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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 8074097" data-attributes="member: 177">Hm.  I have a good example that I played in, rather than run.The game was Mage: The Ascension.  Through bad luck when using a really large magical working, much of the party was tossed into a Paradox Realm, basically a little pocket universe.  The pocket universe looked and acted almost entirely like the real world - determining the difference was not easy.The GM had more than one way for us to escape back to the real world - the basic one was for us to realize on our own, through the buildup of subtle cues, that we weren't in the real world, and it would dissolve away.  Classic trope.Unfortunately, a member of the party broke into the bubble from the outside, and told us what happened.  He didn't know when he did this, but it negated the "easy" way out.  Now, the GM said that we had to enact another major magical working to forcefully destroy the bubble.  And the only way to gather the magical energy for this was to actively sacrifice many of the inhabitants of the bubble and use them as energy.The GM expected that we would say, "Yeah, well, they aren't real, so... distasteful, but okay."  Instead, every one of us just said, "No.  We are not killing these people."  There was no argument among us, we each came to that conclusion on our own.And, now, the GM was stuck.  He had created a couple fixed paths out of the situation - we had accidentally closed one, and had refused the other.  We came up with ... 11 other things we could do that, by the general metaphysics as we understood them, would allow us to escape.  None of them fit the limits the GM had set, so he rejected them.And we said, "Okay, GM, then maybe we need to consider new characters, because these characters would prefer to live a quiet life in a bubble universe than become mass murderers.  No, we are actually serious.  We're willing to make new characters.  Should we do that next session?"It is a basic question for a GM as to what to do next in this situation - do you hold the players to your stated rules, and have them create new characters due to their choices, or do you relent and let a thing you didn't intend work to preserve the current continuity?</blockquote>

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