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Quantum Ogres
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this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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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.
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 you’re doing good prep, you don’t need quantum enemies. You can whip up an ogre encounter on the fly instead of forcing one at a particular point.
But what really the difference. If the group needs a fight in next room and i use a preplanned one or one inade up ob the spot?
Quantum ogre is more about the intent and removing actual choice from players. Good prep does away with making player choice irrelevant.
I'm assuming in your question, the first situation would have the "preplanned" fight be wherever the players decide to go since we're discussing the QO. The difference between your two methods is in the latter, you're making up the creature or combat on the spot by reacting to what the players have done. In the first, it didn't matter what the players did. You were going to do it anyway, so why even give them a choice?
I just cant see how eithet takes away choice. If the players can go north or west to get to the next mcguffin. I would put an encounter on their road either rolled or desined. After all it is common in d&d to have road battles. The battle will be on what road they chose. I would make the encounter make sense and based on the pc.
If we down scale this to a dungeon so it 3 rooms not roads. What changes?
Think about it this way: what's the purpose of the players choosing between North and West if the outcome is exactly the same, whether they know this or not? Are they just arbitrarily choosing between the two paths, or do they have information that gives positives and negatives to either path? Doing the former is just a choice for the sake of it. It serves no purpose. In the latter, it's now less of something to fill and waste time, and it's now a decision on the players' part on whether they want to travel safely or dangerously, or whatever the differences are between the routes.
Well they need to collect more then mcguffin so they can go north to the ice dungeon/town and look for the rings of plot importance. Or they can go west for the crown of plot importance and deal with the jungle dungeon are first. So they would be given information about what town and hazards, and what they pick does change where the battle takes place. So there are consequences to what they pick. They don't have perfect knowledge
In the small scale it is there because unless they split the party they can only go one way at a time. They can only explore one room at a time. that why the the choice is there.
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?
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.
it would be either since the roll encounter was asking about why some see rolling as not false choice, but QO are 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:
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.