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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6840102" data-attributes="member: 42582">The GM is responsible for deciding what is in the chest, how whatever is in there might react if the chest is opened, and how the master might respond.The GM is responsible for deciding what a noble knows. And also for deciding that the noble only cares about partying and sex.I don't see that it wasn't open to the GM to decide that the noble had information about the garrison at the manor, eg because one of the "wenches" is the sister (or has also "wenched" with, or whatever) the captain of the garrison, and had spoken about it to the noble.The same thing could be said for the bodyguards. How big is this town? Does anyone have friends or relatives? Why did the GM decide that none of the bodyguards ever speaks to any of the manor guards? Or use to work as a manor guard but got a better-paying job as a noble's bodyguard? Or . . .?The GM is ultimately responsible for determining backstory such as which roads do or don't need repairing, which manors are or are not expecting deliveries of bricks, etc.If the players suggest such a plan, and the GM simply decides that it can't succeed (without allowing, say, a Knowledge (Urban Design) check by the players to establish that their PCs are familiar with the relevant paving and building schedules), that is on the GM, not the players.The GM is responsible for all this backstory.The players decided not to have their PCs create a distraction. Instead, they decided to try a different point of entry away from the guards they had spotted. It's the GM who is responsible for having decided that the PCs get spotted, rather than (say) the guards being distracted by the ones at the first point of attempted ingress calling out "Hey, come over here, I think I just saw someone trying to scale the wall!" Or whatever.The GM is responsible for deciding what, if anything, happens in the background fiction. (Ie where the players have not declared actions for their PCs bearing upon that background fiction.)In this case, there are any number of possibilities that seem consistent with the established fiction and sufficiently verisimilitudinous (certainly as verisimilitudinous as sketches circulating among guards). The first one that occurs to me is that a member of the resistance/rebellion/thieves' guild/veiled alliance/whatever comes up to one of the PCs and cautions them that their identities are known in the city and that they are in danger of being discovered.At this point, the issue of discovery has been put firmly on the table and the players can choose how to engage with it (if at all) as an element of play, rather than just having the GM decide it all behind the screen.For my own part, I find that once the GM is playing both sides (eg in this case, playing the guards of the city and advising the players on the best strategy for avoiding them) then the game can become less satisfying. If, as a GM, I felt things unfolding a bit like this, but for whatever reason I didn't care to make it a focus of play via something like the approach in my previous paragraph, I'd just say outright to the players "I assume you guys are going about cloaked and hooded, etc, to avoid being spotted." Absolutely. The game is ultimately for the players to play.What I'm seeing in the episodes of play that [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] is frustrated by is a recurrent pattern of the GM deciding on a piece of backstory which the players don't know, and for practical purposes probably can't learn, and then on the basis of that backstory extrapolating to failure on the part of the PCs. The wall-scaling episode is an exception here - with the right action declarations (which would probably fit [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s definition of "pixel-bitching") the players could have learned of the other guards. Even so, the GM is still the one who has responsibility for all this backstory. And clearly other options were available. The failure of the PCs' infiltration attempt is clearly on the GM.A lot of the discussion in this thread about this issue seems to assume that all this background fiction can just be treated as some fixed thing - and then goes on to say that it's the players fault that things went wrong because they didn't acquire the relevant information. But the background fiction is not some fixed thing. It's authored by the GM. If the GM chooses to author it in such a way that the players' plans, as declared by them, are going to fail more-or-less regardless (eg the PCs have been discovered not as the result of some failed action declaration, but simply because that is the background fiction that the GM decided on), that is on the GM.I'm pretty sure that by "saying yes" [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] means to refer to the GMing principle from Dogs in the Vineyard, Burning Wheel and some similar games: say yes, or roll the dice. That is, either action declaration succeeds, or - if the matter is a high stakes matter relevant to the goals and stakes of play - then a check is framed and the dice are rolled.Hussar seems to be saying that, when the real goal of play is to talk to the sister (? I think this is the reason for sneaking into the manor), then forcing check after check to see if the PCs even make it to the sister, and having many of those checks fail apparently because of decisions made about backstory by the GM, over which the players had no real control, isn't the only way to GM the scenario. And perhaps not the best way.</blockquote>

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