Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Krensky" data-source="post: 5611809" data-attributes="member: 30936">Your position is as much GM fiat as JC's, Hussar.Those are my examples. Let me give you some others.You made your Bluff. The guard believes your lie. So he follows his standing orders regarding refugees from the Orclands and sics the dogs on you.-or-You made your Bluff. The guard believes your lie. He knows the king hates mimes so he tells you to get lost.Those are success at the test too.The thing is though, the challenge isn't to bluff their way past the guard. It's to enter the castle. Any way of doing that gets the PCs the XP for that objective. The Bluff check isn't a challenge, it's a tactic.They chose the wrong lie. That's it.Now, in both of those cases, when the players are cooking up the scheme, I'll make some Knowledge checks or suggest a player use a free hint ability, or give me an action die for a hint. So I can inform them that it's a bad plan and why. Same might have happened in the Merry Prankster example, but I may have let them step in it there since their being really dumb, the result will be hilarious, and it'll give me months of material. See, this is the issue.You keep repeating this. It's not true.The PCs succeeded at their Bluff. The guard believes them. We all agree here.Now, you say that unless the guard lets them in, regardless of the circumstances in the castle, his orders, his temperament, the nature of the lie, etc, the GM is being a jerk and abusing his players by turning their 'success' into a 'failure'. That the GM should change to world so the player's succeeding at telling a lie to a guard grants them access to the castle no matter what. That succeeding at a check grants the player broad agency to define the world and NPCs actions.I, and others disagree. That's not what I or the people I play with want out of a traditional RPG. For me, part of it is that the players get to dictate their character's actions. They don't get to dictate mine as well. Part of it is my view that the only thing the Bluff vs Sense Motive check does is determine if the guard believes you. How the guard responds depends on the guard, his orders, the lie, the conditions in the castle, etc. In fact this is explicitly RAW and RAI in my ruleset.Now I need to go back to rereading Wick's Play Dirty. I have a game tomorrow night.</blockquote>

Verification