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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8285636" data-attributes="member: 16814">Looking at the kobold example, the players declared an action to intimidate the kobold in order to get the kobold to divulge information about the rest of the dungeon.  You've argued that, fine, the kobold does this, but can do it in a number of ways, some of which include alerting the next nearby encounter.  You've further argued that there's no real difference between options in the sense that all of them are the GM intentionally directing the story.However, I submit that alerting the next encounter is a clearly undesired outcome for the players.  Had they known that successfully intimidating the kobold would result in alerting the next encounter, they likely would not have chosen that path, as their goal is to gain information, not start the next encounter without that information.  And, so, ANY choice by the GM that includes alerting the next encounter is, in fact, narrating a failure state to the players' intentions with their action.  You've chosen to not honor their success, but instead find a way to ignore it and continue with the next encounter.  Thus, there's an easy metric by which to determine what the kobold does -- don't thwart the players' success.After that, if we're talking about if the kobold whines, or pledges loyalty, or whatever, so long as these all honor the players' intent and success, there's little real difference.  You haven't chosen the outcome based on the best story because the outcome was chosen because it honors the players' intent and success at that intent.  The rest is flavor, not story curation.Now, if you use this as an opportunity to have the kobold pledge loyalty so the kobold can join the party and then betray them later, you're back to story curation -- you're choosing the outcome based on a story outcome rather than the result of adjudicating the players' intent and success.This really isn't that complicated a concept.</blockquote>

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