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Message: <blockquote data-quote="robertliguori" data-source="post: 4036444" data-attributes="member: 47776">A question for the narrativists in the crowd: How do you communicate and manage expectations of what could happen in-world?Say, for instance, you have one player who is an elf-fanboy.  Say you have another player who is a tactics-fan.  Say that you have a battle situation that you want to resolve in a dramatically interesting mechanism.  The elf-fan has his legion of trained blademasters charge the pike-orcs, trusting in their superior elvish reflexes to get them into stabby-slashy range.  The tactics-fan replies by pointing out that superior elvish reflexes aren't enough to keep elves from getting impaled, especially when they are bunched together in formation, and orders his forces to prepare for the inevitable rout.One player is emotionally invested in the world working one way; the other is emotionally invested in the world working a contrary way.  What happens then?  The optimal case is that play stops for a time while the players work out a compromise; Heaven help you if there have been any lingering questions about what elven reflexes really mean compared to how elves have been shown to fight previously in the world.  At worst, neither player is willing to budge, and you as GM are forced to choose arbitrarily; moreover, the player whose reality you chose against will know that the choice was fundamentally arbitrary.If you have a rules framework detailing both the effects of reach weapons and elven reflexes compared to orcish reflexes, then you just roll the dice.  There exists a pre-generated, detailed agreement between the elf-player and the tactical-player establishing each of their feelings establishing exactly how much priority elven superiority is to be given versus pikes.The rules can be viewed as a contract and declaration of preference between not just the players, but the players and the DM.  Having a set of rules for high-level fighters means more than declaring "My character can do this!"; it's declaring "Because my character is a high-level fighter, he can do this; if he ceases to be a high-level fighter, he cannot do this, and should another character come about that is a similarly-leveled fighter, he will be able to do the same, and I find all of this awesome."And this leads us to the best way to, as a narrativist player, please the simulationists in the crowd; make things <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=":)" /><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=":)" /><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=":)" /><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=":)" />in' metal.  You want a high-level knight to die of a fall from horseback? Fine; only he killed a dozen ogres on top of a cliff, than was struck by lightning on account of being the tallest thing left on the hill, and being blood-soaked from horseshoe-to-sword first.  You want an apprentice wizard to flub a ritual?  His experimentation was with the creation of a cursed spell-completion magic item based on his Summon Monster II spell; the energy expended in creating it left him horribly drained, and there are signs that the efreet might have been influencing him even before the ritual was completed.  That apprentice?  He's the first apprentice in decades to pass the master's accelerated training regimen; he actually is a 4th-level fighter.  (And sometimes cries in his sleep about "The knuckles! The horrible knuckles!".  It's probably best not to ask why.)  If the rules say "This event should be big, dramatic, and momentous." and the players like the rules, then if you want the event to happen, give it flair.</blockquote>

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