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Sure. Why do you think I'm such an avid houseruler? I blame elements of the game for all kinds of problems. There are parts of games that are needlessly confusing, excessively complex, illogical, unrealistic, lacking in depth, unbalanced, and so on and so forth. I like some things better than...

So do I. I mentioned this above. Most myths have some basis in reality, and have since become fictionalized and exaggerated. It's not that I don't have experience with DMs who have a plot idea and railroad the players into it, or DMs who make the game all about their own NPCs and make the...

I think they've misrepresented their positions, to be honest. The whole "fiat" notion is not only judgmental, but contradictory. I see claims that other DMs would never impinge on the players' freedoms, but drop in on another thread and the same people are discussing ludicrous overreaches that...

Absolutely not. Being helpful does not mean that people will abandon rationality, or break rules, or do obviously foolish things. They're only human. Of course, when I'm a player I notoriously try to subvert NPCs in devious ways and I tend to rack up a high body count, so I'm not excluding...

I'm positing a generic example. Take it out of the generic and add some bit of context that meaningfully changes the situation, and my conclusion no longer applies. That is, if the PCs are fairly low in level (say, no more than 5th), have no existing relationships with the king or royal status...

Not exactly. I was talking about actions, not outcomes. The action of simply walking up to the gate and asking was never going to produce that outcome, regardless of the player's Diplomacy skill. Neither was trying to charm someone. However, other possibilities might produce other results. That...

It shows nothing of the sort. Of course it's possible to have things that the players know. However, the metagame implications of the players knowing every possible meaningful bit of information, not just some information some of the time, is hard to swallow. Despite this point's tangential...

The cheap option would be an Impaling weapon (MIC), which only works 3/day but is also only a +1 enhancement. The other big thing you can do to boost your chances of course is find some way of being invisible. If you can reliably do that, the Spectral Skirmisher feat (PHBII) is a nice way of...

None of that is scientifically accurate, however. There are things that affect skin but not leather (indeed, that's kind of the point of treating it). And acid does destroy certain types of stones. Green slime is its own thing.

It's not 100% clear what they were going for with green slime. On some level, I think you have to make up whatever isn't covered here in terms of what it affects. I do not think that glass is stone in the technical sense, though both are mineral in nature (ask a materials scientist). I would...

The Big Picture: I'd be going for an apocalyptic multiverse-spanning war that brings the campaign world in the end, with a love story buried underneath. To start, I'd be running several low-level sessions very possibly with some of the characters completely separate. I'd focus on the normal ups...

I'm working hard on fleshing out my adaptation of psychic rules for 3e, and I'll be running psychic-heavy 3e mixed with CoC and maybe a trial of some other rpg for the foreseeable future. I'm pretty happy with where I see my system going.

All of that is true. However, the multi-thread string of examples refers to a 3e-specific discussion that started some time ago in another thread. Since we're also talking about the Diplomacy skill specifically, it's really only referencing 3e. In that other thread, some people with more...

Again, context matters. The difference from what I can tell, is that my king was being reasonable, whereas your sage was being unreasonable. Kings are generally busy, insulated, and paranoid people with many highly trained and very conservative servants, whereas sages are not. The sage...

Well, there's and then Sounds like a contradiction to me. Nothing in this or any other information you've ever provided would indicate that you have ever run a game using the style I advocate, or that you even comprehend what I'm advocating. Railroading isn't a question of action, for example...

You really haven't. Well, that sounded contradictory. I have no idea how good of a DM you are or what lessons you've learned, but I'm pretty comfortable with what I'm doing. And, independently of either of us, the game is the game. There is no "fiat" in the published game, regardless of what...

I've very rarely seen that happen, even from my perspective as a player, even having had plenty of DMs who had their problems. Certainly not relative to the amount of unreasonable actions that players push. But to go back to the point I made about operator error earlier (one that the...

No, it's not. Everything is due to the DM. If you're the players, you're either tracking your own internal goals, or your success is manifest in part through your ability to achieve the DMs vision, and in part through your ability to persuade him of the merits of yours. To put it another way...

If we're talking about intended or appropriate use, I would suggest we should also acknowledge that the other rules are not there for players to break the game, which seems to be what certain others are advocating some of the time. Not everyone, but I think it's natural. I don't expect people to...

I make no statement about any games other than this one, but there is no ambiguity here. There is no reasonable interpretation of that text that would provide for any limitation on a DM's authority or establish any form of "player fiat". The simple fact that I can read does not make this...