NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7942523" data-attributes="member: 29398">I think we're closer to agreement here than it might appear at first glance.I'm not saying there should never be implausible occurrences.  I'm more saying that it's an easy trap to fall into to have them occur far too often.True, meddling deities and all that. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />As in, introduced during play?  Because the way I see it, rolling up those backgrounds introduces the elements thus created into the fiction right then, i.e. it locks them in.Pretty much, yes.Very early on in a character's career, it often can't.  But once a character has established patterns in how and what it does, it's usually pretty easy to tell when something's fishy.  Back in 1e days this came under playing out of alignment, and had some rather nasty consequences.Agreed, and having that inconsistency show up during play is great.Most of the time, because I know my players, I can tell when someone's having their character do something with out-of-game motivations as opposed to just because the character (or player) is having an off day or is in a different frame of mind than usual.Rarely does it ever get to the point of direct questioning.  More often it's a raised eyebrow and, depending on the decision, a mental note of any possible alignment ramifications down the road.Bob and Mary's characters have always been good buddies in the game.  Then one session they suddenly haul off and try to kill each other; maybe one succeeds.  My reaction as DM is going to be a bit different if I happen to know Bob and Mary had a big fight during the week than it would be if I knew they were still good friends in real life and merely wanted to do something silly in the game just for kicks.It's still out of character either way, but I'm going to be much more torqued off in the first instance than the second.I'm using "implausible" as a synonym for "unlikely to the point of near-but-not-zero chance".</blockquote>

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