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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 9383366" data-attributes="member: 6801228">How did you get that out of my point that it might be common in your local area, but not for other people?Okay, we are at least getting to some agreement that there can be problems.I would think you would ALSO have a large problem if the person running the game doesn't understand the rules in the OS type of game. Knowing the basic rules of the game is a pretty basic requirement for running the game. But on your last line, this is sort of the point I've been driving at. OS games want to limit players to only doing what they already know (except for magic) but the point of a roleplaying game is not to play yourself. It is to play someone different. This is why we "give away" information, because it is information the character should likely know, but the player does not.Anyone claiming to use real magic is often incorrect about that. And you keep using the term "Hard Fun" but I've never agreed with that term. I accept you believe that, but I have not agreed that it is what is happening. And while I won't deny there are people in this vast world who lack common sense, implying that people who use one of two styles has it.. and other people play the other way... is rude.That is almost never how that goes. The only time I ever did anything remotely like that, was a time I had a magical lock on a chest, and a player wanted to use identify in a clever way to pick the lock. I hadn't prepared for them to do that, and had to come up with an answer on the fly, which led to me making up a complex alchemical formula... which wasn't written down, and that they solved with a roll, because there was no other possible way to DO that. And that is the only example in the last 10 years. If a player is sitting there clueless in front of a puzzle, I've already made a mistake. They should have some clue just from my description. Then, if they want to, they can roll or ask me. For example, I once had a party enter a desecrated shrine, and ensconced in the shrine were various figures to good-aligned deities, desecrated in unique ways (the Cat Lord devoured by mice, a fire goddess trapped in ice, a god of freedom in chains). I never told them the answers to the puzzle, but I did let them roll to see if they could figure out who these obscure deities were and how each was desecrated. Then, as long as they did something to mitigate it, I said it was close enough to the answer. A riddle (which I always hate attempting to use because they always fail to be fun) might involve a roll to determine where a particular turn of phrase is that can give a more obvious clue. One thing I have long, long noticed is that writers and GMs have a similar problem. You have perfect knowledge of a scenario, so you see the obvious clues. You know the answer, so the answer is obvious to you. But players DON'T KNOW. They don't see the situation like you are seeing it. And so I give chances for them to find the routes and clues, and if they still are struggling, I will let them roll to push them in the correct direction. I don't have a player walk into a puzzle, then tell them the answer to the puzzle, but I recognize that it is more fair to them to give them recourse to find the path forward, when they can't figure it out.Yeah, we do backtrack sometimes. Because yeah, their character would have been smart enough to do something. I once had a DM take us stating to a Sorcerer-King that we would "leave immediately" and have us walk over a week into the desert before informing us we were dying of dehydration, because in a DESERT none of our characters thought to pack supplies for a MONTH LONG JOURNEY because we said we would "leave immediately". And every single person at that table protested the ruling, because it was frickin obvious that we would have gotten supplies. No one leaves on a month long trip across the desert with three days worth of food and water. Now don't take this to an unreasonable extreme. We don't retcon everything. But there have been plenty of times where a player spoke up and said "but wouldn't my character have known that/planed for that" and they have been correct. As a GM, I don't always remember every little detail of the characters, and it is not fair of me to penalize a player because of it. To give an example, let us say that there was a fancy dinner and the players go to drink wine from a goblet, and I have them rolling con because the wine was poisoned. One of my players might speak up and claim "Wait, I have that ring that glows green near poison, wouldn't I have noticed that?" In the NS approach.. yeah, they would. Mea Culpa, they notice it before people drink, what do they want to do. But, my impression I've gotten from OS advocates is that their responses would include 1) "You never said you were wearing that ring, so you aren't wearing it." 2) "You never said that you were looking at that ring before drinking, so you won't notice it before drinking." or 3) "Well, this poison was enchanted to be hidden from your ring/someone stole your ring and you have a fake not the real ring" or basically anything else to avoid it being the DM's fault for forgetting to mention it. But this sort of thing rarely happens. It isn't normal play. It is the edge cases.I don't think I am. I think this has been consistent this entire discussion.Because it is disruptive. It makes everything harder on me as a GM, and makes everything less fun for the players.Players aren't ignorant, especially when you are intentionally misleading them, hiding information, ect which you have repeatedly claimed is the point of OS play. You have literally stated that things can happen for no reason that the players know, so how are they supposed to know about them?</blockquote>

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