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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9617399" data-attributes="member: 42582">Your use of the word "error" is interesting.Everything you describe here - the issue of scale, the need for the GM to make decisions which then determine whether the Alarm spell does or doesn't protect the PCs as the players wanted it to, the challenges that these things pose for a GM trying to make decision in good faith - fits with my own experience in GMing Rolemaster that I've already referred to upthread. I was not setting out to be a "jerk" - quite the opposite. I was trying to diligently portray the setting, in all its verisimilitudinous glory.But that intention doesn't, in itself, provide me with the tools and information necessary to identify and follow in-fiction causal paths. I just had to invent stuff. I found it hard, and ultimately quite unsatisfying.Whether I would say it led me into error is a further thing. Probably on one occasion I made a scry-teleport-ambush style call for the NPCs that I ought not to have; but the "ought" there is not the "ought" of breaking the rules, or breaking the fiction, but rather producing unsatisfying play that didn't really feel fair to the players. Is that what you have in mind by "error"?The myth can be as "high" as you like. It won't tell you every pathway through a city into a library, and through a library to where a PC is sitting, reading ancient lore while warded by their Waiting Illusion.Fictional position is about a player's/participant's actual position. It depends upon their being some constraining fiction.In the context of the Alarm spell, there is no constraining fiction as to when the assassin arrives, how patiently they wait, whether they attack from near or far, etc. Not in any version of D&D that I'm aware of. This all has to be either decided by the GM - that is, made up - or else the GM makes rolls - which, I as I've said, has at one natural endpoint the camp event roll modified by the Alarm spell.(In a dungeon that is fully mapped and keyed, there may be fictional positioning established. But my RM experience, which is what informed my example in the OP, did not involve dungeons. It involved cities and towns and occasionally wilderness camps.)</blockquote>

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