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Blithe negation is crap GMing. Good job, well done, have a day.

How many people in the here and now know their local postal carrier by name, or the UPS and FedEx drivers whose routes their lives intersect with? Do you think not knowing those names keeps people from being able to use the mail, or the big shippers?

Angels and ministers of grace preserve us.

Seems plausible. It was a library book, I don't have the author bio to hand.

The dice-theft seems like a step too far, dunnit? (My dice luck is so notoriously bad that none of the players at my tables will even touch my dice, and my handwriting is so horrible that they don't even try to read my notes. Obviously, not everyone can be me, and equally obviously, no one else...

Clearly the players will take maximum advantage of all abilities, misreading or misusing them as they see fit, and the only way to prevent this is to say no as often and as loudly as possible.

Depends on the plane, of course, but weren't we talking about more conventional travel and more conventional cities? The feature says what it says, and I wouldn't just blithely negate it; planar travel doesn't seem as though it needs to be blithe, though it might depend on the how and why the...

I think it's written just fine, and I think it's pretty clear. A player trying to use it to put someone they know everywhere they go is, as I says, misunderstanding or misusing it. Knowing how to get a message to your contact--a build feature--seems eminently reasonable; hence, my thinking about...

If this is the D&D 5e Criminal Background, they're misusing it, or misunderstanding it--though they should as I read it be able to make non-hostile contact with the underworld no matter where they are, they don't know some specific person in any/every city they could possibly go to. If this is...

The background feature you argued about at some length gives the PC one contact, which I'd presume they'd name and place at start of campaign. It says you can always make contact with them, that you know the underworld messaging systems (couriers, et al.). As I said, I see nothing problematic...

If you say so. I don't see a problem with the background feature as written, but I'd probably go with my suggestion above that the PC would be able to make non-hostile contact with the local underworld. It's not wildly different than the Thieves' Cant being the same everywhere as far as...

Seems to me as though Session Zero would be a perfect time to establish the limits of a chargen choice, if chargen choices are supposed to matter. You could limit it as seemed apt, so long as the player felt they were getting something for it roughly equivalent to what they'd get for some other...

It seems to me that you're anticipating nothing but bad-faith, exploitative play from the players, and I'm expecting at least more of a range. If a player made a choice at chargen that enables them to establish contacts in places, I see no problem with with allowing the player to establish...

I understood "wasn't a thing" to be "wasn't a thing in the rules," not "wasn't a thing that happened." Sorry about that. I don't think we really disagree here.

Asking for connections to the setting before Session One, establishing the PCs as locals to the starting city, is a thing the players in the campaign I did that for have called out multiple times as making that city feel more "there." As GM, I don't handle in-play player-instigated additions...

Sure, different campaigns would have different things happen. The 1e campaigns I was in had no PCs die, at all. I was merely pointing out that permadeath was in the rules, that there were hard limits (even if approximately no one reached them).

No, I'm saying "improbable nonsense" will be dependent on context, as well as on personal taste. One scenario might demand it, one might tolerate it, one might reject it. I'm also saying that even if the scenario kinda demands it, it's still at least very likely to need to be consistent with...

The rest of your post is excellent, just wanted to respond to this ... I have told the people at the tables I run that I always consider PCs to be Weirdness Magnets (I've never played GURPS, I must have picked up the phrase somewhere along the way), and at one point I had some D&D PCs acquire a...

So we're doing it this way, I guess. Oh, please. I'm talking about something fitting the established fiction, or the theme thereof. The protagonist just kinds stumbling over people works in Paradox Bound but would crash and burn (at least, without a lot of work) in a mystery, and Gordon does...

It was a thing in both editions of AD&D, where you could only come back from the dead a number of times equal to your CON score. Yes, a double-digit number of deaths for a given PC seems like a lot, but there were by design hard limits. In principle, there were limits in 3e (at least, in 3.5...