Is Tailor Made Better?

[Quertus]

Doesn't this go against the whole combat as war thing? I've always heard that the whole point was to avoid (combat) challenges until you can steamroll them due to preparation and tactics. That makes basically all fights either cakewalks or near-TPKs.

Combat as War is about 1) composition of encounters being based on simulationist realism (as opposed to being based on game balance as it is in the opposed school of thought, Combat as Sport); 2) not fudging the dice. Although I could be mistaken about #2.

While people avoiding things that they can't steamroll is one logical response to that scenario, it certainly is neither a) inherent to it, nor b) the only possible outcome.

In Combat as Sport, you are very limited to a very narrow range of acceptable encounter difficulty. In Combat as War, you have absolutely no such limitation, and encounters organically span the entire spectrum of difficulties, with a correspondingly broad range of outcomes. Claiming that CaW encounter difficulty levels / outcomes are somehow confined to certain narrow range(s) is hilariously missing the mark.

Neutrality is an illusion for TTRPGs. It can work for wargames, because they're a) competitive, b) have 2 sides other than the referee, and c) have fixed, externally imposed criteria (maps and objectives) and d) have comprehensive rules. None of those are true in TTRPGs (outside of very unique situations like tournament module runs).

b) The "referee" is playing one side of the game. That's inherently partial. The judge is a party to the case.

I've had GMs in tournament run modules that were not neutral. They clearly wanted someone to win / someone to lose. Otoh, I've known plenty of people who could deliver a neutral interpretation of the rules as one of the players. So, in practice, the line for accuracy and neutrality isn't where you are describing it to be.

That having been said, one would hope that anyone empowered to make a ruling was someone who cares about the game being fun. Thus, I claim that the only people worth empowering to make rulings are those who are not impartial.

Which seems to largely match much of your ideas about the GM being a fan of the PCs.

That having been said, I personally still prefer impartial rulings.

c) The objectives and maps are not fixed (unless you're railroading hard-core). Throwing this one away (rigidly running modules without adaptation to the group) seems to throw away the best part of TTRPGs in favor of a more-limited CRPG style. CRPGs have better writing, better mechanics (because they can do the hard numerical lifting), and better graphics. TTRPGs have freedom. That's abandoned if you only use modules and stick strictly to them.

Um, no. The best part of the difference between TTRPGs and CRPG is the ability of the human GM to go off script in a TTRPGs. Having a nice, static start condition can be of benefit to both. If the party wants to take Tomb of Horrors and have their skeleton army strip mine the hill, they can do so in a TTRPG. Same static map, same objective, different approach.

Or, the group can change the objective, and recruit the locals, and/or get rich looting the corpses of dead adventurers who fail the test. All without changing the start conditions.

And, yes, the GM could change the start conditions if for some reason the module didn't fit their world. Say, for example, it's been established that the PCs have already made the entire world flat, so there can't possibly be an ancient hill left. But having to make square pegs fit in round holes is hardly the best part of TTRPGs.

That's why I believe that the notion of impartiality is not inherently a good thing. The DM should be partial. Should favor the players, by knowing what they like and tailoring/modifying the game to fit them. This happens most at the micro level. Adjusting how a particular enemy acts so you're not constantly picking on the same character. Allowing things that are a little bit of a stretch, but still plausible. Interpreting proposed actions generously (as opposed to "gotcha DMing"). These are all partial actions.

Being a referee is part of a DMs job. But only part. And not the biggest part. The biggest part, for me, is being a facilitator of fun. This requires knowing who you're playing with well enough to make adjustments to the Holy Module (or whatever) in an attempt to maximize fun. If you're playing in an open-table setting, this requires more on-the-spot judgement, and probably more strict rules to allow other groups to continue to have fun (call this impartiality between groups). This is different from being impartial between the setting and the individual groups.

You've gotta look at the big picture.

I was just talking to friends about our haunted house experience. They said that, while, this year, they were less scared and therefore got to enjoy the haunted house more in the moment, looking back on it, it was a better overall experience last year, when they were more scared and having less fun in the moment.

Changing the holy module, you lose out on the experience that is the module. I've lost count of the number of times I've tried to talk to people about their experience with a module, only to discover that we lack common ground, because the GMs had changed things for one or both of us. Or run through a module, only to read it later and discover that the GM changed it in a way that made it worse.

As an example of this (at an open-table, multi-DM environment) gone wrong--I played at one where I started a few weeks after the "old-timers." For the first few sessions (before I got there), there had been a tendency to let the items/gold flow like water. Once they realized this was a problem, they (the DMs) clamped down institutionally. But that meant that the old characters started out ahead and no one could catch up. Trying to be impartial and "fair" bred resentment. A better way would have been to ret-con those too-powerful toys (with the players' cooperation) and get everyone back on the same footing. That would have been very non-neutral, but better for the game as a whole.

I've played at tables where all new characters start at first level, with no catchup mechanics. And it worked fine. You don't have to have the ability to catch up to have fun. Balance is not a synonym for fun.

And I've even seen exactly the scenario you describe, but in an online game. In this scenario, what the old timers had that was taken away was the only thing I cared about in the game, so both that solution or your solution would represent a total failure, to me.

There are lots of possible solutions to the "problem" you describe. That the GMs failed to select one that worked for you does not logically mean that that entire class of implementations is devoid of merit.

Mine too. I very much like to tailor things to both the players and the characters. Though it does depend on the type of players. New or inexperienced players will just about automatically have a better fun time in a Tailor Made encounter. And the ''B'' type less aggressive player will often have much more fun in an encounter made for them.

And this is overly true of anything not combat: The DM does really need to make such things for a player or character and put them in the game. There needs to be a hook or thread for the player to see and take; otherwise they often won't even try to do anything.

This also touches on the tier problem for games like D&D 3X and beyond: If the DM just does standard events, then the tier problem thrives and is in full effect: The DM has a standard event, the spellcasters dominate/control/do everything and every other character just watches. This does not happen in tailor made events.

Ok, I agree with tailor making hooks for characters (or, alternately, tailor making / choosing characters for pre-made hooks). And, while not my preference, I can agree with tailoring an encounter for someone who isn't getting enough time in the spotlight.

But I believe you've conflated tier and spotlight time, or tier and power. My signature tier 1 wizard, Quertus, for whom this account is named, generally plays second fiddle to characters like the party Fighter and Monk.

So, out of morbid curiosity, what would you do to custom tailor a game to Quertus' party, or one like it, where the tier 1 Wizard is most likely to get voted off the island?

It's a style that demands that you don't get attached to characters (and thus don't invest in role-playing). It's a very meta-gaming style (using information the character isn't privy to). Neither of those is bad, just very alien to most modern players.

Well, I might say that they're bad. But I won't say that they're indemic to Combat as War. They certainly are one version of CaW, sure. But I'd personally label that a CaW fail state. And acting on OOC knowledge is much more common in - and the body backbone of - Combat as Sport. "The GM wouldn't throw anything at us that we couldn't handle". Need I say more?

I've had DMs that used modules as the core (maps + encounters). It sucked as soon as you went off script at all. They spent minutes looking up facts and trying to assemble things at the table, wasting everyone's time. Things felt patched together, because they were. Players' actions didn't fundamentally matter, because the modules were too easily broken. Clever ways of sequence breaking were disallowed, because otherwise things fell apart.

Modules are best if run straight, with knowing acceptance that you're on rails. That, or heavily modified (take the map but rewrite all context). That's as much work as rebuilding the module, so the savings are minimal.

I'm sorry that your modules and GMs were bad. While neither will ever be perfect, both can be much better than you have described.

IMO, modules are best if run straight as a starting state of the world, by a good GM who knows how to handle things going off-script in a way that custom tailors the level between "impartial rules arbiter" and "for fun" at the correct level for the group. And, for me, that's pretty much "impartial rules arbiter".