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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7977546" data-attributes="member: 42582">Consider: in the fiction, the PCs interact with a hope chest. At the table, the players of those PCs say We look in the hope chest to see if the widget is in it.Who gets to decide what the PCs see? Who gets to decide what (in the fiction) the hope chest contains?DIffferent RPGs, and different GMing and resolution techniques associatd with them, provide different answers to these questions. As best I can tell, from your account of how you GM 5e D&D the answer, in your case, is you the GM.Consider: the PCs interact with a PC, eg telling him to tell them where the widget is hidden. At the table, the players of those PCs are saying something like We ask the captain where the widget is, looking all scary and threatening! Who gets to decide how, in the fiction, the captain responds eg does he call for his bodyguards? Who gets to decide whether or not those bodyguards turn up when called? Again, different approaches provide diifferent answers to these questions. As best I can tell, when you GM the answer is that you the GM, decide.This is not a criticism of anyone. It's an analysis. That's all.OK. But that difference you're pointing to isn't what I had in mind. I'm not talking about the degree of precision or detail in the GM"s decision-making. I'm talking about who gets to decide whether the action declaration we look in place X can result in the coonsequence Cool, you find the widget!OK. What I'm saying is that If the players declare that their PCs search some place you've decided the widget isn't, then they do not have the power to put at stake, in that moment of resolution, that their PCs find the widget.Some time last year, I think it was, I had a whole other thread about this. One thing the PCs can do is look for the widget. That might also mean that they find the widget (or not). One thing they can do is threaten the captain. That might also mean that they draw the ire of the guards (or produce some other consequence). In each pair, it is the second of the twinned descriptions that will drive play. And if it is the GM who decides whether or not that second description is true, in the fiction, then it is on the GM how play unfolds. If the GM doesn't want violence, don't have the PCs' behaviour draw the ire of the guards. This is trivially easy to do. The guards are all drunk. They are in another fight of their own (like in Cirith Ungol in LotR). The captain hasn't paid them lately and so they are on strike. Etc.Again, this is not a criticism of anyone or of any system. For all I know, you GM 5e D&D having regard exactly to these things. I was making these ponts in response to posters saying that the players have reponsibility for the consequences of their action declarations.</blockquote>

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