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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 6427011" data-attributes="member: 2011">No doubt.But, there is something that you are missing.I've spent about one third of my time being a player over the decades and two thirds of my time being a DM. In that time, I've noticed that as DM, I have this vision of what is going on in the campaign world. It's fairly complete in my mind with all types of details.As a player, I'm pretty clueless about what is going on. Sure, I get what the DM is telling me, but I often do not connect the dots.I'll give an example. We started a game as "0th level PCs", shipwrecked on an island. No food. Limited clothing. No tools. We had to survive. We eventually managed to get a fire started and it got a bit out of control due to the wind. So, some vegetation got burned. The DM described the burnt vegetation as sweet smelling.I don't know what the other players were thinking, but I was thinking that the plants might be poisonous. So, I avoided them. The rest of the players ignored this little clue as well. Several gaming sessions later once we got off the island, the DM asked why we did not try to use these plants as food since "cooked vegetation" that smells good tends to be edible and we were starving.Never entered our minds. The DM had this idea of what was going on and we all just sat there clueless.This happens all of the time in games. The DM knows what's going on, hands out clues, and those clues just fly over the heads of the players.So yes, sometimes as a DM, you have to just say "The person is obviously mind controlled". Of course DMs like to give hints and let players figure things out on their own, but sometimes, that just isn't going to work. Players really do not always know what the DM is thinking and even very obvious clues (from the DM's perspective) can be very obtuse clues (from the player's perspective).As a DM, you need to understand this so that you do not get frustrated with your players. They are not necessarily being pitas, they are just not getting it and as a result, they may be getting frustrated with you. And sometimes as DM, no matter how good of clues you thought you gave out, if the players need the information, you are going to have to spell it out for them. If they do not need the information, then you sometimes "out of character" need to make it clear to them (as you did try to do in your one example) that yes, their assumptions would normally be correct, but they are not correct in this case, no matter how good they roll on the dice.</blockquote>

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