In this video Seth talks about quantum orges, or what I call Schrodinger plot point. He had a mostly positive view. So do I, in fact I wa blinded sided that some people see this thing in a bad way.
Training wheels are useful tool for beginner cyclists, but not useful for advanced cyclists. Likewise, quantum ogres are a useful tool for beginner DMs, but not for seasoned DMs.
Quantum ogres are a white lie to your players with a result that, at best, doesn’t actually do anything. At worst, the players figure it out and call you out on it.
The reason they can be helpful for a beginner DM is because they help people who want their players think their choices matter, but are afraid to actually give them that choice: “I want my players to do X but I don’t want them to think they were forced to do X, so I’m going to give them a false choice and then do X anyway.”
Let’s say the players are walking and see a sign for Town A and Town B. Whichever they choose, the DM is just going to sub in the same town they prepped. So why put the fork in the road? We pause the game, have the players deliberate, and ask them to make a choice: we’re investing time and effort into a decision, but why? To make our players feel like they matter? In reality, the scenario is much cleaner if we just have a single road to Town A with no fork.
Adding just a little bit of information actually makes the decision matter: “Town A, population 3000. Town B, population 36.” Now they have some information to make a meaningful decision. Add some foreknowledge that Town A is a major port city and Town B is a small farming hamlet, and suddenly the choice becomes interesting. Now we can see why the quantum ogre is actually a hindrance for a seasoned DM, much like training wheels are a hindrance for an expert cyclist: by giving players more information, players can make a meaningful choice that has an impact on the world.
This remains true even without the context. For example, having multiple paths in a dungeon let the players experience the content at their own pace and in the order they choose, even though they typically don’t know what content to expect. Letting the players choose which order to visit Rooms A, B, and C makes the scenario richer than just quantum rigging it so the players must always experience A, B, and C in that order no matter which room they pick. Pushing yourself to do this when the choices are more arbitrary will help you get off the training wheels faster and help you develop richer, modular content when creating a true open world, like above where our players can freely choose between two very different towns.
In short, using a quantum ogre once or twice while learning won’t make you a terrible DM. But petting your players freely choose whether to go through troll territory or ogre territory and tailoring your encounters accordingly will make you a much better DM than simply teleporting the ogre.
so thanks for the long post I enjoy the feed back. Here is something in the video that I agree that so far one has talked about. Why QO bad but not rolling an encouter? Are they not equally false choice?
I’d say random rolling an encounter is the opposite of choice. It’s representing the variance of the fantasy world: if there’s a 1% chance of someone traveling through a given region encountering a dragon, rolling a 100 on a d100 table emulates that.
Imagine that a DM decided to prescript combat so that every player gets down low HP before the enemy dies in the fourth round. The DM doesn’t give the enemy HP, they pretend to roll behind the screen, and they mete out damage at predetermined intervals. This happens regardless of whether:
The rogue decides to use their inspiration after a miss to try for sneak attack
The wizard uses Fireball for damage, tries to break concentration with Magic Missile, tried to Hold Person the enemy, or just cast Firebolt
The Eldritch knight uses Shield to absorb a hit
The cleric buffs and heals the party vs. focuses on damage
The barbarian uses rage or saves it forever
Which wild shape the druid chooses
Regardless of any of these decisions, the DM has already planned the entire thing out. Attacks hit when the DM wants them to hit, the DM makes up that the enemy is “starting to look bad” when they’re not tracking HP at all, the enemy suddenly saves against things that would be encounter-ending, etc. This is basically the quantum ogre.
Rolling in the open, letting hits hit and misses miss, suddenly makes those decisions important, because the DM can’t just lie to meet a predetermined outcome. Rollable tables are a similar sort of randomness that discourage a DM from just forcing a predetermined outcome at the player. A random generator is not even a choice at all: other than choosing when to roll it, the DM has no influence over the result.
I see the QO as a stepping stone to using random encounters, and to prepping enemy stats but not setting the encounter itself in stone.
Do you mean rolling random encounters while traveling or Rolling encounters randomly within a dungeon?
Random encounters were originally put in to add spice to long travel and make it feel like actual long time to travel and dangerous. Nowadays with modern story telling you can continue using it if you want but if you have a story base campaign they mostly just interrupt the flow.
If you want to use them for Additional XP and gold from time to time to adjust your players level gently and/or because you havent quite prepped the next area and you want to stall til next week then go nuts but see them for what they are, a purposeful time filler and making your players scared to go throught the forest.
If you mean within a dungeon then go nuts if you arent planning your dungeon fight by fight and you like the challenge of your monsters being random so your players have a more even chance, go nuts.
Training wheels are useful tool for beginner cyclists, but not useful for advanced cyclists. Likewise, quantum ogres are a useful tool for beginner DMs, but not for seasoned DMs.
I hard disagree. Quantum baddies are useful no matter how seasoned a DM you are.
Quantum enemies are a technique you can use to help preserve the prep work you do as DM, and doubling the prep you do isn’t a mark of experience. Use it when appropriate, and avoid using when the story says you must.
I think it’s a matter of in what context the quantum ogre is used as well.
Combat is complex to balance in 5e, so encounter design takes up significant prep time. It makes sense the user a quantum ogre where the players are arbitrarily picking between rooms A and B in a dungeon. They have a fight, then the DM has time to prep a puzzle or another combat in the unused room for next week.
The poster you’re replying to shows when quantum ogres are bad. World building at a basic level isn’t a heavy lift, so limited prep work is wasted by fleshing out both locations. And your players won’t out level a city or NPC like they will a combat. So you can always come back to that unused location later with minimal additional work.
If I’ve given the party a meaningful choice, I’ll honour it. Having said that, if I’ve prepared an encounter on the path not taken, I’ll reuse/reskin it later.
yeah but not all choices have equal meaning. You go into the left room or the right. It is all the same dungeon, and with out minor choices it just a hallway.
Choice can’t exist without information. If you know nothing, you can’t chose. If two doors are perfectly the same, it’s not a choice. If you have no information on either path in the forest, you’re not really choosing.
Even if it is immediately a false choice, the point of the fork in the road isn’t necessarily one of immediacy.
A poor DM will run the same exact campaign no matter what fork you take.
A good DM will still have the choice you make have impact, even if the immediate result no matter which way you go is a pair of ogres.
Maybe, if you go left you choose to save the prince rather than the princess. Yes, no matter which way you went you were going to encounter the ogres and it’s only the hostage that’s different. However, if the one you don’t save gets killed by the Basilisk-knight, that means you got to make a choice that impacts the campaign.
It just didn’t put you into conflict with the knight that the DM hasn’t written up yet. That’s next week.
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