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Old 10-27-2022, 07:45 AM   #1
sjmdw45
 
Join Date: Jan 2008
Default D&D as conflict simulation: first impressions of Muster: A Primer For War

I'm excited about Eero Tuovinen's new book "Muster - A Primer for War. Advice for playing D&D the wargaming way!" (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/413382/Muster) and want to share my first impressions and ask for yours.

I'm not much of an art guy normally but the art immediately grabbed me. I may wind up printing this one out.

I'm also impressed by the clarity of the layout/organization and by the fact that he immediately contextualizes it with Kriegspiel and open-ended conflict simulation. I can totally imagine myself printing out the Manifesto section to routinely hand to new players to inform them what my game is about, which of the 8 types of fun I intend to serve. I love how the work positions gaining insight as a core motivation for play:

D&D is a roleplaying game that is also a wargame. Its philosophical basis is in conflict simulation gaming of the war-gaming tradition. The principles we insist upon here are only novel compared to other types of roleplaying games.

Wargaming originates in the 19th century as a hobby and training tool of military men. Its creative ideals are about learning and sportsmanship; we play to understand conflict dynamics, learn culture and science, and grow in the contest.

Although this may often be ignored today, D&D remains one of the high achievements of wargaming.

Yes! A thousand times yes!

I'm getting new ideas for my game already, just from pondering the manifesto. What if I made my Dungeon Fantasy dungeons (hexcrawls) increase in realism as you go deeper (northward), instead of increasing in difficulty? What if going deeper (northward) is how you give the DM permission to stop telegraphing danger, introducing monsters in small numbers before encountering them in large numbers, following the Three Clue rule, and avoiding effective-but-unfun traps and security protocols (like magical claymores that obliterate you with overkill, instead of just scaring you with medium damage)? What if player actions can signal the GM to stop doing the things that make it a fun game, and start doing the things to make it more of a realistic conflict simulator?

Those are my first impressions. What are yours?

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Old 10-27-2022, 09:23 AM   #2
sjmdw45
 
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Default Re: D&D as conflict simulation: first impressions of Muster: A Primer For War

Another idea I just had: if the GM's job at the end of the session is to "score" the players' actions by handing out character points (or XP)... then in some scenarios, I should hand out character points for retreating! If retreat is a wise course of action given what has just been learned about the opposition, I should reward that intelligent decision the same as any other intelligent decision.

This might also make it more interesting to GM, because you're taking on the role of critical reviewer/mentor instead of a neutral observer. Commenting on player decisions would be welcome and expected after the delve is over, instead of feeling like interference.

I would still want to rotate GMs frequently though. Now I'm excited to try this as a method for awarding CP. I can't wait to plop down a spellcasting dragon and then reward the players for wisely hiding until it goes away. (Or killing it, if they manage to do so through other wise decisions, such as luring it into traps they found elsewhere or having meteoric iron bodkin arrows.) I have the soul of both a designer and a teacher, so the chance to design scenarios for people to learn from excites me.
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Old 10-27-2022, 10:07 AM   #3
The Colonel
 
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Default Re: D&D as conflict simulation: first impressions of Muster: A Primer For War

As I understand it, the wargame/RPG boundary has now been re-colonised by games like Frostgrave (and whatever Junglegrave and Spacegrave are actually called) and Rangers of Shadowdeep.
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Old 10-31-2022, 11:08 AM   #4
beaushinkle
 
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Default Re: D&D as conflict simulation: first impressions of Muster: A Primer For War

Quote:
What if going deeper (northward) is how you give the DM permission to stop telegraphing danger, introducing monsters in small numbers before encountering them in large numbers, following the Three Clue rule, and avoiding effective-but-unfun traps and security protocols (like magical claymores that obliterate you with overkill, instead of just scaring you with medium damage)? What if player actions can signal the GM to stop doing the things that make it a fun game, and start doing the things to make it more of a realistic conflict simulator?
What sort of game would you suspect that produces at the table, and is that the sort of game your players want to play?

For example, we have the three clue rule so that there's redundancy. "For any conclusion you want the PCs to make, include at least three clues". When you include less clues than that, the PCs often won't make those conclusions. If those conclusions are necessary to survival or progress, they die or don't progress. If that's the reality you're trying to simulate, you've done so successfully, but is that fun?

Same with the magical claymore example. Some wizard puts a magical claymore somewhere. It goes off and obliterates a PC, who didn't know it was there because there weren't multiple ways to detect it (because we've purposefully ignored the three clue rule), and so now we've got a dead PC. What happens at the table? Is everyone happy that the game is designed this way and is this the game they want to be playing? If so, you're golden!
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Old 10-31-2022, 11:19 AM   #5
sjmdw45
 
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Default Re: D&D as conflict simulation: first impressions of Muster: A Primer For War

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Originally Posted by beaushinkle View Post
What sort of game would you suspect that produces at the table, and is that the sort of game your players want to play?
On further reflection I've concluded that having one gameworld with multiple levels of realism partitioned geographically might be less satisfying than just having different gameworlds for different levels of realism. YMMV but that's my current thinking.

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For example, we have the three clue rule so that there's redundancy. "For any conclusion you want the PCs to make, include at least three clues". When you include less clues than that, the PCs often won't make those conclusions. If those conclusions are necessary to survival or progress, they die or don't progress. If that's the reality you're trying to simulate, you've done so successfully, but is that fun?

Same with the magical claymore example. Some wizard puts a magical claymore somewhere. It goes off and obliterates a PC, who didn't know it was there because there weren't multiple ways to detect it (because we've purposefully ignored the three clue rule), and so now we've got a dead PC. What happens at the table? Is everyone happy that the game is designed this way and is this the game they want to be playing? If so, you're golden!
Yep, player buy-in is essential.

Expect players to run away more and/or adopt a more fatalistic attitude about infiltrating a wizard's tower in a world with magical claymore as opposed to "fun" traps. In real life, Navy SEALS don't go around assaulting [brutal dictator's] hideouts for fun; you need a reason before you hit a hard target. A realistic gameworld has less tropey play; but more player freedom, and is sometimes easier to DM intuitively. Pros and cons.

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Old 10-31-2022, 12:30 PM   #6
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Default Re: D&D as conflict simulation: first impressions of Muster: A Primer For War

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Originally Posted by sjmdw45 View Post
Expect players to run away more and/or adopt a more fatalistic attitude about infiltrating a wizard's tower in a world with magical claymore as opposed to "fun" traps. In real life, Navy SEALS don't go around assaulting [brutal dictator's] hideouts for fun; you need a reason before you hit a hard target. A realistic gameworld has less tropey play; but more player freedom, and is sometimes easier to DM intuitively. Pros and cons.
I'm having a little bit of trouble imagining the game world here: is the idea that you dangle a wizard's tower in front of the players and then obliterate them with magical claymores if they take the bait? What's the lesson learned - don't go into wizard's tower? Go into wizard's towers with way more preparation?

The first one feels awful imo - why invent sweet places for your players to go if you then immediately teach them that going there leads to death they can't control? The second one looks like reinventing the three clue rule. You'd inevitably end up making these claymores detectable in multiple ways (per-based traps, mage sight, etc) and then now you're back to the three clues.

As for expecting players to run away - how do they know to run vs not run unless you're telegraphing that information? Further, if we're expecting players to be able to run, now the players (and the GM) need to make sure they actually *can* run. IE: in my rewrite of Logiheimli in Hall of Judgment, I change the skeleton's Move to 4 (from 8) in most circumstances where the players would fight them. This allows the players to actually run from the skeletons rather than seeing skeletons, seeing that they move significantly faster than the players, and deciding that this is "do or die".

If this is the case, now we're not simulating war (if i understand the premise). War doesn't care for how fast the players can probably move, and then tuning the enemy move speeds around making sure that players can escape if they walked into a situation. Rather, we're creating a (fun) game that encourages exploration, retreat, planning, and regrouping.
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Old 10-31-2022, 12:41 PM   #7
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Default Re: D&D as conflict simulation: first impressions of Muster: A Primer For War

For what it's worth, there's a lot of stuff about the basic premise that I really like. I don't think the world should warp around the PCs, for example. In that same blog post, I write:

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Here's something I'll get out right away with, since folks will probably disagree with me. HoJ:33 writes

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Skeletons will rise and attack any who draw near the buildings. There were 10-20 people in each of the longhouses.
Then on HoJ:32

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There are twelve ghouls in the temple itself, and they will attack in groups of three from different places within the ruin.
I asked the folks in the GamingBallistic discord why there was a range of skeletons in the houses, whether all of the skeletons intended to attack at the same time, and whether the ghouls in the three different places in the were intended to attack at the same time like a pincer maneuver.

The responses I got back all followed the same sort of pattern: that there's a range there so that you can make it easier to harder based on how much anti-undead capability the party has. The party is under-powered and isn't prepared for the undead? Throw 10 skeletons at them at a time and only have one house activate at once. The party has a cleric with turning and everyone is well-optimized for fighting? Maybe there's 20 skeletons in each house and they all attack at once.

There's a similar concept in DFD, page 11:

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Before exploring, however, the delvers must battle a guardian peshkali armed with six scimitars. This is a powerful foe with Supernatural Durability... but if the delvers are very capable, or go right for its fatal flaw (lopping off arms), the GM can have The Devil send more to help out!
This smells like design rot to me, and makes the player's choices less meaningful. A party that doesn't buy Turning will have spent those points somewhere else. Do we make those challenges more difficult? A party that is well-optimized for combat will be less-well-optimized for exploration or social interactions. Should we make combat more threatening and exploration and social interactions easier?

What is the purpose of building a well-rounded party or optimizing our characters if the game world itself is going to warp around the characters to provide rubber-banded difficulty? I propose, instead, that a party that is unprepared for the undead should have a hard time dealing with the undead. That a party over-optimized for combat should breeze through most combat encounters (that's what they chose to be good at), but probably should struggle in exploration settings and social interactions. Your campaign should include a mixture of all three.

Not only that, the difficulty of your challenges should be independent of the characters attempting to overcome them. It's the player's job to build characters capable of overcoming your challenges. It's the GM's job to build challenges that are theoretically capable of being overcome.

That means sometimes there will be an overwhelming amount of undead. They'll either wish they had turning, be thankful they did, have to think of something clever. Sometimes there will be 20 yard gaps. They'll really wish they had walk, levitation, flight, etc, or be thankful that they invested in these things. Should we give the party that decided to bring two knights, two barbarians, and a scout nothing but gaps they're capable of leaping over? No! They get just as many 20 yard gaps as a well-rounded party. They need a way to solve 20 yard gaps. Maybe that means they've been smashing dungeons until they get to a 20 yard gap and think "oh goodness what do we do about these". Maybe they hire a wizard hireling who knows walk on air, or maybe they just carry around a bunch of scrolls. They need something.
In I Smell A Rat, for example, the GM is advised to alter the number of enemies in encounters, or to increase the size of some of the golems based on how strong the adventurers are. The same thing happens in Hall of Judgment. Yet the difficulty of the social and exploration challenges stay static. The locks are always the same difficulty to pick no matter how strong your character are at combat. The cliffs are always the same climb penalty, and charming the guards always takes the same influence rolls.

Savvy players would realize that the optimal way to "win" is to purposefully make your characters good at social/exploration activities (where the difficulty is static), passable at combat, and then expect the GM to reduce the difficulty of the combat for them so that it's winnable but exciting. The mirror situation is that combat-optimized PCs have the difficulty of combat encounters raised so that they're winnable but exciting (when they should be breezing by them), but relatively struggle at exploration and social stuff.
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Old 10-31-2022, 01:03 PM   #8
sjmdw45
 
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Default Re: D&D as conflict simulation: first impressions of Muster: A Primer For War

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Originally Posted by beaushinkle View Post
I'm having a little bit of trouble imagining the game world here: is the idea that you dangle a wizard's tower in front of the players and then obliterate them with magical claymores if they take the bait? What's the lesson learned - don't go into wizard's tower? Go into wizard's towers with way more preparation?
That's one lesson you could learn from that approach, yes. Other possible approaches include sending up a white flag and trying to negotiate with the wizard, or recruiting a horde of orcs to storm the tower for you and letting the first dozen or so warriors get obliterated by magical traps, or using disguises and social engineering to [attempt to] bypass the magical traps (e.g. posing as the laundry lady on the theory that the wizard can't afford to routinely kill laundry ladies), or catching the wizard outside the tower and then pumping his brain. [shrug] It will depend on the scenario and what the players are trying to accomplish, both with respect to the wizard's tower and their actual, big-picture goals.

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Originally Posted by beaushinkle View Post
The first one feels awful imo - why invent sweet places for your players to go if you then immediately teach them that going there leads to death they can't control?
If I put myself in a player's shoes in the scenario you're envisioning: a new game has started. The DM says, "Oh, by the way, there's an evil wizard's tower in this town with a reputation for killing anybody who trespasses there." Why would I ever go in the wizard's tower? Well, if I did it would be because I'm curious about what would actually happen if a bunch of talented novices a la the Karate Kid and Harry Dresden (as of Storm Front/Fool Moon) tried to invade a wizard's tower. Maybe I suspect that it leads to death, but I'm curious about whether that's actually the case and what kind of security measures the tower has.

Or maybe I'm not that curious and I prudently stay away until I have an excellent reason to go do otherwise.

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The second one looks like reinventing the three clue rule. You'd inevitably end up making these claymores detectable in multiple ways (per-based traps, mage sight, etc) and then now you're back to the three clues.
Inevitably? As a GM I can think of ways to avoid making them detectable to mere per-based vision and mage traps. E.g. put the evil runes on the far side of a door frame, so that you can't see it until you go through it. Potential counterplay is possible simply due to how magic works (e.g. Earth Vision would probably let you see the other side of the door frame, although an evil wizard who anticipates this may use wood paneling over stone to prevent that) but the whole point of the Three Clue Rule is that the GM is taking responsibility for there being a minimum of 3 ways to discover information that's critical to advancing the game/story, whereas in a realism-oriented game, nothing is critical and there is no particular game/story. (Realism-oriented games will be vulnerable to pacing issues though, since having interesting choices to make all the time is actually not particularly realistic, unless the PCs have been cursed somehow.)

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As for expecting players to run away - how do they know to run vs not run unless you're telegraphing that information?
In my past experience, "run away" is a player default under conditions of high uncertainty, especially when they know that you're not "balancing" encounters to be survivable for them. It's more like they need to know when not to run away. It can be a little bit frustrating to GM because you can wind up with wasted prep when they run away after only experiencing minor difficulties, but hey, that's what you sign up for when you decide to run tropeless games.

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Further, if we're expecting players to be able to run, now the players (and the GM) need to make sure they actually *can* run. IE: in my rewrite of Logiheimli in Hall of Judgment, I change the skeleton's Move to 4 (from 8) in most circumstances where the players would fight them. This allows the players to actually run from the skeletons rather than seeing skeletons, seeing that they move significantly faster than the players, and deciding that this is "do or die".

If this is the case, now we're not simulating war (if i understand the premise). War doesn't care for how fast the players can probably move, and then tuning the enemy move speeds around making sure that players can escape if they walked into a situation. Rather, we're creating a (fun) game that encourages exploration, retreat, planning, and regrouping.
I think you're making the point that the game where you did that was intentionally not wargamey. It was a more traditional game. Yes, I agree. When I proposed a scenario where "you give the DM permission to stop telegraphing danger, introducing monsters in small numbers before encountering them in large numbers, following the Three Clue rule, and avoiding effective-but-unfun traps and security protocols", that also includes giving the GM permission not to reduce skeleton Move rates for your sake. It's up to you to either have a way to deal with them, surrender, or die fighting.

There are plenty of Move 8+ creatures in DFRPG already; I think players would generally be wise to prepare to deal with such creatures even in a slightly more standard, trope-filled game.

For the record, I haven't run any wargamey adventures in a while. I do telegraph danger, follow the Three Clue Rule, find reasons to avoid realistically deadly traps in D&D in favor of "fun" traps (I invented Trap Gremlins to rationalize the existence of mildly-deadly traps, which are basically created to amuse the gremlins), etc. But I do kind of enjoy running tropeless adventures, i.e. adventures where the GM can just kick back and think about what's realistic instead of what's plausible-enough-and-fun-to-experience, and aside from the inevitable pacing problems I would enjoy running a tropeless adventure once in a while if the players were up for it. It would be very different.

Quote:
Originally Posted by beaushinkle View Post
For what it's worth, there's a lot of stuff about the basic premise that I really like. I don't think the world should warp around the PCs, for example. In that same blog post, I write:

In I Smell A Rat, for example, the GM is advised to alter the number of enemies in encounters, or to increase the size of some of the golems based on how strong the adventurers are. The same thing happens in Hall of Judgment. Yet the difficulty of the social and exploration challenges stay static. The locks are always the same difficulty to pick no matter how strong your character are at combat. The cliffs are always the same climb penalty, and charming the guards always takes the same influence rolls.

Savvy players would realize that the optimal way to "win" is to purposefully make your characters good at social/exploration activities (where the difficulty is static), passable at combat, and then expect the GM to reduce the difficulty of the combat for them so that it's winnable but exciting. The mirror situation is that combat-optimized PCs have the difficulty of combat encounters raised so that they're winnable but exciting (when they should be breezing by them), but relatively struggle at exploration and social stuff.
I agree, the world should generally not warp around the PCs, with the possible exception of an explicit GM condition saying "I'll adjust the number of monsters in this adventure based on how many players show up Friday evening." In that case it's not warping around in-game PC choices, merely around how many of them there are; but it's still a valid choice to simply pick a fixed adventure and run it for however many PCs show up. If it turns out to be "too easy" for the players, well, it's possible for them to adjust: e.g. instead of everybody ganging up on the Peshkali in I Smell A Rat, maybe the party Swashbuckler will tell everybody to stand back while he fights her with one hand (shield hand) behind his back to give her a fighting chance. Or maybe not, maybe they will gang up on her and squish her like a bug. [shrug] There are many ways to run RPGs and many ways to play them.

TL;DR when you write in your blog that "This smells like design rot to me, and makes the player's choices less meaningful", I tend to agree, and I think the way I normally run adventures is one you would approve of. The tropeless, realism-oriented way of running adventures is not something you would approve of but also not the way I usually run them. It might possibly be my favorite kind of adventure to experience as a player though. I am really, really into "what would actually happen?"

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Old 10-31-2022, 02:14 PM   #9
beaushinkle
 
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Default Re: D&D as conflict simulation: first impressions of Muster: A Primer For War

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Originally Posted by sjmdw45 View Post
That's one lesson you could learn from that approach, yes. Other possible approaches include sending up a white flag and trying to negotiate with the wizard, or recruiting a horde of orcs to storm the tower for you and letting the first dozen or so warriors get obliterated by magical traps, or using disguises and social engineering to [attempt to] bypass the magical traps (e.g. posing as the laundry lady on the theory that the wizard can't afford to routinely kill laundry ladies), or catching the wizard outside the tower and then pumping his brain. [shrug] It will depend on the scenario and what the players are trying to accomplish, both with respect to the wizard's tower and their actual, big-picture goals.



If I put myself in a player's shoes in the scenario you're envisioning: a new game has started. The DM says, "Oh, by the way, there's an evil wizard's tower in this town with a reputation for killing anybody who trespasses there." Why would I ever go in the wizard's tower? Well, if I did it would be because I'm curious about what would actually happen if a bunch of talented novices a la the Karate Kid and Harry Dresden (as of Storm Front/Fool Moon) tried to invade a wizard's tower. Maybe I suspect that it leads to death, but I'm curious about whether that's actually the case and what kind of security measures the tower has.

Or maybe I'm not that curious and I prudently stay away until I have an excellent reason to go do otherwise.
Sure - I more meant in the abstract and using the Wizard's claymore-filled tower as an example. Abstractly, you're going to present your players with interesting stuff to explore (you happen upon a wizard's tower), and then because the game has explicitly been designed to not make sure the players get the information they need, they'll die. Rather, the game has been designed to get the players whatever information they happen to get, as simulated by whatever would actually happen, that one can assume that very frequently includes killing delvers with little they can do about it.

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Originally Posted by sjmdw45 View Post
Inevitably? As a GM I can think of ways to avoid making them detectable to mere per-based vision and mage traps. E.g. put the evil runes on the far side of a door frame, so that you can't see it until you go through it. Potential counterplay is possible simply due to how magic works (e.g. Earth Vision would probably let you see the other side of the door frame, although an evil wizard who anticipates this may use wood paneling over stone to prevent that) but the whole point of the Three Clue Rule is that the GM is taking responsibility for there being a minimum of 3 ways to discover information that's critical to advancing the game/story, whereas in a realism-oriented game, nothing is critical and there is no particular game/story. (Realism-oriented games will be vulnerable to pacing issues though, since having interesting choices to make all the time is actually not particularly realistic, unless the PCs have been cursed somehow.)
Being able to detect the trap with earth vision is another way to detect the trap, right? IE, we're making sure that are ways (not necessarily ways the player have currently) that the players could progress through such a scenario. So now they're glass walling every surface (not every wizard tower has rumors about it), prodding every space with a 10ft pole and hoping it isn't one of those devious anti-10-ft-pole traps that kills the person 10ft away, and going down their laundry list of extreme precaution because anything else more or less instantly kills them.

I would imagine the at-the-table automation eventually looks like "hey, can i execute delving routine C", which you calculate has some probability of succeeding and then we've reinvented carefully moving through a room from first principles.

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Originally Posted by sjmdw45 View Post
I think you're making the point that the game where you did that was intentionally not wargamey. It was a more traditional game.
I'm saying that if your players are walking an area where they encounter an overwhelming force that they can't escape, and such a force wasn't telegraphed or hinted at via three-clue, they're sort of cooked. There's a common trope that in such situations the enemies will capture the PCs and we'll have a fun escape sequence, but I'd imagine in reality the PCs are often just dead. Again, totally comes down to to the table. There's no such thing as wrongfun! If ya'll have fun rolling up characters, playing like this, and then bumping into untelegraphed doom because the GM decided that it was realistic then I think that's awesome. Eventually the players will figure out how to make the optimal party that gets the furthest with the most suvival-of-the-fittest tactics.

I know that sometimes, extremely powerful dragons just fly over roads and decide that they want to eat delvers and don't want to talk about it. You, as the GM, can just decide that happens to your party. The dragon just roasts them and they're dead, time to spin up new PCs. Happens sometimes, which is realistic. I would also be pretty annoyed as a player if I was traveling to my next location, decided to not go in the trapped wizard tower, and the GM decided that we were the ancient dragon's next meal.

That stuff happens to other delvers in most games. Dragons have to eat. The PCs delvers are the ones that didn't happen to, which isn't realistic in a sense; they have some degree of plot armor.

I guess what I'm saying is that I think unless I'm totally misunderstanding the genre, going all in on the "what would actually happen" sounds miserable to me. The answer is "lots and lots of unfair, unavoidable death", as far I can imagine. For instance, how many encounters on the ose srd wilderness encounter generator before you get a straight up TPK? The GM can decide that the enemies aren't hostile, but they can also decide that they are; that they're hungry; that they chase you until they catch and kill.

I would guess that if it's your favorite generate to play in, either your GM is fudging "what would actually happen" so that it's more bearable to play inside of or that my mental model for "what would actually happen" is wildly different than theirs.
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Old 10-31-2022, 03:10 PM   #10
sjmdw45
 
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Default Re: D&D as conflict simulation: first impressions of Muster: A Primer For War

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Originally Posted by beaushinkle View Post
Sure - I more meant in the abstract and using the Wizard's claymore-filled tower as an example. Abstractly, you're going to present your players with interesting stuff to explore (you happen upon a wizard's tower), and then because the game has explicitly been designed to not make sure the players get the information they need, they'll die. Rather, the game has been designed to get the players whatever information they happen to get, as simulated by whatever would actually happen, that one can assume that very frequently includes killing delvers with little they can do about it.
Can one assume that? I'm not so sure. One would think that at minimum, anything that very frequently involves delvers dying would even more frequently involve regular civilians and monsters dying, which implies that it will be possible for the players to get information that they need to infer deadliness. From the abundance of skulls and Keep Out signs, or rumors among the peasantry, or complete absence of peasantry, whatever. Killing things has logical consequences that will often (but not always) be observable to players.

I could agree to "occasionally" as opposed to "very frequently".

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Being able to detect the trap with earth vision is another way to detect the trap, right? IE, we're making sure that are ways (not necessarily ways the player have currently) that the players could progress through such a scenario.
No we aren't. We're discussing how many ways N logically exist, with no particular agenda w/rt whether N >= 3 or N = 0. This is the Larry Niven school of science fiction, a la The Theory and Practice of Teleportation: choose a scenario + ruleset and explore the implications of it.

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So now they're glass walling every surface (not every wizard tower has rumors about it), prodding every space with a 10ft pole and hoping it isn't one of those devious anti-10-ft-pole traps that kills the person 10ft away, and going down their laundry list of extreme precaution because anything else more or less instantly kills them.
Maybe. Or maybe they decide that's insanely dangerous and decide to seduce the wizard instead next time he comes to town, or pose as his washerwoman's replacement, or recruit those orcs to be their patsies, or shudder and ignore the tower.

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I'm saying that if your players are walking an area where they encounter an overwhelming force that they can't escape, and such a force wasn't telegraphed or hinted at via three-clue, they're sort of cooked. There's a common trope that in such situations the enemies will capture the PCs and we'll have a fun escape sequence, but I'd imagine in reality the PCs are often just dead. Again, totally comes down to to the table. There's no such thing as wrongfun! If ya'll have fun rolling up characters, playing like this, and then bumping into untelegraphed doom because the GM decided that it was realistic then I think that's awesome. Eventually the players will figure out how to make the optimal party that gets the furthest with the most suvival-of-the-fittest tactics.
I mean, will they? At least for me as a player, the point of a tropeless game is at least partly to satisfy my curiosity (while also, yes, scratching the role-playing itch to extrapolate what the character would do). While I have no objection to the idea of figuring out the optimal party, once you figure out what that optimal party is, it might not be interesting to actually play the optimal party. Once you know that a bunch of wizards and druids sitting outside the wizard's tower spamming Create Animal/Rider Within and Phantom-25 + Initiative have a very good chance at penetrating the wizard's tower with their three dozen peshkali Phantoms, chimps, and karkadanns... a natural next step is to say, "Hey, could we have done the same thing with just ONE spellcaster and a bunch of knights? Could we have gone around the obstacles with a bunch of bards instead of through them? Could we have..."

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I know that sometimes, extremely powerful dragons just fly over roads and decide that they want to eat delvers and don't want to talk about it. You, as the GM, can just decide that happens to your party. The dragon just roasts them and they're dead, time to spin up new PCs. Happens sometimes, which is realistic. I would also be pretty annoyed as a player if I was traveling to my next location, decided to not go in the trapped wizard tower, and the GM decided that we were the ancient dragon's next meal.
That doesn't sound very realistic, unless it's a one-time fluke or there's some hidden connection between the wizard and the dragon. Ergo as a player, if I trust my GM I'm probably going to assume there's some hidden connection, and that sounds interesting.

Also, there's a decent chance that dragon just dies with an arrow to the eye. I've already run that scenario more than once in simulations; to some extent it depends mainly on whether there's a scout with meteoric iron bodkin arrows in the party. (See above RE: optimal party, pros and cons of playing vs. not playing it. Related question is how often dragons will know Missile Shield and how often they spend the 25 FP necessary to cast it: meteoric iron may not even be necessary!)

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I guess what I'm saying is that I think unless I'm totally misunderstanding the genre, going all in on the "what would actually happen" sounds miserable to me.
Fair enough. Science fiction is an acquired taste. But I think you're also misunderstanding the probabilities involved--it sounds like you're imagining a GM who gives you improbable problems like an ancient dragon who "just happens" to attack you without a reason.

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For instance, how many encounters on the ose srd wilderness encounter generator before you get a straight up TPK?
I don't know but that sounds like a TON of fun to me (assuming a DFRPG conversion). As a player, that's basically how I approach the game anyway: extreme paranoia about the need for fallback plans, which gets wasted if the GM isn't willing to occasionally hit you with something way overpowered. Over the course of a couple of dozen clicks I saw a couple of super-tough encounters listed, like a Titan and a six-man adventuring party including a level 11 cleric, and those are the encounters that I would be most excited to have if I were playing DFRPG as a player.

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The GM can decide that the enemies aren't hostile, but they can also decide that they are; that they're hungry; that they chase you until they catch and kill.
Yep! And then we get to see if my fallback plans are good enough to keep me and my buddies alive.

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I would guess that if it's your favorite generate to play in, either your GM is fudging "what would actually happen" so that it's more bearable to play inside of or that my mental model for "what would actually happen" is wildly different than theirs.
Sounds like the latter: your mental model is different. E.g. I bet you're not thinking in terms of caltrops, scouting ahead, illusionary decoys, Sanctuary, or (worst case scenario) everybody scattering and fleeing in different directions so that the Titan can only catch one or two of us. (You can probably tell I've read the Honor Harrington novels. :))

Last edited by sjmdw45; 10-31-2022 at 03:52 PM.
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