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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8697833" data-attributes="member: 16814">I'm seeing a lot of "lie" going on, but from the player's perspective, what's the effective difference between making a choice blind and making a choice the GM is going to do what they want anyway?  There's an argument floating that it's fine to have players choose a path if you then randomly determine what's there (some kind of procedural generation) but I don't follow how this affords any difference in agency or meaning to the choice.  The only way that agency is increased is if there is some information about the difference between the paths that holds true.  But, even here, there's some issues to be considered.Let's go with the example from above (paraphrased) where going down path A there's an 80% chance of ogre and 20% chance of bandit and on path B there's 80% chance of bandit and 20% chance of ogre.  Let's say that this information is even provided in a less mechanical way of "path A has way more ogres than bandits, and path B has way more bandits than ogres."  This is a true statement.  The players make a choice based on this, deciding they want less ogre and so pick path B.  The dice are rolled and turn up ogre.  Was there agency here?  I mean, sure, risks and all that, so yes to that hypothetical, but here's the real question -- does it matter that there was agency from the player's perspective?  They made a choice and the outcome was what they wanted to avoid anyway.  How does that appear?  Walk this through various iterations of play from where everything is 100% open and transparent to the players such that they see the %'s and the rolls and know exactly how it happened all they way through the vaguer statement and a roll behind the screen.  Let's assume the GM is 100% honest in all efforts here -- no lying.  In the 'behind the screen' version, does it matter if the GM is being honest?  The appearance from the players is one where they can easily leap to the conclusion the GM Forced the ogre.  And if the defense to this is "but you should trust the GM" then we need to go back and talk about occasional moments when the GM isn't honest and does Force the ogre and evaluate if there's actually anything different on the player side of the screen here.I don't have preferred answers here (I have my preferences, but nothing says those are controlling).  I'm not fishing for a gotcha.  Legit thinking exercise.  Approach with curiosity.</blockquote>

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