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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jhaelen" data-source="post: 5726883" data-attributes="member: 46713">Well, arbitrary =/= randomly, according to my preferred online dictionary. 'Randomly' implies chance is a factor, 'arbitrary' implies choice without good reason. Note that I'm not a native English speaker, so maybe I'm off here.Deciding beforehand that skill A will work, while skill B will not, no matter what will actually happen in the future session is making an arbitrary decision. To get back to our example:If I decide that it is impossible to find a shorter route than the npc, then that's arbitrary.There's no reason why I couldn't have decided differently. It's impossible because I say so. In a nutshell, yes!It's a world of a difference.If I decide it on the fly, I can take everything into account that just happened in a session. If I decide beforehand, what happens in the session cannot matter. Instead of limiting myself to my own ideas I can take everyone's ideas into account.Do you decide at the beginning of the month what you're going to eat every day of that month? Or do you sometimes decide spontaneously, "Well today, I'd like to have X."Have you ever spontaneously decided in a game session to insert an encounter to shake things up because your player seem to dawdle, wasting time on boring stuff?There's a second difference: I typically don't simply rule that something is going to work or not. I set a DC that is either easy, moderate or hard. If a player makes an awesome roll, I'm inclined to say it works. I'm not using binary decisions, I assign chances.No. It _can_ lead to the same end result but it doesn't have to. _That's_ the difference. I must have missed the pit example - the thread is growing too fast for me to follow every post.I'm talking about fixing details that don't need fixing and things that could be influenced by the pcs and therefore shouldn't be fixed. Things that can be fixed are things that are outside of the pc's influence.E.g. the starting point of my last campaign was that an unknown force had eradicated two nearby villages. It wasn't until much later in the campaign that I actually decided who had done it. And it wasn't even really my decision: It was my players' actions in a particular adventure that decided it: They entered an alliance with a monstrous faction, so that faction's enemies were revealed as the 'evil guys' who were responsible for everything.It's like Schrödinger's kitten: I don't decide if the cat is dead or not until my players decide to open the box!Likewise I never use fixed timelines: What's the point of deciding that after 20 days X will happen? Isn't it preferable to let X happen when it has the best dramatic effect?The Shaman posting that map of Paris was quite revealing for me: I'm taking every bet that this map was no longer accurate the moment it was finished (and that's assuming it ever was accurate in the first place)!Saying 'there is no route' because the map doesn't show one strikes me as ludicrous:Even today, where everyone is using GPS, people can get utterly lost, drive into rivers and generally find it impossible to find the shortest (let alone fastest) route from A to B. Why is that? It's because maps aren't reliable and become obsolete after a (relatively) short time.But as I said in my last post: I'm not expecting to convince you of anything. I'm not even saying my approach is better than any other. I just found that it's the approach that works best for me and my players at this point in time.</blockquote>

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