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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lord Pendragon" data-source="post: 1878979" data-attributes="member: 707">Because the PCs can't quit.  If the geas wheren't there, now that the artifact's been stolen, the PC's could say "oh, well, sucks that those gnomes backstabbed us.  Let's go check out the Tomb of Ancient Loot and see if there's any left."But because of the geas, the PCs can't do that.  They have to set out to look for the artifact again.  This completely invalidates the campaign for the last year+ of real time.  They didn't have the artifact then, and now they don't have the artifact again, and they must find it again.  Or die.And then after possibly another year of real time tracking the thing down again, they have to hope that another group of NPCs doesn't miraculously have 30+ ranks in Bluff (which I'm willing to wager none of the gnomes actually did,) to fool the highly-diplomatic and motive-sensing party into trusting them.There are multiple issues here.  In-game justification, In-game mechanical fairness, and out-of-game campaign satisfaction.  The gnome's actions might have been fair, but were they mechanically fair?  (Where bluff checks rolled vs. sense motive, did the gnomes have reasonable scores not meant to screw the PCs, etc. etc.)  Possibly not.  And as for out-of-game satisfaction, clearly there is a problem here.  The fact that the geas prevents the players from dumping the quest rather than repeating a year of real-time progress is one of the problems.With a Diplomacy of +30, Neutral NPCs you meet automatically become Friendly.  A PC with that kind of score should be able to be reasonably sure that most NPCs he encounters are going to like him, and want to do well by him, unless they're already Hostile.  And even if they're Hostile, there's a darned good chance they'll be merely Neutral instead.This relates to the player frustration, not whether the gnomes acted reasonably.  Again, there are several issues here.A lot has changed, and you'd have to be on glue not to see that.  Before, we had no understanding of why the players would be willing to quit the campaign, when the scenario seemed so standard.  Now we know the whole story.  The new information makes things much clearer.</blockquote>

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