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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6683996" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, if the roll wasn't made in secret, why would we force a player's actions?  The whole reason for having more than one person playing the game is to not have one person making all the decisions.  More to the point, by what right do you force a player's actions?  GM's have lots of rights stated or implied, but telling a player how to play their character is in general not included among them.  You can't know that.  You can't even know that if the player actually is withdrawing to avoid the feint.  That's because you can't know whether, absent the information that a feint was coming, whether he the player would have withdrawn anyway.   Nor for that matter can even the player himself known how he would have acted were he not influenced by such salient information.  Once you concede that the withdraw action was a valid possibility even absent knowledge about the feint, then you concede that the knowledge of the feint only made the withdraw more likely but that you also don't know whether it was the only information that would have caused the withdraw.  That's the nasty thing about metagame information.   If you spoil a mystery to someone, they can never know whether or not they would have solved the mystery on their own.  They can say to themselves, "Ahh.. that's obvious.  I would have caught on to that, even without your spoiler.", but they can never really know for sure.In a very real sense, when you release metagame information to the player that their character wouldn't have had, you've already screwed around with their free will and agency as a player.  You made the answer to the puzzle obvious, and they lose the ability to judge for themselves.  One huge and I think valid objection a player may make to this situation is that the roll was made openly specifically to prevent the player from making choices he wanted to make, and that in fact the open roll itself was metagaming by someone else at the table.No.  I'm not.  I'm not stating anything of the sort.  All I'm saying is nothing in the rules says that the target of a feint, if it is successfully feinted, cannot take the withdraw action on its next turn.  Nothing in the rules constrains the targets actions at all, regardless of the result of the role.  That's not even really arguable.  You are interpreting what you think the intention of the rule is, and adding clauses to the rules not found in the rules.  It makes sense to you that if you fail the sense motive check, you aren't allowed to take a withdraw action to evade the feint.But you've already admitted that the rules don't say that when you admitted that you have no problem with the withdraw action if the roll was made in secret because you admit the player is free to choose that action.  So now you are claiming that the rules say, "If the sense motive roll wasn't made in secret, then the player isn't allowed to make a withdraw action in the round following a successful feint."  Of course, the rules don't in fact say anything of the sort.  You are adding to the text based on your interpretation of the intent, because nothing in the text of the feint constrains the targets next action at all whether or not the role was done in secret.   We certainly could write it that way, and it might make an interesting combat maneuver to feint a target out so successfully that they were basically mind controlled over a short term.  But that's not the way the feint works as written.Ok sure.  I agree.  So what?  Whether or not you sense any motive, you still get to act however you like on your next turn.Show me the rule you are adhering to.  If you can't point to the rule you are adhering to, then I suggest that you don't actually have a good handle on how rules work.  The thing you are pointing to doesn't say anything like you say it says.Yes, it sounds really cut-and-dry to me as well.  First, you are quoting out of context.  "You can also... very clearly indicates that this aspect of Sense Motive is unrelated to other aspects of it.   It's not actually a part of the rules on feinting, which makes no mention of sensing when something is up.  Secondly, you still haven't quoted anything that backs up your claim.  The feint rules completely describe the results of a successful feint, which are, "If your Bluff check result exceeds your target’s Sense Motive check result, the next melee attack you make against the target does not allow him to use his Dexterity bonus to AC (if any)."  It says nothing at all that suggests the target's next action is constrained, or that the target cannot take certain actions until you make your next melee attack.   There is no wording for that rule at all, so we would have no idea what it is.  Multiple wordings are possible, but we have no recourse to the rules to know which is right.  This is a pretty clear indication that if we desire such a rule we have to invent it.  And by your own discussion, this invented rule would have to refer to whether or not the roll was made in secret, because you've agreed that feint works differently depending on whether or not the rolls are made in secret.  I think that sentence is confused nonsense.  "The metagamer" is not an identified party in the rules.  It's not a defined term.   Again, "sensing something" isn't part of the rules on feint.  Additionally, while the rules don't state the answer one way or the other, I do think it is a reasonable interpretation that the character doesn't 'sense' that he has been feinted until it is too late to respond.   And certainly, the rules support this, because once the character has been feinted, that penalty to his AC sticks around versus the attacker regardless of what he does.  The penalty to the AC is conditional on what the attacker does, and not on what the character that has been feinted does.  But it also doesn't matter that the character doesn't 'sense' something, because I don't think the rules mention the player at all.  Nor do the rules constrain the character at all - which you have admitted.  By the rules, the player whose character may be feinted may still choose a withdraw action (or any other action, say casting a shield spell, taking a total defense action, etc.), and by the rules the character may still run away.   The rules certainly don't say, "Players may not take any action where it may be construed by the DM that they are metagaming."  That's not a rules issue.  That's a metagame issue and a matter of social contract that is not addressed by the rules.  The rules provide no mechanism for dealing with failures of a social contract, particularly one that is likely unstated. In short, you are rules lawyering to try to enforce your idea of what the social contract at the table should be.  And you are actually inventing rules on the fly in order to control player agency just because you don't like what the player is choosing to do with their agency.  It's no more respectful when a DM does it than when a player does it.</blockquote>

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