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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7976478" data-attributes="member: 42582">Taking your examples at face value, that is not very much.Let's suppose that the GM has decided that the widget is at place X. Then if the players can bring it about that their PCs are at place X - which itself is a whole lot of action resolution that might be resolved via the same methods we're discussing - they might be able to get the GM to answer the question, to which only s/he has the answer, whether or not the widget is at X.In this way of playing, the GM is the one with the (much) greater control over what occurs in the fiction.I'm not entirely sure what you're saying here.On the one hand, you seem to be saying that if the players want to find the widget and sincerely look for it in some place (like the captain's daughter's hope chest) then they'll find it. Or they won't. Because as a GM, while you're not specific, you do think these things through during your prep and you might decide that the captain does not have the widget, and nor does his daughter, or they do have it but somewhere else.I'm not getting a clear sense of how all this is playing, but to me it does seem to reinforce that the players can't, themselves, establish very much.I'm talking about the players rather than the PCs. (Or, if you prefer, I'm interested in the PCs as mechanical and fictional vehilces whereby the players engage the shared fiction.)What I'm saying is that if the GM is the principal, or only, participant who can establish what signifcant things happens in the fiction (like whether or not the widget is at place X), then s/he has a big responsibility. If the players's PCs end up at place Z, and the players have them look for the widget there, it is on the GM that they fail to find it. And it's on the GM to establish whatever consequence of failure follows from that.If the GM decides that bodyguards turn up, s/he is practically asking for a rumble! Especially in a RPG, like D&D 5e, where the one clear exception to this GM-driven approch to deciding what happens is the combat resolution system.If the GM doesn't want the fighting, don't introduce the bodyguards. There are very many other things that can happen when someone looks in place Z for a widget that is not there.</blockquote>

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