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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 9617065" data-attributes="member: 6785785">That doesn't nullify the spell. The spell works exactly the way it says it works. Right the spell works a given way. How does that interact with the rest of the rules? All those ways that it can be bypassed... how do those work? What monsters or NPCs are in the area? How hostile are they? Which of them can detect the Alarm spell? Which can attack at range? Which would do so even against sleeping opponents? How all these things can be learned by the PCs involves the GM making determinations and telling them that information. Which is perfectly fine in general. But at scale... when it's potentially an intricate web of GM decisions that are interacting and informing the players of the world... that just seems to open things up to errors. I would say that the salient difference between the two is that one works exactly as expected without fail and is clear to the players, and the other may or may not work, and the reasons for that may or may not be clear to the players. The part where the GM doesn't actually need to be a jerk to make a mistake, or to do something that isn't ideal. I'm not focusing on trying to prevent bad faith play on the part of the GM... though some of these things may certainly help with that... I'm talking about enabling the GM to actually do his job and do it well. The less room for error, the easier it is for the GM to do well. I don't think it takes bad faith to make a poor decision about play. These are all just ideas. The GM isn't actually modeling anything... he's just thinking about things and supposing. That's abstraction. Because it's all imagination, there's also no actual cause and effect. The GM can start with the bypassing of the alarm spell, and then work his way backwards to find reasonable explanations regarding the intruder's ability to bypass it. Here's the entire quote for reference:So it's a jerk move to contrive a reason to bypass the alarm. But it's okay in situations where the fictional reality logically produced such a result. How is the fictional reality determined? It's contrived. This is the conflict I'm talking about. It must all be contrived. If there is an enemy capable enough to bypass the Alarm, and with motivation to do so, and who also happens to be in the area and be aware of the PCs' presence... then it's acceptable to do so. But all those things are contrived by the GM. The remainder of the paragraph doesn't have much to do with my point. Torchbearer wasn't part of my comment. And again, I'm not really focusing on bad faith GMing. It doesn't take a bad faith GM to make a crappy call. And when you start piling GM calls on top of each other, and then expecting them to interact with another stack of GM calls, and then finally to interact with a player decision to use a game resource whose efficacy relies on all those GM calls... well that's a lot of room for error. Not a lot room to be a jerk. Just a lot of room for error. The idea that the GM can make all these decisions in such a way as to produce effects that don't violate your label of being a jerk seems utterly bonkers to me. It's an impossible task.</blockquote>

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