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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5091405" data-attributes="member: 4937">"[you] feel this one will be a challenge..." is an appropriate attempt to convey a difficulty to the player in natural language without resorting to metalanguage.  I'd adopt that 2nd person language in response to a player proposition like, "How difficult does climbing the wall seem to be?", without a second thought.Where I've seen many DM's go off the rails though is by adopting too much of a 'lean foward' 'Choose your own adventure'/'Zork' approach to narration, and they begin to slip into the narration things like:"You've scaled a lot of walls before and feel this one will be a challenge to you.  You put your hands against the wall and test its slipperyness.  What with the early morning dew and smooth stones, you find it very slippery indeed and the very thought of climbing the wall makes you quell with fear."I consider the two italicized sections to be bad form for a PnP game, even if they might be well suited to other media.  In the first section, the DM grants himself authority to make extended decisions about how the character acts.  In the second section, the DM grants himself authority to describe the PC's internal feelings.  I consider both to be breaking the wall of separation between what is within the DM's narrative control and what is within the PC's narrative control.  In this example, neither tresspass is particularly annoying, but I think its just a bad habit.  The very worst DM monologueing IMO occurs when the DM gets extended ideas about what the character is doing or feeling and tries to tell the player about it.   As a player, when I get extensive 2nd person narration telling me about my behavior and feelings, my tendency is to wonder why I'm even playing.</blockquote>

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