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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Krensky" data-source="post: 5610874" data-attributes="member: 30936">That came up with the earlier example of "I'm a spy for the baron, let me in!". Since this is a weird event, and the baron kills guard who screw up and then kills their families, even if he believes the players he's quite likely to ask someone else to make the decision. The PCs are more then welcome to try to use Impress or Intimidate to change that course of action.OK. let me try this again.The players make a Bluff check. They succeed on the check. The guard believes their lie. That is all they have succeeded at. What that means in terms of infiltrating the castle is dependent upon the context. What the lie was, the nature of the guard's bosses, etc.Bluff is used to lie convincingly. Impress and Intimidate are used to convince someone to do something. Now, this gets slightly blurry as often lying convincingly will result in someone reacting in a predictable manner. "Dude, someone just crashed into your car!" could reasonably be expected to make someone rush to check on their car. Similarly, "We're diplomats here for the summit." can reasonably be expected to cause the guard to have the players escorted to the proper place in the castle.Why does the GM get to decide this? Because he's the GM. It's his job to decide it. He doesn't get to, as a rule, dictate the actions, feelings or thoughts of the PCs. Similarly, as a rule, the players don't get to dictate any of that for the NPCs or the world at large.They also don't get to decide what's reasonable because they know less then the GM about what's going on. Perhaps the guard is somewhat important to the scenario so the GM knew ahead of time that he knows the person they're pretending to be. Maybe he's a meat puppet who follos orders exactly regardless of anything else. Whatever. The GM is in possession of all of the facts of the world. He's the source of almost all of them too. And now we're back to being evil-bad-wrong abusive GMs. What we've been saying is that a successful Bluff makes the guard believe your lie. The consequences of that belief are dictated by the GM. Why? Because he's the GM.No one is saying what you claim we are. All we're saying is that Bluff lets you lie convincingly. It does not, directly, let you enter the castle. That can be one of the consequences of succeeding at the check. It might also summon the guard's superior. It might do any of one-hundred and forty-six things that I can't think of without far more information then we need to get into here.We're not saying the result is dictated by GM whim or fiat. We're saying that your "a successful Bluff lets me in because that was what you wanted to do" is not how we run things, and the rules support our interpretation as strongly as it supports yours. In my specific case it's explicit in the write up for Bluff in my game of choice.If the players choose the right lie and properly support it the Bluff check will get them into the castle with no entanglements. If they choose the wrong lie, then even if they succeed they might not get what they were looking for.Let's flip this around a little.The PCs need to infiltrate castle. They're new in the area and overhear talk at the tavern between some guards about how Baron von Evil invited the Merry Prankster to show up for dinner. They immediately latch onto this and show up at the castle and Bluff the guard so he believes the one of them is the Merry Prankster. Now, the problem is that the guards were joking. The Merry Prankster is a wanted criminal with a huge price on his head for doing pranks and Robin Hood like things and that 'an invitation to dinner' was an euphemism. So the guard panics, screams for help and it all goes pear-shaped. Fast. Now they're on the run, captured, or dead.Now, admittedly, the PCs are very gullible and naive there, and it's a little contrived, but it's a one paragraph hypothetical example. It's also 0300, so cut me some slack.From what you're saying, I should let them in without any consequences because the players thought it would be reasonable and it fits their definition of success.I find that completely counter intuitive for any traditional RPG. Maybe so weird Forge games work that way, but I don't play them nor do I wish to play them.</blockquote>

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