So why do people have a problem with the so called "quantum ogre"...

Like everyone else in this thread OP, I'm gonna call you an idiot for suggesting that standardly GMing a game is somehow bad form.

Some people are looking for different things out of the game.
For those who come from an improvisational background, it makes no difference whatsoever how many ogres there are so they have no problem with quantum ogres.
For those who comes from a wargaming background, completing a dungeon is gratifying in the same way solving any other puzzle. Imagine solving a chess puzzle and having your opponent drop another rook onto the board. Ridiculous! That's not to say that these people don't enjoy roleplaying as well, (there's a reason they're playing a roleplaying game instead of a wargame) but the puzzle solving aspect is also important to them.
The reason these players get so upset when the GM adds additional foes into an adventure dynamically is it appears to be a betrayal of the trust players put in their GMs. GMing is a daunting task after all. A GM must fulfill the roles of storyteller, referee and opponent. No one would enjoy a game in which the enemies simply stood in place waiting to be killed after all! When the number of foes increases, it may be because the GM has failed in their role as impartial referee and used their storyteller powers in the service of acting as the party's opponent. Is it any wonder that this upsets players?

Pretty much this. Nothing is set in stone, not even in the rare event I'm running a published adventure.

You joke, but have you ever dealt with a player who pulls shit like this? They're fucking insufferable. They're the most miserable autistic wretches in the entire hobby. Change one line in a creature's stat block and they screech and shit themselves. Change one encounter in a published module and you can see them start to sweat and fidget and grit their teeth and clench their fists. It's fucking awful.

Tabletop games are absolutely not for those people. If they're so dependent on routine and foreknowledge they should be playing video games instead. It's fucking wild how awful these people are.

Really only a problem when the GM contradicts himself.

>It just seems like good GMing practice
How is player actions having the same consequences no matter what they actually do good practice?

>How is player actions having the same consequences no matter what they actually do good practice?
How do the players know that?

Because it keeps the game moving in a forward direction and it means the GM doesn't have to improvise, because not all GMs are good at improvising. The only thing that matters is the illusion of choice.

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Nobody actually has an issue with it, they just apply it erroneously to harvest (you)s

This. I guarantee nobody in this thread actually for-realsies dislikes the idea. They just want to argue, because it's Veeky Forums, and Veeky Forums is full of contrarian shitheads who start arguments over absolutely anything.

This.

Complaints like this hold about as much water as "how can you get scared? Its just images on a screen"

Isn't it about players meeting the ogre no matter what path they take rather than it sprouting extra arms and wings mid-fight?

In my experience, they're actually scared. You change that statblock and the first assumption is that you're trying to rocks-fall the party, because Assumption Zero is that in-character means of discerning information about enemies always gives you tiny pieces of knowledge from the PRINTED statblock unless the GM SAYS there will be homebrew.

tl;dr don't lie to your players.

>tl;dr don't lie to your players.
Dragons aren't real user. The entire game is a fabrication

I can guarantee that there are plenty of people who hate this idea with a burning passion, but will dare to say that those people only think such because they have been victim to incompetent GMs who've implemented quantum ogres with the worst execution possible; just like how plenty of people hate furries, but only because they've had to contend with obnoxious sociopathic people with no self awareness who happen to be furries.

That's fair. I didn't think of it that way.

>So why do people have a problem with the so called "quantum ogre"? It just seems like good GMing practice that the players would never know about without glancing at the GM's notes.

Some people view RPGs as duel between GM and players.

In dnd you play to beat the game, not the DM. Something is wrong if players try to restrict a DM in the same way that the game rules restrict players.

A good DM should understand that his point in the game is to lose, but reasonably so. Yeah, he can build powerful villains and dangerous caverns, but the point there isn't to punish your players needlessly for daring to play in your world- it is to provide challenges for them to overcome.

Trust between players and DMs are everything, players need to feel like they control the narrative of the world they are playing in and DMs need the freedom in order to provide that on the fly

this. Most "problem" behaviors in RPGs are just normal behaviors done badly.

Storytelling:
>Building a robust narrative with which the players are expected to interact, and improvising when they test the boundaries of the world

railroading:
>Building a shitty narrative that the players are squeezed into, with no smoke or mirrors to hide the seams

I don't remember how long ago it was, probably at least a few years at this point, but there was some big hubbub about it among a bunch of blogs awhile back. I can't remember what sort of blogs, maybe OSR people?

>running modules instead of homebrew campaigns in homebrew settings
>playing with players who don’t appreciate switching things up with well-known monsters and other hazards as a challenge
Why even play in the first place if you don’t do these things?

>B-but they'll never know!
They will. You're not as competent as you think you are. Every GM will make mistakes at some point that give your players insight into the way you're running the game. When your players realise you're making it up as you go along they'll lose trust in the game as a real world that's actually responding to their choices and start viewing it as some cunt telling them what to do.

>You change that statblock and the first assumption is that you're trying to rocks-fall the party
anyone who's that paranoid doesn't belong in the hobby
this is litterally what autists centered on one system have brought

>When your players realise you're making it up as you go along they'll lose trust in the game as a real world that's actually responding to their choices and start viewing it as some cunt telling them what to do.
I'm pretty much always open on how much I pull out of my ass during the games (which is most things constantly). And never has anyone raised that as a problem.
I'm not on the table to be a tour guide for some fantasy land, players can read a book for that shit. I'm there to find a story with the players.

Sometimes it's easier just to take a decent module and hack it into something nice.

The few time I ran modules, mainly to save time on world building and overarching goal of the campaign, I changed lots of things.

Hell if the module's been out for a while you kind of need to change things - if people can juts download it and read it, it kills of the whole scene.

>When your players realise you're making it up as you go along they'll lose trust in the game as a real world that's actually responding to their choices
Sounds either like someone who can't improvise for shit, who can't prepare for shit or a player who doesn't know what being a gm is about
If you are "making it up as you go", as you're saying, then the game world will respond to the player's choices. I've ran a bunch of homebrews systems and settings, some over the course of several years and I've litterally never had this problem. The world doesn't need to be "real" because it cannot be perfect. They best you can do is to make it coherent and ensure that there's as few consistancy errors as possible
I don't care that you're playing X "by the book", but your players shouldn't have to know anything about it besides what a player should know in order to play and what they learn over the course of the game, because that's how you get metagaming.

I'd also like to hear more about these "mistakes" that GMs make "revealing" how they master. I'd wager that it's pretty hard to slip up on stuff like this when you're open with players on how you do stuff

Yeah, but to check if it really does collapse in a biased manner you would have to repeat the 'experiment', which is metagaming from a strict point of view.

But it's all bullshit, what matters is whether the collapsing ogre does enhance the game experience or not, and that's completely subjective.

"Making shit up as you go" is a core gm skill, you pretty much need it if you don't want to completely railroad the players.

The trick is to be consistent with it. If the players want to talk to the Mayor/ important NPC and you don't want them to, say that they're out on a hunt/business trip. Then, next time they're back in town, make sure you mention it and make it noticeable.

You're never going to simulate a whole world accurately, you don't have the computing power nor is this the goal of table top. You do want verisimilitude though.

>When your players realise you're making it up as you go along they'll lose trust in the game
imagine being this autistic about games you've never played.
Have you even read the rulebook to a single RPG?

Because at the most fundamental level, a game, any game, not just an RPG, is a series of iterated choices that lead to differing outcomes. Good choices generally lead to winning, or at least improvement of the position, and bad choices lead to the reverse.

If you have a GM with a quantum ogre, it's a form of soft railroading. The choices you make as to which path to take don't really matter, because you're facing the same ogre either way.

> It just seems like good GMing practice that the players would never know about without glancing at the GM's notes.
Just because the players don't wise up to the fact that they've been railroaded doesn't mean that they haven't been. And players are far less stupid than you seem to give them credit for, especially the ones who have GMed themselves.

Because D&D and frankly most RPGs of this caliber involve dealing with a limited amount of player resources and generally require some number of challenges (i.e. iterated choices with chance of failure) per day of adventuring, this "quantum ogre" is a core part of the ruleset.

Mind you, I'd argue that bypassing challenges counts as dealing with them. If you took the trouble to learn the time of enemy guard change and snuck through when there weren't any guards, congratulations, you win this encounter.

If it's what I think it is, it's because the game world should generally take a form that makes sense. Things should be there because it makes sense for them to be there (this applies even to things like random encounters).

Maybe I'm differing on what constitutes a quantum ogre, but I'm not sure how what you said addresses what I said. Yes, there is a need, generally, to match a certain amount of danger to refresh periods. And yes, in most games, hiding, sneaking past, bargaining with, etc, are methods of dealing with hazards as alternatives to fighting, but the player choices exist beyond that set of tactical options.

I've always thought of "Quantum Ogres" as a party that just finished their last adventure, and they're trying to figure out where to go next. Do they want to

>Head overseas to engage in the spice trade?
>Head on up into the mountains, where there are rumbles of a monstrous humanoid invasion?
>Go into the forest, where the more elusive fae have been engaged in religious arguments with the somewhat more social elves?
>Track out into the plains, and hire themselves in the king's call for mercenaries.

If no matter what they choose, they run into a band of monstrous humanoids led by an ogre beserker who wants to crush their heads, then the choice about which adventure track to take isn't a real choice at all; and that seeming choice but not actually having one is what makes a quantum ogre a quantum ogre.

It's fine so long as your players never find out you're doing it.

I really don't understand how relegating what they encounter to an arbitrary random encounters table offers any increase in agency. Nevermind the fact that you are just phrasing the question to be explicit railroading.

Eh I suppose this is a more specific version, yeah.

If the players never knew about this band of monstrous humanoids, the problem kind of never arises as far as I'm concerned though.

If he's intended to be a major character (i.e. connected to some overarching plot), he could perhaps be interested in tracking down the players so it would make sense to run into the baddie at some point.

If not, you can always change minor details. Most settings definitely allow for rampaging groups of bandits and demihumans so if you feel like an ogre doesn't fit into this particular spot just change him into something more appropriate. It comes down to "random" encounters and resource expenditure.

Not him, but it changes the encounter from being something they'd have encountered regardless of their actions to something that they encountered because they went into an area where they stood a chance of encountering such a thing.

How would they know the difference though?

If it's a seemingly random encounter, it's just that.

If you want to make it a bigger part of the overarching plot, just have someone mention a raiding party led by a big ugly ogre that's been terrorizing *area* and tell PCs to be safe on the road (and if they choose to avoid the encounter, either roll the dice while the travel the road or don't do the encounter if the go the other way)

It comes down to player awareness because you can't react to something you aren't aware of.

>If the players never knew about this band of monstrous humanoids, the problem kind of never arises as far as I'm concerned though.

If a lie is never detected, does it cease to be a lie?

If it's an accepted part of a game that this sort of DMing is considered valid, then by all means do that, but if the players expecting an impartial sandbox, you shouldn't do it, even if the players never discover it.

>How would they know the difference though?

Whether they know or not doesn't matter, because we're discussing what it is. If you lie to someone and never get caught, you're still lying to someone.

It doesn't. But that's beside the point, it shouldn't be a completely arbitrary random encounter table either, since that also offers 0 agency. Ideally, (and this might or might not be more work than what your GM is willing to put in), you ought to have separate tables for separate regions based on some sort of theoretically knowable in-universe cone of probability about what lurks in different areas.

Again, just because the players don't realize that they're being led around by the nose doesn't mean they are not in fact being led around by the nose. Negating their choices does your players a disservice, regardless of whether or not they manage to see behind the curtain into what's going on.

>It comes down to "random" encounters and resource expenditure.
I disagree. It comes down to choice and consequence. And if your game is so staccato and random that it's impossible to make meaningful, informed choices, you're not even really playing a game at all.

If the lie doesn't have any effect on you, yeah absolutely.

There's intelligent aliens on the other side of the galaxy, living on the 4th planet of a red sun. They're about as advanced as we were at the start of 20th century.

did this affect your life? And can you really prove that I'm lying?

>It's ok to cheat on your husband as long as he doesn't find out!

>it's ok to call in sick once in a while when you really aren't

Keep going; eventually you'll find a comparison that's applicable.

Well, I could maybe see the issue with the Quantum Ogre, but this one is objectively true!

That's MRS Quantum Ogre to you!

so basically this

>it's ok
Well, we could debate that one all day, but the fact is that business both anticipate and account for that kind of employee behavior.

No, even if it doesn't affect anyone it doesn't cease to be a lie. Whether it's morally acceptable to lie is another matter (Kant would say no, others would say yes under various circumstances).

What? No. Basically whether it's something bad is determinate on the nature of the game agreed upon between players and GM.

There's lies, truth, and unknown.
Most things fall under the latter.

Your players decisions should matter instead of secretly being meaningless window dressing for your railroad

>Basically whether it's something bad is determinate on the nature of the game agreed upon between players and GM.
stop being an obtuse ass
the entire game is a lie
It's not real
the DM is there to provide entertaining and challenging encounters. Maybe it satisfies your autism to have the world possess the correct ratio of DM interference to slavery to randomness but most of us here understand the appreciable limits of someone simulating an entire fucking world and allow for some plausible allowance of control over that world.
Do you complain that you start up a game and can't completely circumvent the earth? That you can only interact with the game world through the tools provide to you? It's a fucking simulation, and just like every game it requires some amount of cooperation by the players to accept the bounds established by the organizer.

>When your players realise you're making it up as you go along they'll lose trust in the game as a real world that's actually responding to their choices and start viewing it as some cunt telling them what to do.
It's almost like your enjoyment and experience is contingent on your GM's competency.

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Also contingent on the players. Basic social skills is not making CN antisocial tieflings who clash with the party, you need to play along sometimes.

If the players actively attempt to avoid the encounter through skill checks or whatever and succeed then the waveform collapses and the ogre was always on the path they choose not to take. If they just wander in either direction making no attempt to realize what's ahead of them they haven't made a meaningful choice regarding the ogre as such no player choice has been negated.

That's true for life in general. Paths never taken, etc

If you're already fine with players not fighting your ogre why not just have it exist in a predefined location in the world?

Here's the point - the ogre is a challenge. You (as the DM, the person setting up this series of challenges for your party) want the party to encounter this challenge, so you bend the module or the plan you've made slightly so that the players always run into the challenge.

HOWEVER, giving them the opportunity to use creative methods to overcome the challenge is entirely separate from making them encounter the challenge in the first place. If they scout, find the ogre without alerting it, and go around, that's a perfectly valid method of overcoming the challenge.

Now, if the DM said "okay, you go around the ogre. A day's travel later, you come to a bridge with another ogre on it", that's not okay, because you're removing the party's agency to choose how they overcome challenges.

In the case of the Quantum Ogre, the lie did have a meaningful affect on the players. They seemingly made a choice but only had the illusion of one because what happened was always going to happen. So if you were to tell me that these putative aliens only exist because I posted in a thread about Quantum Ogres (when in fact their existence was independent of my posting) you would be affecting my life if I believed you.

I really don't follow your thinking, so please indulge this line of questioning. If the players decided to go through the brush because they're worried about being spotted by harpies, would that be enough to "collapse the waveform" and cause the ogre not to be present? Or would they have to act as though there is an ogre there in order to remove it from their path?

I'm a different user than the one using the uncertainty vocab, but I'll attempt to answer anyway.

So I'm the DM, setting up an encounter for my game tonight. I know where the party is trying to get to, but I don't know how they're going to get there, because I don't want to railroad them into one specific path. Since there have been rumors of ogres in the area, I stat up an ogre enemy, and figure I'll throw in in wherever the party goes (unless it makes absolutely no sense, like underwater).

Now it's game night, and the party is nearing a good spot for my ogre attack. As you say, they left the straight path and are traveling off-road through a forest because they're worried about aerial attack. I stick my ogre in a ruined woodsman's hut which the party is approaching. Up to this point, everything has been theoretical (or quantum, I guess). Wherever the party went, if it made sense for an ogre to appear there I was gonna throw an ogre at them.

(...)

(...)

Once I've placed the ogre in the hut, the waveform has collapsed. The party is close enough that, if they haven't been watchful and scouting ahead, the ogre's gonna hear them and attack, but if they HAVE been scouting, or if they run away from the ogre, or they deal with the ogre in some fashion other than killing and looting it, I've still used the ogre, and it would make no sense to throw a guaranteed ogre at the party again later.

I took it to mean the ogre previously not existing then existing because the GM thought the players were doing too well.

Honestly, these.

If this area, for example a swamp, is infested with ogres and this information is communicated to players in some way - either as an offhanded remark by an NPC, a knowledge check or other, it makes sense that an ogre might pop up somewhere. Just taking care around one ogre doesn't mean there aren't more ogres in the swamp.

If the party continues successfully detecting and avoiding ogres, congratulations. But an area populated by multiple ogres may have multiple potential ogre encounters.

I put forward "shroedinger swamp" occupied by "quantum ogres" to be standard terminology for this scenario. The threat isn't ogre until players leave the area.

>tracking reveals the ogre should only be on one road
Who's to say the ogre didn't simply tromp through the woods to the other road after walking down the one road for a bit?

Imagine, forming a party just to stalk one single ogre through the woods. You can watch it shit on the side of the road, wrestle a bear and eat it, visit its mother, take a bath in a particular nasty corner of the nearby swamp, all without it noticing you.

This.
I have no problem with the Quantum Ogre, in fact, I like the simplicity most of the time.
What I have a problem with is the GM being a fucking liar and asserting, 'There's no Ogre, don't worry,' and then dropping an Ogre on you.
Or even worse, the player planning for there to be an Ogre, so the GM removes it because he doesn't like being outwitted.
That's the shit that's actually aggravating. Not GM's bending the rules of the game, but GM's bending the rules of functional human interactions to make themselves as untrustworthy as possible in an effort to seem superior.

This, I think, is the most important single point in this thread.

Quantum Ogres can be fun, and done well, if the GM and the PCs aren't shitters. It's when GMs railroad too obviously and to the detriment of players that it starts to become awful, or when PCs are paranoid about nothing that it starts to become annoying.
If the people involved are actually reasonable, experienced, adjusted individuals on both sides, then the Quantum Ogre, like basically any other RPG conundrum, is perfectly solvable.

This completely boils down to a question of whether or not someone else is being a shithead.

It also depends on the type of campaign being run.
If it's a module-like affair where the GM only has a specific thing set up, and the players know that they're doing a specific thing, the quantum ogre is critical to the campaign, while sandbox-style games benefit less, and may even be harmed by the quantum ogre.
At the end of the day, the party's going to have to face whatever it is the dm has planned, and the only real difference between quantum ogres and encounters in an open world is how much different kinds of things the gm has planned.

Jesus fuck, 100% This.
They're the people that come to the table with a flying devilman that uses firelegs in a gothic horror setting, and then Screech if the DM changes the adventure remotely, even if it's to try and actually accommodate his actual train-wreck of a character.
I say this from experience.

This is the actual most That Guy anyone can get to me. if you start breaking down or belittling a DM who's shaking things up to suit their abilities/so that they're more comfortable with it, Seriously consider Suicide or extensive therapy.

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If you want your players to encounter an ogre no matter what they do, don't put the fork in the road in the first place. You're the GM. You have complete control over the game world. You don't have to offer an obviously facile illusion of choice like a Telltale game.

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That seems like an awfully strawmanny way to portray the situation. If a pc is given the illusion of being able to outmaneuver or hide from or otherwise escape the ogre, and a few minutes later you get into combat with an enemy with suspiciously ogre-like stats, in what meaningful sense did you actually elude the ogre?

It's not 'cheating,' it's just an example of how no decisions you make as a player matters at the tables of some particularly bad gms,and once a player believes that, trust is irrecoverably damaged.

I once had a DM who railroaded us heavily for the first half of the campaign and the players loved it, then he decided to go off the rails and we all slowly got bored, ending with a player leaving after a session and never coming back.

What the DM didn't realise is that railroading was thematically quite appropriate, each character was working for the setting's equvilent of XCOM, we were all soldiers and questioning orders would just get us discharged.

Bitching about “Quantum Ogres” is just another way how you know your players are the fucking worst.

I didn't think this was a problem. I just never offer players options if there's no difference. No roads lead the same way as any other, every split is a different story, that jazz

Bitching about bitchy players is how you know a DM is creatively bankrupt.

I hate how my DM railroad our party into a dangerous dungeon or battle no matter which way we go! Go to the Goblin Swamp - and we're swamped by goblins! Go to the Ogre woods - OGRES! Why can't we just sit right where we are and not do anything adventurous and exciting?

The problem with quantum ogres is when 1) the 'ogres' don't fit into the environment that the players have made it to. If the DM is set on using a type of monster and will use it this session no matter what the players do, it can make for an awkward situation where the DM shoehorns in something that feels out of place.
Or 2) when the players are not being rewarded for cleverly avoiding an ambush. "Oh this rock formation sounds like an ideal ambush site, we'll take a detour". It takes the DM out of the habit of rewarding good player behaviour if he does not at least lessen the resistance the players will be facing.

Rocks Fall never looks that way from the DMs side of the screen. It happens a lot more than you think.

Players shouldn't know the stat block in the first place, unless they make that high DC knowledge roll to know all weaknesses and strengths in character.

If anything, it's good to shuffle all stats around and make players discover these things IC. Trolls regen unless damaged by negative energy and have a short range snot breath weapon? Better do some IC research before you got hunting trolls.

Honestly, my sessions are sometime nothing but quantum ogres. If players are just wandering the wilderness I have a whole heap of encounters I can throw at them while I pretend to roll for random encounters. I usually just pock one I want to run and work it in. Players enjoy the session since planned content is usually better than ad-libbed content.

Maybe just don't look for TPKs in evety encounter?
How about instead of evaluating the danger of a battle by stat blocks you aren't supposed to know, you play the game based on information the GM gives you?

i would love to see a quantum ogre as an actual monster.
when attacking or being attacked, roll to determine which side of the target it is standing on.

It is possible to make everything SOOOO "quantum wave state-ey" that player decisions stop mattering, but that's a pretty deep rabbit hole to go down before you hit bottom.

I've found the best is to include enough points of definition in the world that aren't in a "quantum wave state" that the players have to assume everything is.... and truthfully, you can be direct and honest with your players about this, and it works fine.

Also.... someone who lacks the skills to quickly change a few keywords, damage types, and rider abilities, to use an Ogre's statblock as something else should not be improv-GMing in the first place... or they're using a system where fluff and crunch are so inseparably tied up with each other that it naturally resists improv-GMing .

So from a GMing side I really don't like Quantum Ogres, because I feel like implicit in the premise of the medium is the fact that I get to have real choices that matter.

There are loads of other forms of media w/ considerable advantages over TTRPGs, the main thing that keeps this genre afloat is the flexibility of a live GM and their ability to respond in real-time to player choice. Converting said choice into an illusion just seems pointless and backwards.

I understand that it's sometimes necessary (improvisation is nowhere near perfect and sometimes you need to throw in a Quantum Ogre as a stopgap) but imo it shouldn't be a foundational skill or a critical tool in the GM toolkit like some people advocate.

Biasing this is the fact that I generally run "old-school" games which are like 50% hexcrawling 50% site-based exploration (read: dungeon-crawling). If I spend time and effort properly keying up a hexmap or dungeon, you damn well know I'm probably going to re-use as much as I can for future groups, campaigns, or even repeated delves/expeditions within the same group or campaign. Thus, I have less issue with the concept of having fully written content that a group may never discover, just because sooner or later somebody will and so it's not like my work is getting wasted.

Plus, people think that the players will never know about your Quantum Ogres, but that's assuming every player has never heard of this concept before. I'd rather spend a bit of extra time to come up with at least a framework for the results of all the actions it's reasonably likely my players would take so that they know that they have meaningful choices, rather than have them constantly wonder "did this choice I made actually matter at all?" constantly because they're aware a lot of GMs only give their players an illusion of choice.

this is good DMing

Quantum ogre refers to any element of the game (from enemies to cities) appearing or disappearing from a determinate position depending on the current state of the game and the players decisions.
The most common of one being an enemy encounter planned for path A moved to path B is the players take that route instead.
It can also refer to a city, enemy or npc being refluffed to match the new direction the players are taking. If instead of doing what was safely expected and going to the woods they go to the desert, the citie, npcs and encounters are refluffed to match the desert.