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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crimson Longinus" data-source="post: 8699835" data-attributes="member: 7025508">My stance is that generally everyone participating actually understands and has consented to the idea that the fictional world cannot have perfect objective existence, and required the GM (or at least someone, but in D&D it is mostly the GM) to make decisions of what exist and how it is presented. And that when doing so the GM is authorised to use their own judgement. Furthermore, it is understood that the GM may use that judgement to bring forth elements they think would be cool to include. The GM deciding that the third forest area the PCs explore will contain the witch's cottage, or that the next treasure parcel they find will contain the plot relevant magic ring or that the character's long lost brother will not be found until dramatically appropriately arduous amount of searching has been conducted is not 'deception.' It is just the GM using their framing powers to include interesting elements in appropriate moments. And may this sometimes mean that some choices do not have the weight that they perhaps could be imagined to have if we assumed objectively existing world? Like it actually didn't matter which treasure parcel you looted, you found the Ring of Power anyway, even though logically, in an objective world it would have mattered. Sure, that can happen. But also don't think this is shocking. No one expects that every minor decision will have a huge impact, and everyone is aware that the world actually isn't perfectly objective and the GM is making some decisions to direct things.Now could people agree that they wanted to explicitly play an old school map and key game where basically everything is predetermined? Yes, of course they could. In such a game the GM wouldn't be doing much of such directing, though perhaps even there they might need to make calls on small thing. But in either case, I don't think there is any basis on assuming that this is the expected playmode of 5e D&D, and that any deviation from it requires an explicit announcement.</blockquote>

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