[B said:
GnomeWorks[/B]
]
I am constantly telling my players that it is never me, the DM, doing X or Y to them; it is the setting and its inhabitants. I never seek to kill off characters; NPCs, on the other hand, may want to do so very much.
Right, right. Except it really is you. Because the NPCs aren't real.
The distinction is, I feel, an important one, to the point that I try to make it very, very clear to new players that this is what is going on. The playstyle you're talking about here would seem to eventually lead to antagonistic DMing, because the players will interpret the DM's actions as antagonistic (whether intended as such or not). I'm not interested in a "DM vs. the players" set-up, because in such a thing, the DM always wins. The reverse, though - where it is silently understood that the DM and players are all working towards the same goal - doesn't interest me, either; there, players may get the sense that they are "unique and special snowflakes," or that they enjoy some sort of plot immunity.
Let me not overstate myself. I am a HUGE (the only?) proponent of illusionism. I totally agree that you want the players to *feel* like the NPCs are real, living people, and like the NPCs actions are really derived from their very real decisions and motivations. I'm totally down with that.
But you can't believe your own propaganda, man. Obviously its you doing things to the characters, not "the NPCs" because you are the NPCs. You created them, you control their every action, you control the world they live in, you control... everything. Everything except the PCs, of course.
Its not unbounded control. In order to make a fun game, it has to be relatively believable. And that may mean that you have to do something that kind of sucks. Like hypothetically, if you've had the evil NPC scream at the Paladin, "I don't care if you kill me! I will eat your heart before I die!" then you might have to have the evil NPC coup de gras the unconscious paladin, even though the evil NPC is obviously losing his last chance at survival by spending his turn hacking apart a downed foe. Or if you declare that a particular lake is full of lava, expecting the party to avoid it, and instead they get into a fight in a rope bridge above the lava and fall in, well, they're probably gonna die because you said it was lava and that's what lava does.
But there's two major differences between my way of looking at these things, and the predominate view in this thread.
1. I acknowledge that ultimately it was me who did it. I invented the NPCs motivations knowing full well they might lead to a PC death. I put the lake of lava there. And so, when I do these things, I do so from the perspective of someone who's considered the repercussions that are likely to be felt by the players. Honestly, I expect most other people do this as well.
2. I have a little different threshold for what counts as affecting realism. Basically, if the players don't know about it, it isn't *real* yet. Because what matters isn't creating a world that feels real for me. It can't, because I know darn well that I made it up.
What matters is creating a world that feels real for the players. Lets say that I secretly plan on an orc strike team scouting for them and ambushing them after their fight with the minotaur. Its all quite logical, they're in a conflict with the orcs, the orcs have scouts, the orcs like to ambush people, everything's well and good. But the fight with the minotaur is particularly taxing, and I look at the orcs and realize that one or more PC deaths are likely if I continue with this plan.
If I alter the plan, maybe by reducing the strength of the orc's force, or changing the terrain to somewhere more favorable for the PCs, or adjusting the encounter so that the PCs have a chance to notice the orcs in advance and slip away in a non combat encounter, or even just plain reschedule the whole fight for another time, I'm not affecting the player's sense of realism. Because they don't know that anything was changed, because they don't know the original nature of my plans.
Obviously if you take this to extremes and envision a world in which I've covered all the sharp edges with foam, a player might eventually notice something. But there are a lot of ways to create a sense of danger that don't involve killing off PCs because you're concerned about changing a note you made before the session that no one other than you has ever read. Exactly what those techniques are is too big of an issue for this thread (they vary depending on your campaign's take on resurrection magic, your game's view on replacement characters, your player's attachment to their present characters, and so on), but there are plenty of them.
The sense I get from this conversation is that a lot of well meaning DMs have a lot invested in creating a sense of realism about their gameworld. I also suspect that those DMs care just as much as anyone else about creating a fun game for their players. In pursuit of that, they're very leery about ever admitting that the Great Oz is really just a man behind the curtain. Its become kind of a taboo issue for them, because its not something you can ever tell the players if you want them to keep believing (or suspending their disbelief) in Oz.
But you're online. Your players aren't reading. You can stop pretending. We're all DMs, and we all know we're the ones ultimately responsible for things like the personality of the Orc Overlord of the living quarters of the Evil Dragon.
If the DM and the players approach wishlists in the right spirit, they can save the DM the time that he would have otherwise spent on picking magic items for the PCs. Of course, the counter to this would be your broader point that the DM shouldn't be entertaining the players, and hence, he shouldn't be picking magic items with the PCs in mind in the first place. 
