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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadfan" data-source="post: 4587832" data-attributes="member: 40961">Are you serious? This is D&D, not Relationship Hotline. Keeping secrets from the players for their own good is part of the game. Players want the DM to make decisions on what to do based on things like what would make the best story. But they also want the DM to create the impression that the game world is a living, breathing, realistic place. And living, breathing, realistic places do not operate based on laws of drama. Walking this line is a dungeon master's job. And its a job that absolutely falls apart if you tell the other person what you're doing. Its the same as if you were at a movie, and the whole time a gruesome alien was eating lost astronauts, the director was next to you saying, "the reason that the monster has those weird eyes is because we did a focus group and those eyes were rated the most scary." You might kind of be interested in knowing, but not at the exact moment you are trying to suspend your disbelief in the story. Edit to add an example: Recently, I had a bad guy surrender when he was bloodied, instead of fight to the death.  I did this because the encounter was turning into a drag, and to keep the table's energy up, we needed to move on.  The players enjoyment was increased by this decision.  Had I been a complete fool and TOLD them why this happened, they wouldn't have thought it was as cool.  They'd probably have found it pretty lame.  Because right now, while they're in the dark, they believe that the reason the enemy surrendered was because the whipping the PCs handed out was so terrifying that he lost his courage to oppose him.  If I told them the true reason, they'd stop thinking about the game in the terms of the game, and start thinking about it like people in this thread.  Then they'd get upset because of MY reasons, instead of focusing on the BAD GUY'S reasons.I have a real hard time with the idea that the quality of my dungeon mastering decisions stems from what time I make them chronologically. You are literally arguing that I would be a better DM if, instead of planning ahead and then adapting my plans, I simply didn't plan ahead at all. This entire line of reasoning has a sort of ad hominem quality to it. Not that you're insulting me, you're not. But, you're judging the quality of an encounter in a game of dungeons and dragons based not on the encounter itself, not on the experience regarding the encounter at the table, but rather on the motivations you infer went into designing the encounter. Doesn't that strike you as odd? Your fundamental problem is that you apparently cannot tell the difference between "having an effect on the gameworld" and "having an effect on the dungeon master's written plans for a specific encounter."Their ability to fail is irrelevant to this discussion. Of course the PCs can fail. Its just that sometimes they can get back up and approach the problem from a different angle, and when they do, I can reuse some of my old material instead of burning it sacrificially so that I do not commit DM thoughtcrime.</blockquote>

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