in.  Is it illusionism to place this little scene at "the next coaching inn the party visits"?

I've seen others run (or have myself run) color encounters in this way. Often this occurs as the result of a random encounter on a table of special encounters. Usually there are required criteria for the encounter to occur, e.g. if the GM rolls a special encounter result AND if the players are somewhere that inns exist and are encountered, then this is the next encounter the players get. Both those things (random encounter table and requisite situational criteria) protect the GM from any urges to play ABRACADABRA Presto Chango!

QuoteIf the players decide to follow up on this it could become a plot seed, if they don't they may never discover the plot against the Crown that these two are engaged in.

Its a bit of a compromise between completely naturalistic world and we are all trying to play a game. If the players can walk away it's similar to any other plot hook or adventure seed. I wouldn't worry about the encounters at the next coaching inn part.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;925266(What would make it illusionism? Well, let's say that the PCs specifically say that they are going to try to enter the coaching inn without being noticed by anyone. You want to trigger the encounter, so you decide that their successful Stealth check is instead a failure so that they have to run into the mysterious stranger.)

Right. The PCs being able to view the encounter is another requisite situational criteria. So if the PC was unconscious when they arrived at the inn, they’d miss the encounter.

Quote from: DavetheLost;925042Where I worry about crossing the line into illusionism is when I advance prepare little set piece encounters to drop into play. Usually just little colour encounters. "At the coaching inn a mysterious stranger will rush angrilly out the door, physically pushing the PCs out of his way, exchange heated words with a lady in a carriage then jump on his horse and ride off in the opposite direction to the coach. Examining the inn yard will reveal that he dropped a monogrammed silk handkerchief."  If the players decide to follow up on this it could become a plot seed, if they don't they may never discover the plot against the Crown that these two are engaged in.  Is it illusionism to place this little scene at "the next coaching inn the party visits"?

Technically, I suppose you could call this a "Quantum Event" or "Schrodinger's Ogre".  But, most of the time when people are talking about such events, or Illusionism, they are referring to a GM's decision that robs the players of agency or choice.  But, to be honest,

• If the players don't know about the nobles.
• They're not specifically trying to avoid those nobles or going to coaching inns.
• They're in a place where they would naturally visit coaching inns.

Then I really don't see an effective difference from the players point of view than...
1. Rolling at every coaching inn to see if the people pop up.
2. Deciding at what exact coaching inn and hour this will happen and if the players miss it, then oh well.
3. Deciding it will happen here and now.

Basically what you are doing is presenting the players with a choice...that's all.  (And giving them minor loot in the form of a silk handkerchief.  One of my players would want to find out which nobleman that was in order to frame him/blackmail him by placing the handerchief in the wrong bedroom. )

Now if they had specifically said they were avoiding coaching inns and so you chased them out of the forest with bandits/beastmen so they would have to take the road and made a torrential downpour so they would have to shelter in the coaching inn, well then now you're railroading the hell out of them...or are Grove.

My problem with those is, you have to have those fairly often and a lot of time have them potentially go nowhere at all, otherwise any word that comes out of your mouth becomes "Campaign Important".

Quote from: CRKrueger;925313My problem with those is, you have to have those fairly often and a lot of time have them potentially go nowhere at all, otherwise any word that comes out of your mouth becomes "Campaign Important".

Typically, a potential hook won't have a lot of detail. I just ran a short session last night that included two of these.

A character, Le Serpent, had hitched a ride with a supply caravan heading towards an army camp. I mentioned the weather (occasional showers) and that traffic seemed normal on the road. Then I mentioned two encounters that seemed a bit unusual.

The first was a plain coach traveling rapidly north for Orléans. Inside you can just make out what looks like a female figure, but her identify is hidden both by her travel mask and by the carriage’s curtains. The player asked if the driver of the wagon he was on knew anything about the coach. The driver did not and nattered on about why some people were always in a hurry, "Afterall, why hurry? Whereever you go, there you are. And whereever you came from is where you were." The player made note of the event, but decided not to do anything else as the coach rolled on by.

The second was a gentleman on horseback in the woods to the side of the road. The gentleman was carrying a musket or other long gone which made it seem like he was probably a hunter or possibly a scout for a band of highwaymen. Le Serpent asked the driver about the man and the driver said "He's probably a hunter since folks do a lot of hunting here. We're near to the Solonge." Again the player made a note but elected not to investigate further or to ask about the Solonge - a wooded, marshy, lake dotted area south of Orleans.

These were just two random encounters from the random events tables I use. If the player had engaged with either encounter then I'd have responded with improvisation and some random die rolling to determine what the NPC was actually up to. This could have resulted in a side adventure of some kind. Since the player didn't engage we just moved on and that became some local color.

Quote from: Bren;925306I don’t think we said it eliminates all reward. Just that for some it eliminates an important reward. Maybe even a crucial reward. Why look, here is me not saying that shell games eliminate all rewards.

Of course not. Sometimes the PCs do what you want them to do and there is no need to rig things and rigging everything is way too obvious. Similarly, rigged gambling joints don’t rig every throw or spin. They rig the throws and spins against the player where the house has a lot of money riding on the outcome and occasionally for the player as a come on in the initial set up.

And even more of the time the PCs do what they want to do and the GM goes along just fine as there is no reason to interfere. This probably 90% or greater.

This works and is much pithier than what I was going to say. (And if you say it aloud with a bit of a lisp it is pithy and a pun.)


I've seen others run (or have myself run) color encounters in this way. Often this occurs as the result of a random encounter on a table of special encounters. Usually there are required criteria for the encounter to occur, e.g. if the GM rolls a special encounter result AND if the players are somewhere that inns exist and are encountered, then this is the next encounter the players get. Both those things (random encounter table and requisite situational criteria) protect the GM from any urges to play ABRACADABRA Presto Chango!

Laugh, so if a table or chart does it its fine, but if an intelligent being improvises something, its not. Gotcha.

Its a bit of a compromise between completely naturalistic world and we are all trying to play a game. If the players can walk away it's similar to any other plot hook or adventure seed. I wouldn't worry about the encounters at the next coaching inn part.

Right. The PCs being able to view the encounter is another requisite situational criteria. So if the PC was unconscious when they arrived at the inn, they’d miss the encounter.

Sometimes it sounds as if some of you would plan, oh say a Bandit encounter by exact location, time and circumstance and if the players didn't blunder exactly into those specific parameters then it wouldn't happen. If you altered those parameters even slightly however to trigger the bandit encounter anyway, youd be railroading. If so, that's ridiculous. I would almost guarantee a HUGE majority of GMs simply jot down on a notepad "Bandits on road to castle - " and make it happen.

Quote from: CRKrueger;925313Technically, I suppose you could call this a "Quantum Event" or "Schrodinger's Ogre".  But, most of the time when people are talking about such events, or Illusionism, they are referring to a GM's decision that robs the players of agency or choice.  But, to be honest,

• If the players don't know about the nobles.
• They're not specifically trying to avoid those nobles or going to coaching inns.
• They're in a place where they would naturally visit coaching inns.

Then I really don't see an effective difference from the players point of view than...
1. Rolling at every coaching inn to see if the people pop up.
2. Deciding at what exact coaching inn and hour this will happen and if the players miss it, then oh well.
3. Deciding it will happen here and now.

Basically what you are doing is presenting the players with a choice...that's all.  (And giving them minor loot in the form of a silk handkerchief.  One of my players would want to find out which nobleman that was in order to frame him/blackmail him by placing the handerchief in the wrong bedroom. )

Now if they had specifically said they were avoiding coaching inns and so you chased them out of the forest with bandits/beastmen so they would have to take the road and made a torrential downpour so they would have to shelter in the coaching inn, well then now you're railroading the hell out of them...or are Grove.

My problem with those is, you have to have those fairly often and a lot of time have them potentially go nowhere at all, otherwise any word that comes out of your mouth becomes "Campaign Important".

I truly hope the smiley face after the baseless slander was meant to indicate your joking, otherwise... well you can imagine the appropriate response. I have never pulled anything remotely as ridiculous as what you describe. Its not even in the same ball park as what Ive defended.

And once again I have to call bullshit on your position on avoiding making certain comments or descriptions obviously "campaign important". You might run a great game and be a master at storytelling but Im fairly certain most players don't want to hear all the meaningless tavern banter throughout an evening, descriptions of the behavior of every patron, recounts of every false rumor in the region etc. We only have a limited time to play afterall. You can elude to all that other 'color' sure, but then it actually SHOULD be rather obvious when something important to the game at hand comes up.

 "Through the din of the common room you hear an old timer in the corner strike up a conversation with a much younger serving wench. He seems to be bragging about his pouch full of silver and the old mine where he found it."

This is a time honored gaming tradition, glazing over the various scene elements and locking in on what matters. Its not a slip of a bad GM, its how the game has been played for decades. Sure, I suppose there are alternatives but as it stands the approach is almost procedure.

Quote from: rgrove0172;925332Sometimes it sounds as if some of you would plan, oh say a Bandit encounter by exact location, time and circumstance and if the players didn't blunder exactly into those specific parameters then it wouldn't happen. If you altered those parameters even slightly however to trigger the bandit encounter anyway, youd be railroading. If so, that's ridiculous. I would almost guarantee a HUGE majority of GMs simply jot down on a notepad "Bandits on road to castle - " and make it happen.

Yeah, I'm definitely getting the sense that too much of the analysis is taking place in a vacuum and strictly for argument's sake. If I were to plan a Bandit encounter, my focus would be the bandits themselves, not the encounter. The bandits are thinking individuals with goals. It doesn't make much sense for them to just sit around just waiting for someone to blunder into their clutches. Rather, they take action to maximize their opportunity. And thus it's only logical that they may actively be seeking to railroad the party one way or another into a trap or ambush.

There's this great adventure "hook" from the Dance of the Faerie Rings adventure module. And I put "hook" in quotes because it's not really a hook so much as a blatant railroad--a more blatant railroad than any GM railroad. PCs are traveling along and come upon a fork in the road. Do they take the high road or the low road? The low road leads to the adventure. But if the party takes the high road, they walk for a while and come back to the same fork in the road. Every time they take the high road, they end up back at the same fork until they decide to take the low road. What's happening here, which you wouldn't find out 'til the very end of the adventure (spoiler alert), is that some faerie creatures have been captured and are trying to enlist the PC's aid. They're using their magic to prevent the party from leaving the area. And in fact, if you get to rescuing them, they can use their magic to aid you, but the more times the group took the high road, the more of their magic is drained so the less they can help you.

Quote from: rgrove0172;925332And even more of the time the PCs do what they want to do and the GM goes along just fine as there is no reason to interfere. This probably 90% or greater.

If we ever meet in person, let's play some blackjack, roulette, or poker for real money. I'll cheat less than 10% of the time and you'll let me because it's not all the time and we'll find out if that is OK with you. Deal?

QuoteSometimes it sounds as if some of you would plan, oh say a Bandit encounter by exact location, time and circumstance and if the players didn't blunder exactly into those specific parameters then it wouldn't happen.

I have in fact used a timeline of events on more than one occasion for the villain's activities and when the players weren't in the right place at the right time for timed events the players never saw those events occur. Sometimes they heard about the events later e.g. when the dead bodies of the latest victims were found. One example that occurs to me is a series of ritual murders in my H+I game. There were preset locations and times where the villain planned to sacrifice a victim. The players missed several of the killings. Eventually they observed a pattern and predicted the next occurrence and were waiting to foil the witch's next sacrifice.

I thought giving them a real puzzle to solve was fun. They seemed to think actually outfoxing the witch was fun.

And if they'd never figured out the sacrifices in time then some bad stuff would happen, the witch would get stronger, the magic harder to undo, and the witch's plan would have moved on to phase 2. At which point the players would again have a chance to try and puzzle out what was going on with the next set of rituals. If I'd just engineered events so that the players automatically had a boss fight at pentagram point #5 at the appropriate time that would have made their success a bit of a sham.

QuoteIf so, that's ridiculous.

No it is just me playing the world in motion not me trying to tell a story with a specific climax or conclusion. [/quote]

QuoteI would almost guarantee a HUGE majority of GMs simply jot down on a notepad "Bandits on road to castle - " and make it happen.

I bet 20 bucks you are wrong, but you have to prove you are right to win. I only need you not to show proof for me to win.

Shall We Play A Game?

Quote from: Bren;925338If we ever meet in person, let's play some blackjack, roulette, or poker for real money. I'll cheat less than 10% of the time and you'll let me because it's not all the time and we'll find out if that is OK with you. Deal?

The point is to play an imaginary character in a setting as part of a tabletop roleplaying campaign. It not a competitive game, and it not a competition. The referee needs to be fair which doesn't always mean being a slave to the dice or mindlessly applying a set of rules written by somebody else who has never has sat at your table.

All of the stuff that the thread is talking about is bad when applied in disregard to the circumstances and good when the circumstances warrant. This includes my own suggestions as well.