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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8953076" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Nothing you are using here is learning the game. It is learning the very specific details of particular monsters or traps.Learning the game means learning to manage risk, to identify effective vs ineffective combinations, to create useful plans, and to acquire the information you need in order to do these things. That's the game. You are conflating learning what any given specific opponent or obstacle is or does with learning how the game itself (the framework within which the opponent/obstacle appears) works. It would be like saying that, because learning how Lionel Messi plays fútbol tells you nothing about how any other player plays the sport, you cannot learn how to play football. Of course you can! There are so many skills and intuitions you can develop through practice and reflection that will help make you a better player of that sport (or any sport!), and you acquire those skills and intuitions by both study and actual play. The former lets you learn from the actions of others and develop your reasoning, the latter lets you test your choices (and thus actually correct for misunderstandings or false beliefs) and develop your intuitions.Just because you can't generalize "knowing" that the stereotypical D&D troll has a weakness to fire, or that certain kinds of traps can be found using 10' poles, does NOT mean that you cannot learn to play D&D better overall by...y'know, playing it.Surely you expect your players to make smarter, more effective, more productive decisions over time as they gain experience with play? Because if you do—if you expect that a total fresh-faced newbie will make more, and more severely, unwise choices than a seasoned veteran—then you expect your players to learn to play. I find it more than a little unbelievable that your intent is to ensure that your players are always equally likely to make a bad choice after ten years of play as they were after ten minutes!That's...you just repeated what was said. I still don't see the connection. Those are two totally separate ideas. The former is purely a matter of DM choices, without any reference to player awareness or even participation; it could happen for "solitaire" play (just the DM running something for herself.) The latter is specifically about the players; it cannot, even in principle, be about something other than players who are distinct from the DM. It couldn't apply to a "solitaire" game.So...you've repeated the two ideas. What connects them? I still don't see it. Maybe a better way of saying this is, the former is, "this is a method that forestalls any need for fudging," without saying anything about why one should do it. The latter is, "this is a reason why you should not fudge." The former is a method, process, or action; the latter is a reason, explanation, or purpose. The two are wholly distinct things. There are other reasons one might choose not to which have nothing strictly to do with what I described (like, as others have said, having a policy against intentionally making your players believe something that is false about what kind of game they're playing, as opposed to characters within the world trying to deceive the PCs for their own benefit: non-diegetic vs. diegetic deception.) And there are other methods to avoid fudging, such as building in safeguards you can reference, openly stating to your players that you are going to ignore a roll, or using systems which don't employ the same kinds of randomness/unexpected result generation (perhaps cards, those are a popular alternative for stat generation, for example.)How are you getting this ought (you ought not deceive your players about how the game itself actually works) from this is (this method is a way to avoid fudging)?</blockquote>

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