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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crimson Longinus" data-source="post: 8696618" data-attributes="member: 7025508">I know that you're arguing in good faith and I feel it is unfortunate that we are seeming to fail to communicate here. But I assure you that I am not being intentionally dismissive.The thing is, that it is the ambiguous stuff that the disagreement almost always is about. Like basically everyone agrees that it is generally a bad practice to present a choice with clear(ish) stakes and then have it not to mater. But when get to discussion of what it actually means in practice, the disagreements emerge. I assure you that I honour the player choices great deal, and bigger the stakes are more important I feel it is to honour them. I have let players to blow up entire worlds. But still in discussions here sometimes I find out that some people get hung up on stuff I'd consider trivial. Things that I would consider to be just part of perfectly normal GM framing powers are seen as deceitful illusionism. And the logic behind such complains often eludes me. There probably is one, and in fact several, as these people don't seem to even agree with each other. <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="🤷" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f937.png" title="Person shrugging    :person_shrugging:" data-shortname=":person_shrugging:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" />Also, one other area where disagreement often arises is the level of fundamentalism regarding good practices. And some people are far more black and white about this than me. There are things that I consider to be good practices, (but aside Wheaton's rule type matters) I don't practically ever consider them to be absolutely binding. I'm wary of "a good GM always" or "thou shat never" type of proclamations. For every GMing principle I can think of there will be some rare edge cases when breaking it actually is the right choice. One of course can say that, and if the players get stuck for a long time debating something trivial it indeed might be a good call. Then again, it also is calling attention to the artificiality of the game world and addressing the situation at the metal level, which is something I'm not a huge fan of.Again, I swear I'm not trying to be difficult, but I'm not exactly sure what "letting layers to assume it matters" means. Like I just describe the situation, and the players make their assumptions and choices. It is not necessarily even that GM clearly outlines some choices, they just frame the surroundings and the players decide to make some choices on their own initiative.Presumably the players had some reason to assume that I would be useful, so yeah, it probably would be, or at least could be. I mean of course they might have been mistaken about something or fail their library research rolls miserably or something, so it is not guaranteed to matter.Again, that is meta knowledge. Characters wouldn't know whether it will be relevant later, and the GM necessarily wouldn't know either. A situation may emergently lead to a place where choices that seemed to be pretty trivial turn out to matter. I've been saying that this is exactly what they should say if they feel that way! The we figure out whether we can align our preferences or not. And for example based on this tread I can see that there are some people with whom I couldn't come to an understanding. Illusionism is badly defined, but I don't think it as a term is insulting. Even railroading that tends to have rather negative connotations is less of a value judgement than "lie."I understand that some people don't like these techniques, and communication is good idea. But also absolutely nothing suggested in the OP is something that the GM under the rules of D&D wouldn't be allowed to do, which of course is not the same than this being the only proper way to play. And sometimes gaming presence mismatches happen. What I don't like is turning such into a matter of morals rather than of taste.</blockquote>

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