Does the NPC have a beard? It hasn't been established yet? Let the players spend some game resource and poof, the guy has a beard. Just resolves all this sort of thing so much more satisfactorily for me.
Another option is via some sort of Lore/Knowledge check - "Isn't it the custom for men in these parts to wear beards?" - rolls history/local knowledge/whatever check to establish the point.
One reason I'd make a random roll to see if the NPC was bearded (1-3 no, 4-6 yes) is because it helps to remove my bias from the game. Beards aren't a big source of bias for me, but a while back I realized that most of the NPCs I was putting into the game were men. Now I roll randomly for sex and I think it's helped out my game.
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Rolling randomly takes the responsibility off of the DM (to a point - the DM still has to determine when to roll and how to assign the odds). Doing so creates a less adversarial/mother-may-I game, I think.
With the beard example, though, we're talking about player-driven "bias" rather than GM-driven bias. I'm not sure that they raise the same issues. For instance, the players aren't being adversarial to themselves.
This is the kind of thing I would do. There are features of my game that mitigate this, though. The game world has enough adventure in it that the PCs don't need to wait for NPCs to offer quests
Right. If you go full-sandbox then the rhetorical force of my question is blunted, because you can answer "yes" with a straight face! My sense, though, is that a lot of D&D play is not particularly sandboxy but more AP-y. And AP play does depend upon the GM metagaming with respect to the plot-hook NPCs and events.
At which point, I find the objection to metagaming the beard decision less compelling.
A lot of D&D can be summed up as what you describe as "Tomb of Horrors" play.
See, I'm not sure about this. I think illusionist/AP play is also very common - the scenarios that the OP described seem more like that than like ToH.
Also, I think ToH has features that make it more narrowly applicable as a model than you are suggesting. For instance, I don't think it's a coincidence that ToH is a
tomb. It is an austere physical environment, in which it is plausible to think that everything of interest, even down to at least the basic details of the construction, can be spelled out in the GM notes.
But once we set our game in an urban area, the idea that everything would be spelled out like that becomes infeasible. And at least in my experience, a GM who insists on exercising strong control over the backstroy elements is in danger of making the urban environment unreasonably austere (at least in comparison to real urban areas).
If the players come up with the idea of having the PCs impersonate a bearded wizard to infitrate the wizard's guild, then in the absence of any prior cultural specification (eg the Roman preference for being clean-shaven) and given the widespread fantasy trope of the bearded sage/wizard, it seems likely that there are candidates around. At which point, if the PCs have just taken down an NPC wizard, the two options are either to allow that that (hitherto under-described) NPC is bearded, or to send play off in the direction of the PCs hunting down an alternative bearded wizard to impersonate. Unless world-exploration is a very big part of play, the second alternative can start to look like busy-work, interposing events with a more-or-less foregone conclusion between the players' conception of their plan, and the real action of finding out whether or not it works.
I think that the difference here is that, when a player gets an idea for a plan, the cards always seem to fall into place for them.
But the beard is not all the cards, it's one card. And its one card for the PCs, but it's not really one card for the players, because no action resolution has taken place yet.
If there is no beard, that is the cards not falling into place for the PCs, but it's not really a hurdle for the players, because they just come up with another plan using whatever alternative backstory the GM provides for them.
In a ToH and/or sandbox game, I can see that this serves the purpose of supporting/rewarding setting exploration. But in the sort of AP game that was described in the OP, there is not that sort of setting exploration taking place. The gameworld is already utterly contrived (eg the food critic with his soup; the woman with her flowers; etc). If the players want an additional contrivance - of a bearded NPC that will facilitate them doing wacky hijinks A rather than whatever the GM had in mind that would lead to wacky hijinks B - I don't feel the force of the concerns. Is anyone really under an illusion that
this gameworld is organic rather than contrived?
For me, it's that the crux of playing the game is solving problems. You might be solving those problems by killing things or by coming up with non-combat solutions. The entire point of the game, IMHO, is that players use the information they have in order to come up with solutions. Changing the information based on a solution is no longer solving anything. It's just reading out loud a thought that occurred to a player.
For instance, say the PCs need to get up to a window that's 2 stories up. I would like them to either have a chance of falling by climbing the wall or using up a resource of some sort to teleport to the window, or they are going to need to do some roleplaying and convince someone to give them a ladder or something. If one of the players says "Is there a box or something nearby I can stand on?" I COULD answer yes, because they obviously have come up with an idea to build a crude set of stairs. However, they haven't really solved the problem they were given.
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GOOD ideas that fit within the parameters the DM has given you should be rewarded.
Did you say there were no boxes? If not, what is being
changed? And how was the absence of boxes part of the parameters that the GM established?
Furthermore, if the window is in an urban area, then the presence in the vicintiy of boxes, or lumber, or hay bales from stables, or barrels, or other devices for making steps,
is a part of the established parameters. If the PCs are on a timer, make it a Streetwise check; otherwise, it seems that any group of PCs in an urban area, with a couple of hours and a couple of siver pieces, could collect this sort of junk.
I think insisting that the players come up with the very solution the GM had in mind in framing the situation risks turning the gameplay from a roleplaying session into a group sudoku session. There is a time and a place for sudoku, but I'm not convinced that an RPG session is it.
My current RPG group had its origins in a two-or-three-session D&D campaign being GMed by another person. Our PCs had captured a kobold - I think the GM had assumed we would kill them all - and then we tried to interrogate it (either it spoke Common, or we had an appropriate linguist) and get it to show us on a map where the kobold base was, etc. Although, per the 2nd ed AD&D rules, a kobold is of average intelligence, the GM had the kobold reply with less intelligence than a primary-school-aged child - it could not understand our questions, could not say anything meaningful about the number of disposition of kobold forces, could not read a map, etc.
I'm sure that, from the GM's point of view, he was holding us to solving the puzzle with the resources that he had put in front of us. From out point of view, that was the last session we played with that GM. Next week the GM was absent, and everyone else rolled up characters for a RM game that I wanted to start. The following week we told the GM that there was a diffrence of creative opinion, and wished him better luck with his next group of players.
I think there is a very fine line between the GM holding the players to his/her preconceived notion of the challenge, and shutting down player ideas and creativity in the way that [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] described upthread.
I hate it when the group comes up with a plan, but the DM wants to "add difficulty" so he just starts obstructing the players by saying no. It's often not about "the integrity of the setting" but rather, "I want to make the players work for their success, so, I'll just make this more difficult, just to make it more difficult". I find it so frustrating when DM's do this.
For me, the particular frustration comes from the fact that the only actual increase in difficulty is time spent at the table before getting to the good part.
I mean, in the real world, if I have to go and get lumber from the other side of the village and carry it back to the building I'm trying to break into, that makes things more difficult.
But in the context of RPG play, that is just more stuff that I have to play through, taking up time at the table, with the likelihood of anything exciting coming out of it being rather small. It's busywork, the non-combat equivalent of filler encounters.
