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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8954994" data-attributes="member: 6790260">The state of play. To make (reasonably) well-informed decisions, you must have a chance to learn the state of play. Call it "the fiction" or "the pieces on the board" etc.; all call out what's going on, people, things, and acts. Some stuff remains hidden for diegetic reasons: as said, characters lie often for their own reasons. That's just people.Yes. What is wise, or unwise? What is useful, or trouble? How much work to make ready is right, vs. wasteful or lacking? Etc. Learning how to play the game, not the spreadsheets (that's just math), not the DM, but the rich space between the two.There is (much, much) more to "learn[ing] how to play the game" than just learning the math--for exactly the same reason that it is demeaning to call a TTRPG a boardgame. You're right, speed, efficiency, etc., these are useful as tools. It is not the tools that matter. It is learning to make wiser choices that matters--and learning when the wise choice and the right choice should differ.Not relevant here. I don't mean to be dismissive, just...that's outside the point I'm making.The question is too small. You have only considered one, narrow, limited branch of wise decision-making. How should we spend resources? How should we spend time? What places are worth going to, when we don't have all the info to make a perfect choice, nor enough time to go everywhere? Which people are worthy of trust vs suspicion? What goods are worth buying, and why? When should we sell what we do not use? Etc., etc., etc. All of these things are part of learning to make wiser decisions--to play the game better, not just the math, nor just the DM. Interceding between the players and the consequences of their choices breaks that link. Even doing so for the best, most principled reasons still means that every single bad result has the massive asterisk: "Unless the DM decided that the actual results weren't right." That asterisk means, ultimately, you are always playing the DM, not the game. You are learning how to shape the DM's response, not learning the connections between your actions and the consequences, because when that intervention is a perfect secret, the player cannot know the difference.Think of it like this:The player sets up tracks, which feed into a very wide tunnel they cannot look inside. Colored trains go on those tracks. When trains of the right color reach the stations on the far side of the tunnel, the player succeeds. When they do not, the player fails. Clearly, the player wants to place tracks in such a way that they have the best chance of getting the trains to the right stations. They cannot know all information, because the tracks inside the tunnels change randomly, but they can try to account for that randomness as part of their choices. As the player learns both the fixed and random parts of the overall system, they will get better at getting trains to the end. They may not ever get 100% success, but they'll accomplish their goals better than they did before. Providing new setups, with more complicated tracks and more difficult unknowns to puzzle through, is part of what makes this "train-game" a fun challenge, and not just a gambling game or weird semi-random puzzle. These new setups are provided by the Trainyard Master, TM.But, now, imagine that the Trainyard Master can insert or modify tracks wherever she likes, during the course of play. She can choose to modify tracks in three places...mostly because those are the only places that exist within the game space: openly, in the parts before the tunnel, secretly in the parts inside the tunnel, or openly, in the parts after the tunnel but before the stations (or, I guess, the stations themselves.) If she changes the parts outside the tunnels, the players can see how those changes affect the trains; the results are still mediated by the TM's choices, but the players can account for that, or at least try to. (I don't expect perfect play from anyone.) Some of the changes may be "as a trainyard master," played through as a person actually altering the tracks, while others may be external to the game, just declaring that the tracks are different now.But if she modifies the tracks inside the tunnel...what can the players do about that? They can't. They literally are not able to see the difference between "this choice is because the TM made it so" and "this choice is because I made it so." It doesn't matter whether the TM only does so under the most dire circumstances, when someone's choices (whether her own or the players') would lead to a derailment or collapse of the rail network or whatever else. The filter is always there. Just because it doesn't change things doesn't mean it's not present in the system, yet the whole point of changing things inside the tunnels (rather than in either open space) is to ensure that the players don't know that the change occurred--to make them think the consequence is the result, solely, of their own choices.Hence, the players cannot actually learn how to make wise choices. They can't even really learn how to make choices the TM likes, because any choices the TM doesn't like (beyond whatever threshold of dislike the TM has chosen) simply aren't allowed to have the consequences they should have had. This cuts both ways: secretly lengthening the life of a boss by nerfing someone's damage or raising the boss's HP (the two are precisely equivalent) means punishing good choices even if those good choices were heavily affected by luck; secretly saving a PC from death, whether by giving them extra HP or nerfing the attacker's damage (again, precisely equivalent) means rewarding poor choices even if those poor choices were heavily affected by luck.The example I like to give for this, which doesn't actually involve fudging any dice but which I consider to be exactly as problematic, is a murder mystery. For whatever reason, the party is investigating a murder. They attended the masquerade ball, and the Prince was killed by someone there. You know, and have put clues out to the effect that, the Countess is the actual murderer. The players have found evidence to this effect, and have started to put together their theory. However, one player is gravely concerned, as he has found some of the false evidence planted by the Countess, which implicates the Baron, whom the PC has been courting. Thinking this theory so much more juicy than the one you originally went with, you now decide that all of the evidence they had been relying on--which they had understood to be true--has actually been false clues the whole time, planted by the Baron to make the Countess appear guilty.There is no difference between this and the fudged roll. Both are taking the actual state of affairs and discarding it for the DM's preference instead. It does not matter that the DM is only doing it for the best of reasons, or for the worst of reasons, or for any reason or no reason at all. All that matters is that the players have understood something to be true, have reasoned based on that thing being true because it actually was, and then the DM secretly (in such a way so as to prevent the players from ever discovering it) made that something untrue and thus the reasoning based upon it faulty with no fault on the players' part. Caprice only intensifies the problem; it does not cause the problem.</blockquote>

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