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No. I'm saying that I see several clear issues, which seem like they should warrant techniques of some kind (processes, procedures, guidelines, rules-of-thumb, best practices, etc., etc.) to deal with. I have instead been told that it is literally impossible to even attempt to communicate with...

I have. Several times. Party meets in a tavern. GM describes the tavern and notes that one of the patrons is an old man with one arm. This is understood by many old-school GMs as ample information for the party to know that the old man with one arm is an essential source of information that...

Depends. Did they still need to avoid being heard? Are there truly no guards who ever look at the vault? Did they not need to consider shifts or timing? Seems to me that they'd need to do at least these three things: 1. Thoroughly case the joint, to determine the ideal timing for the heist, and...

I'm not talking about the GM just announcing random information to the party without effort. I'm talking about people discussing this style, who have more than once told me that it's simply, flatly, not possible to detail ANY kind of procedure or process or technique or what-have-you beyond (a)...

I'm not pemerton. But to me, that isn't bypassing the encounter. It is interacting with the encounter--just not in the brute-force, maximally-straightforward way. To me, "bypass" is something rather more like...completely negating it? Like outright nixing the very foundation upon which the...

Hmm. Perhaps. But that would be yet another unspoken but critically necessary expectation: that the players are basically somehow magically expected to know that they're supposed to treat every environment as something to be questioned deeply and expansively. Which just feeds right back into my...

Alright. Let's take this example and run with it, shall we? You decide to go to the store. But before you enter, the store has you blinfolded, puts noise-cancelling earphones over your ears, and puts mandatory boxing gloves on your hands. Functionally, while you are inside, you are in sensory...

At this point it's been years, so I don't remember the specifics. IIRC, @Lanefan was one such poster, so perhaps you could ask him about how he has used "maimed grizzled man in the tavern" type things as this sort of idea. But, again, you seem to be missing the forest for the trees. The point...

Again, I refer you to the example that I was explicitly given by others who favored an old-school sandbox experience: the "you didn't talk to the one-eyed [or one-armed, or various other maimings] man, so you never heard that the slimes in the mines are weak to lightning but divide when struck...

Indeed it seems a counterproductive non sequitur. I'm already of the opinion that maximizing plausibility is not what GMs actually do in practice--that instead they aim for preserving a certain "quantity" of it and will accept many options that reach such a threshold. And, because I have been...

Okay. I'm not quite sure what that means, seeing as how I see the three horns as being...pretty clearly problems to be avoided. But I'm willing to listen. Okay, but that...doesn't seem to have taken this horn of the trilemma at all? Like this is just saying "Exposition, and player participation...

Thank you! This nicely captures my concerns here. That is, there seems to be a trilemma here: GM doesn't give detailed info unless prompted by players, which risks "guessing-game" territory GM only gives detailed info about the things she's prepped, which risks "pick your option from the menu"...

I don't see any specific problem, no. But I do think this makes previous hard-line stances kind of frustrating? By which I mean, okay, so this is an example of prepared sequences-of-events that are acceptable to you. Cool. That's a useful boundary condition here. "Something like this is...

Yes, exactly this, this is what I mean when I say the world is inside the GM's black box unless-and-until the GM chooses to inform the players about it, under this approach, as I have understood it. Informed decisions depend on already having a ton of GM work done. Anything that doesn't already...

Are we talking about the same edition? 5e is literally all about the latter over the former.

Well, my idea was that the Warlord starts with medium armor+shield and upgrades to heavy later. Medium armor is perfectly doable at low levels even if you don't have a crazy high dex mod. But I suppose something could be worked out? It's just something where I would want to avoid a "one level...

I'm honestly not sure I can--particularly in light of these recent posts! Is it acceptable to have a planned sequence of events a, b, c, as part of the defense of a location when the PCs visit it? Is that an unacceptable overreach because the GM has laid down a sequence of what will happen? Or...

But Hannah having something she "would like them to continue [doing]" seems to be a pretty big no-no, isn't it, in this context? Like I was under the impression that the GM wanting the players to do anything at all would be unacceptable, outside of sharply limited exceptions (e.g. right at the...

Well, would you say my elaboration on the question demonstrates why pemerton would want clarification? I wouldn't have posted about it if I didn't see a seeming (emphasis SEEMING) contradiction between the hard stance against most forms of pre-planned events, vs the way a sequence of encounters...

I dislike the spell-ification of class features already, so even if it weren't psionics being recast as "it's literally just another flavor of spells", I'd oppose it on those grounds. What I want to see: A mechanical structure which radically differs from Neo-Vancian spellcasting in nearly all...