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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5427246" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't myself fully understand why it's OK for the exalted to sneak in but not to honourably fight their way in. Can't the paladin-monk do subdual damage with no penalty? And as a paladin, doesn't the code of honour get in the way of sneaking?I get that the players didn't tackle the scenario in the way that you expected them to. Or would have liked them to. But isn't that their prerogative? They're the players, after all. I'm just not seeing how they tried to do, or actually did, outrageous things.Maybe a bit like Shadzar, I still don't feel the force of all this.The inevitable was impersonating their acquaintance. Why? (And how is this consistent with lawfulness? It seems on the chaotic side to me - and bards, the magic-using class one would most associate with illusory disguises, have a "no-law" alignment prerequisite).As you describe it, they used a threat to an inanimate object (the scroll) to try to get information from the inevitable. When it didn't cooperate it, they fought it. This is so close to standard operating procedure for D&D play that I can't see what's wrong with it.In my previous campaigns one of the PCs was an animal spirit who had been banished from heaven. By living on earth as a human rather than a fox he was violating the terms of his banishment. Heavenly constables therefore came to arrest him. He fought them, and so did the rest of the party - including a paladin and a cleric/monk. This was the start of what turned out to be the main focus of the campaign and its resolution - the effort by the party to undo what they took to be all sorts of disasters and injustices that had resulted from heaven entering into contracts and imposing all sorts of sanctions that upheld the celestial order but that were going to leave the earth in jeopardy. The paladin and the cleric/monk took themselves, in doing this, to be doing their duty (for the paladin, in particular, his duty of compassion), not to be violating it. What would it have added for me, as GM, to stick my bib into this? I'd presented the players with the situation - they then worked out how to respond to it.Anyway, returning to your scenario, if you didn't want them to fight the inevitable, why did you not have it give them the information they wanted (which, presumably, was along the lines of "Why are you impersonating us and our acquaintances?"). For dramatic effect, you could even have had it give the information, then dramatically snatch the scroll from a PC's hand - thereby revealing that it had chosen to tell them, rather than being forced by their petty threats - which would have reinforced the superiority of the outsider to the PCs (if that's what you were going for) without more or less obliging them to let it go about its business with them being in complete ignorance of that business except that it involves pretending to be the PCs and their acquaintances.I'm still not sure what you were hoping to achieve, as a GM, by saying (in effect) to the players "There's this really big plot going on, and it involves impersonating all sorts of people in the gameworld that you care about as players and that your PCs care about ingame, but you're not allowed to engage with it except by observing it from a respectful distance." I just don't get it. My minimum advice would be - if you want to avoid what you yourself have described as a train wreck in the future, then be clear on exactly what it is that you're hoping to achieve through your GMing techniques. And I don't mean "What are you hoping to have happen in the gameworld?" I mean "What experience are you hoping to generate at the gaming table?" You seem to me to have focused excessively on the former question, when it is the latter that is (in my view) far more important.</blockquote>

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