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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6684263" data-attributes="member: 4937">[MENTION=6681948]N'raac[/MENTION]: Ok, so now you've done and gone deep.Your post is so long and addresses so many points I can't respond to everything, and as I largely agree with most of your points fisking would be the inappropriate response anyway.  Also, I need to respond to some of your points out of order.  Basically, I agree with your assessment that if we follow the rules strictly, we are lead to the conclusion that  Barlo is intended, at least in the case of a normal feint, to know he has been feinted and has time to respond.  But you are misusing some of your terms here.  What you are repeatedly referencing as 'the metagame' isn't in fact the metagame, but something that I will here call 'the fiction'.   The fiction is the narrated situations and actions that together created the imaginary shared space in which the game takes place.  The metagame refers to how we agree to play the game, and not to the fiction of the game.  An example of the metagame would be the tacit understanding by the players that the purpose of playing is 'to win' and winning is defined as gaining levels and earning loot, where another table instead understands that the purpose of play is primarily to tell a story and that death isn't failing if it makes a good story.  We generally use metagame as a verb, when we mean a player making decisions about his character that are based on metagame goals (like 'winning') or knowledge rather than on information about the fiction that is available to his character.  Normally, this has a negative connotation, but I think it's fairly easy to establish that not all such decisions are necessarily bad ones.There are a lot of different theories as to whether the game, that is the rules, supports the fiction and is derived from it, or whether the fiction is derived from the game.  I don't think we can settle that here, but I'll be up front and state that I think almost inevitably it is the game that creates the fiction.  Thus, the fact that I think since Barlo has an unconstrained chance to respond to a normal feint action, the most logical narration of the fiction created by the game is that Barlo at least potentially knows that he has been feinted and now has to choose how to respond to that.  If we want some other fiction to prevail, such as for example having the feint action succeeding representing Barlo not knowing that he's been exposed and left vulnerable by Able, then we have to actually change the game - that is the rules - to privilege that fiction.  The RAW doesn't privilege that interpretation, and even appears to contradict it.This is true even if we make the declaration and rolls secretly.  Among his other problems with this situation, Oryan77 in my opinion wants the game to support a fiction he has in his mind, which in fact it doesn't support very well.  So when you disagree with me regarding whether or not it is reasonable to expect a player to make a conscious decision to cause the death of his own character, you are simultaneously misunderstanding me and possibly (?) making a different statement regarding the desired metagame - that is to say, the purpose we have in playing the game.   First, there is a difference in saying that it is unreasonable to expect a player to make the conscious decision to cause the death of his own character, and saying it is not reasonable for a player to make the conscious decisions to cause the death of his own character.  I have no objection to a player deciding that in this case, the proper way to play his character is to make decisions that he knows will lead to his own death.   I merely assert that it is unreasonable to expect him to make such a final and important decision as that just because you think he should.Now I'll quote you:I'm not sure I understand your point entirely here, but whatever it is, it's very interesting.  Which of the thought processes do you consider poor?  Are both poor, or is one correct and the other wrong?   It seems to me that they are equivalent, but the first exposes yet another reason why revealing the roll regarding the feint and then trying to limit the player's agency based on something that doesn't exist in the fiction (the dice roll) is wrong.Where I disagree with you is whether or not the fiction has primacy.  I think that we have to allow the game to create the fiction, because in the long run it inevitably does.  We can pretend that the rules of the game aren't (as it were) the physics of the game world, but in the long run as we adhere to the rules the game world will more and more take on the character of a world where the game rules are it's physics.  So we might as well accept that.  There are no end of DMs that fail to accept that, and are all the time frustrated and heavy handedly trying to remove player agency, because the players are always judging their actions on the basis of the rules rather than the fiction as the DM imagines it, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they are demanding players read their minds.  I recall many instances of DMs on this board, frustrated by things like when an NPC points a heavy crossbow at a player and demands they surrender, that they don't do so and instead attack, because "in the real world if someone pointed a heavy crossbow at you, you'd be intimidated".   I recall one DM on the board becoming frustrated because players made the calculation that dismounted they would do more damage, when "in the real world, a cavalry charge would have been more successful".  These DMs are all the time trying to use DM force to make the world match the world they desire, and to the extent that they aren't simply would be novelists that prefer players as puppets to direct (most I think aren't), they seem to never analyze the combination of their own beliefs that "the rules aren't the physics of the world" and yet perversely that the players should act as if they don't know that the rules will be used to resolve the fictional situation.  They are always bouncing up and down about the players "metagaming", when in fact it is they that always have this unreflected upon metagame going in their head "the story should be realistic, as I understand the word, and players should act according to my notion of what is real and not according to the game or the metagame".   If you really have a coherent model of what is realistic, you better have a hyperrealistic set of rules that matches that model if you want that fiction - and that metagame - to prevail in the long run.As such, I would say it is the rules and not the fiction that is key to the interpretation here.  The fiction will ultimately be derived from the rules, after we've adjudicated the player propositions.Since the opposed roll is secret, the DM will handle both sides of it.  Indeed, I'll probably be handling all the rolls, including the attack rolls, behind the DM screen.   If a player protests that this requires a high degree of trust in the DM, I'll explain that next time they should consider that before going to a PvP situation with no upfront metagame agreement.   All one player will know is that he was not successfully attacked this round, and whatever color of narration I used to explain this.  For all he would know, the other player just swung and missed.  For that matter, all the feinting player will know is that he tried to feint, not whether he succeeded.  However, it's worth noting that I have a homebrew Tactics skill that among other things can be used to answer in the affirmative questions like, "Is the other player denied their DEX bonus?", "Or is the other player currently taking the defensive fighting stance?", or even "Does the other player have the Combat Reflexes feat?"  Or with a sufficiently high check, all of that at once.</blockquote>

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