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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6235954" data-attributes="member: 17106">No. There might or might not be wizards there, and if the players attempt to discern their presence, they may or may not discover any information, which may or may not be accurate. If and when they attempt their action, they make, at best, an educated guess about what the parameters are and what outcome they think they might get. Then, the DM resolves it, drawing on a body of information about what's going on that is much broader than what the players will ever be aware of.The gulf in assumptions seems to be that you're treating this scenario as a zero-sum game, like chess. All the pieces and their positions are known, and the player's job is to assimilate that information, do some mental math, and output a decision, much like a computer would do. I, on the other hand, assume a world of maybes, in which the players (like their characters) have limited and imperfect knowledge and make decisions the way people do, not computers, using heuristics and guesswork.The other assumption I make is that the rules define the entire world. So if some player has a plan to charm an important NPC, he can't possibly be the first person to have thought of that. Magic has been around for thousands of years (or more). There have been thousands of NPC spellcasters throughout history that were much better than the PCs will ever be. So, if there is a king or similarly important figure, his rulership is contingent on his ability to not be possessed by demons, replaced by doppelgangers, charmed, dominated, or simply coerced. Clearly, if there is a king at all, there are some mechanisms by which he maintains his power and avoids subterfuge. Real kings had armies, castles, spies, and food tasters. Who knows what D&D kings have? Overcoming the social structures of the world would require a player be either incredibly powerful or incredibly clever.The difference is that I think that the player characters are characters, and live in the same world as everyone else, and work the same way.It's not adversarial DMing because the DM's motivation is not to oppose the player. His motivation is to create a world, populate it with characters, and play out a plot of some sort. Depending on the players, he might be doing anything from actively suggesting courses of action and giving them free stuff to countering their actions and hurting their characters/</blockquote>

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