Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Not necessarily. There are rules out there for this stuff, and prep you can do, if you want.
GM fiat - an illustration
- Thread starter pemerton
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hawkeyefan
Legend
I mean... just read his posts in this thread to get what he does.
hawkeyefan
Legend
Mother May I? is a game that works that way which springs immediately to mind.
I find any perspective that relies on the GM's ability to thwart the players at every turn to be a rather poor perspective.
Yes, because it removes the decision of lethality from the GM and puts it onto a game process.
Not in all games. I certainly don't approach RPGs that way, even when I run a game like 5e D&D.
I would think some amount of self-reflection would likely do you some good.
I'm 100% with @AbdulAlhazred here. When I was GMing the Rolemaster game I mentioned upthread, by mid-to-upper levels the PCs had connections and enemies spread across the Greyhawk map. Those NPCs included all sorts of spell-users, with access to all sorts of magical abilities. Does their one nemesis hire a Nightblade (magic-using assassin)? Does that Nightblade know the general parameters of Waiting Illusion? Are they concentrating on an appropriate detection spell as they approach the PCs?
Prep that simply authors fictional facts can't handle all this: how many assassins are available for hire; how much the NPC rival is willing to spend to hire them; etc. Either the GM makes a call, or the GM outsources the decision-making to some sort of procedure - generally a roll-based one.
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Generally I do one or the other. The more involved it would be to get it right by setting logic, the more I rely on rolls and rules modules (in or out of the core system I'm running) to handle the situation. I make a call when I have to but always with setting logic at or close to top of mind.
Bedrockgames
I post in the voice of Christopher Walken
I weighed in on the post in question, but don't want to assume his style based on a post
I don't find the notion of simulating competition very clear. That just seems to be one particular way of not engaging in competition.
On your first and last points - the last time I had to think about those sorts of things in a regular and systematic way was GMing 4e D&D. I would make decisions about what my NPCs and monsters did in com bat based on a mixture of what seemed fun, what seemed likely to put pressure on the players, and what seemed to make sense for the NPC/creature at hand.
I relied on the game's monster design rules and encounter building rules to give me an assurance as to the likely "heft" of my overall encounter "budget". The game worked in that respect.
Your second and third points are about content introduction. When the tables in Torchbearer 2e tell me to roll to see who/what is encountered, I roll. When they tell me to decide, I decide. This is part of how the game is built. For treasure, I follow the game's instructions, which are to use a mixture of rolls and placement. (When converting a D&D module, I filter the D&D treasure through a sense of what the TB2e tables permit for like encounters/rooms.)
In Burning Wheel or Prince Valiant, by comparison, I don't use rolls for content introduction. They're simply not part of those games. Except one time in Burning Wheel the players failed a roll while fleeing through the city at night, and I decided that the PCs encountered the night watch. And as I happened to have a copy of the Appendix C DMG city/town encounter matrix on me, I rolled the 3d4 (or whatever it is) to see how many members of the watch they encountered. But that was mostly for colour - there was no real prospect of the PCs undertaking an action which would depend for its success on the number of NPCs.
AnotherGuy
Hero
That is how I run things in D&D, no matter the edition.
5e does not have a very good system for encounter budget, particularly at higher levels, so I do not rely on it.
I do for my own amusement calculate the budget anyways to see perhaps if I can identify a pattern that would help me fix the published design (at least so it works for my games).
D&D treasure tables are a rather mixed bag so I make the necessary adjustment when I feel it is best for the campaign.
I'm not infallible nor do I claim to excel in creativity - but I do my best. I have sometimes offered the players the opportunity to provide input on something rolled - drawing on their creativity for assistance.
Do I have final say, I suppose yes by permission of the players. But when I'm opening up the creative process to the table - I'm doing so in the spirit of negotiation, not as a person of authority.
There is no right answer: just the answer the DM says is right. This is why a RPG session is called the DM's game: they get to decide what is right or wrong or anything else.
I agree that randomized inputs are great aid for the game. But not having them rule or control the whole game.
It is no where near impossible as great DMs do it all the time. Creating deep details is a skill of great DMs. Though for the casual DM, one who just plays the game for a couple minutes just like the players, will see such creation of detail impossible. The more classic, traditional DM works on the game outside of the social game play, and ever often takes up several hours of work on the game.
And this does not even touch improv. Plenty of great DMs can make up a ton of detail in very short amounts of time
Or ask some pointed questions......
Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
You are literally made aware of the threat as it set off the alarm spell. Further, once you are not surprised, nothing else can surprise you during the combat, so any further enemies that you are unaware of outside of the alarm range, can't surprise you. Sage Advice also clarifies that to be surprised, you have to be caught off guard, which you cannot be since the alarm spell has alerted you and you are on guard from that moment onward.
