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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6418983" data-attributes="member: 42582">Yes. This is what I was saying upthread.When you say "PC behaviour" do you mean "player behaviour"?That said, I don't follow your point under either interpretation. It seems to me that the gameworld should absolutely reflect PC behaviour, given that the PCs are active agents with causal powers in the gameworld. If the GM decides how the gameworld is independently of what the PCs have done within it, what is the point of the players even declaring actions for their PCs?But I don't follow your point under the "players" interpretation either, because in this context the only player behaviour is asking the question "Does the NPC have a beard?" Answering yes to that question is not "being biased by player behaviour". It is responding affirmatively rather than negatively to a question from a player.The experience of what?I think there is some confusion here. All three of these posts seem to be talking about action resolution.But the question "Does the NPC have a beard?" is not a declaration of an action. It's a question about the existing contents of the campaign world. Similar questions include things like "Are there any ashes around the edge of the fireplace?" "Is the barmaid pretty?" etc. The players are wanting the GM to tell them more about the content of the gameworld, and at least in some cases they are hoping that the answer will be X rather than Y."Saying yes" to such questions, thereby satisfying those hopes, is not making things easier. It is not "the world altering itself, dreamlike, to the PCs' activities". There have not yet been any activities - rather, the players are hoping that the necessary preconditions for attempting certain activities are present.If a player has come up with a plan for his PC to sneak into the wizard's guild hiding behind a fake beard, I don't see how it is "fostering creativity" to tell the player that the wizard - whose face hitherto has not been described - is clean-shaven. That seems to me to be thwarting creativity.By saying no, what the GM in effect does is shift the focus of play away from what the player wanted - namely, finding out whether or not the plan with the disguise works - to making the players come up with another plan. I don't see how this helps the game. (Unless you're playing Tomb of Horrors style, in which the point of the game is for the players to accommodate their plan to the pre-written backstory.) And I don't see how the player's perception of the gameworld is going to be altered, and destroyed, by having his/her hope satisfied. The player clearly wants the gameworld to be a certain way. And s/he knows that the GM has the power to make it that way, and (unless s/he is very confused about the difference between reality and authored fictions) s/he also knows that it is by means of the exercise of that power that it will or won't be made that way.Is the player nevertheless asking the GM to interpose a random die roll between hearing the question and answering it? Is the GM allowed to fudge that die roll? Illusionism about action resolution is one thing, but illusionism about backstory generation seems to me to be a step too far. Do these same players get upset when the GM decides that the patron walks into the inn and asks their PCs to go on the MacGuffin-fetching mission without first rolling a reaction check to find out whether or not the patron likes the look of the PCs?Deciding without a random check that the patron hires the PCs and not some NPCs, or deciding that its the PCs who are walking past the plot-hook event rather than rolling for that on a table, seem to me to be far bigger instances of the gameworld reality shaping itself to external considerations, than deciding that an NPC has a beard because a player is hoping so. Yet they are the stock-in-trade of every GM everywhere since time immemorial. No one's game has the PC's live boring, uneventful, poverty-ridden lives simply because random content generation gave all the plot hooks to the NPCs!</blockquote>

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