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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9611282" data-attributes="member: 42582">I have quoted these two posts together, because I think that the second rebuts the first - in that it shows how/why the assassin who takes extensive measures to defeat the Alarm spell needn't be unfair at all - or at least, not in any straightforward way.I think there are some potential challenges to fairness posed even in your first scenario, though. The GM uses what they know about the hunter to make the call - but does the hunter know exactly when the Alarm spell was cast? If they guess, based on their knowledge of the PCs' travel pattern and the time of sunset and so on, how accurate is their estimate? Do they correctly identify the warded 20' cube? Do they correctly intuit the caster's selection of ringing bell vs the mental ping - because in the former case, they are going to release their own silence effect to negate the ringing?For me, the stuff above is not just theory-crafting. I posted the example in the OP because, a few days ago, I was reflecting on some GMing calls that I had to make decades ago when GMing Rolemaster. There were two PCs capable of casting a RM spell called Waiting Illusion - a triggered illusory effect - and they would often use the spell in a similar fashion to a D&D Alarm, to generate a bell or claxon sound if triggered; as well as the basic function of protecting against intruders, they would also use it eg if they had sneaked into a library, so that it would alert them if the librarian was coming into a nearby area.And I would have to make decisions about whether particular NPCs or whatever would or wouldn't trigger the spell, based on my adjudication of the fiction, and in particular the fiction of the trigger vs the fiction of what the character in question would do. That can be hard - especially because very often there is no what the character would do but at best what the character might do.One technique I would use was to resort to random rolls - say, assigning a percentage chance to a NPC doing this or that, and thereby triggering the spell or not. This is similar to what [USER=7031982]@Bill Zebub[/USER] has said upthread about choosing combat actions, and to what [USER=6785785]@hawkeyefan[/USER] has noted about the aliens in the Alien RPG. One way of looking at TB2e's framework, that Aetherial Premonition feeds into, is that it systematises this approach rather than requiring the GM to make the sort of ad hoc calls and rolls that RM required me to make, back in the day.</blockquote>

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