Perhaps 6 months ago when you killed Jareth as punishment for expertly breaking into the mayors house while everyone was asleep and punching his dagger up through the base of the mayors skull in what was clearly an expert kill, you should have inquired further. The clues were there. If you didn't see or pursue them and then 6 months later it comes back to bite you, that's not on the DM or a DM gotcha.
The explicit example given previously was that there was no such evidence. Had the players inquired, yes, they would have been (potentially) able to find out--but there were zero such forward-facing clues given. Hence why I used it as an example.
It seems that all of those rumors talking about the ancient red north of the town of Wefryeverysooften and the dragon encircling the mountain on the map seem to be true. Perhaps you shouldn't have gone there at 5th level and brought this eminently avoidable circumstance upon yourselves.
The explicit intent of the example is that there is ZERO warning. Nothing. No preamble, no rumors, no warning,
nothing. At all.
Because I was asked for examples of how things could be fair or unfair, and someone explicitly mentioned a red dragon
randomly attacking the party. Not just
being around, actually attacking out of the blue with no warning.
Would you rather fight 20 skeletons or 40? There's nothing about a necromancer who is building up that is a gotcha or unfair. Hitting her and keeping her forces down is a sound tactic. Expecting her to just sit there and not add more after a week of you guys sitting around is silly.
Except, again, the specific point of the example was that the characters had eliminated
ALL of the necromancer's skeletons, and the GM knew that, and then conjured up a reason why she would immediately have as many skeletons as she needed later. Because the explicit description given by other posters above was, as long as there's any narrative justification they could give for why someone
could have forces just show up, they can, no matter what has happened to those forces nor how much the party has done--all but explicitly saying reinforcements as the plot demands. Because it's not possible for the party to be omniscient, therefore anything they don't explicitly know is totally fair game for the DM if they've invented a story (that they have not told the players) to explain it.
Of course you can come up with examples of a bad DM abusing authority, but assuming the DM is not bad(And DMs very rarely are), it will go more like I describe above than how you describe it in the quotes.
Because someone EXPLICITLY asked me (well, the thread) for examples of what "unfairness" would look like! I was literally giving someone
what they wanted examples of. And all of them were directly inspired by things real people, in this very thread, talked about as things that actually happened to them or their players!
Here are the quotes, for your viewing pleasure:
So what is your answer to "is it okay for the game to be unfair?"
I haven't pulled a single thing out of either of these posts. Those are full, unedited quotes.