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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9619613" data-attributes="member: 42582">This claim, asserted as baldly as this, seems wrong.If I toss a coin to see who has to do the washing up, and I lose, that's fair. I took my chances and lost! If we are wondering who is going to wash up, and you just decide that it will be me, that seems pretty different!The use of lotteries, in all sorts of contexts that extend well beyond playing games, is a pretty well-known way of disclaiming decision-making. Losing a lottery is quite different from having someone decide that I will get the short straw.Sure.And sometimes this is purely "mechanical" (not in the game-mechanics sense, but in the sense that there is an algorithm-like procedure that determines a unique outcome). For instance, the player declares "I look through the archway" and the GM consults their notes to see what it is that one will see beyond the archway.Other times it's not, though. The Alarm spell example was chosen by me because it's not (outside of some pretty narrow contexts, like dungeon rooms with single doorways).The play you seem to be describing here is what I have sometimes called "puzzle-solving" play; and have sometimes called "playing to learn what is in the GM's notes". The clearest example of advocacy and advice for this sort of play that I know of is found in classic D&D rules - eg in Moldvay Basic, Moldvay notes (p B4) that eventually the players' map will come to more-or-less duplicate the GM's map.Now I think I can come up with an example of play that nearly everyone would regard as unfair or unreasonable: the GM builds a dungeon (call it D1); there is a trapped treasure that can only be obtained by speaking a magic word; the magic word is found in a second dungeon (D2) that the GM has (fully or partially) built; in the first session, the GM tells the players that their PCs are at the entrance to D1; the players then have their PCs enter D1, and are promptly killed by the trap on the treasure.This is unfair, because although in the fiction, the secret word was knowable - all one has to do is go to D2 and learn it! - in the play, the players had no chance to learn it. The GM framed their PCs into a loss.How close is the secret assassin's guild to the example I've just given? To what degree is it really true that the players could have had their PCs learn about this secret guild? Play time is finite; what the GM makes salient - via exposition and framing - is hugely significant in what choices the players then make.There is a huge range of possibilities here. But for information about the setting to be amenable to being leveraged by the players, there needs to be far more done than simply having the GM write it down in their notes.I don't what resolution system you have in mind here.I don't know what RPG you have in mind here. What you've reminded me of is <a href="https://mightyatom.blogspot.com/2011/05/apocalypse-world-guide-to-hard-moves.html" target="_blank">this, from John Harper</a>:I've seen people struggle with hard moves in the moment. Like, when the dice miss, the MC stares at it like, "Crap! Now I have to invent something! Better make it dangerous and cool! Uh... some ninja... drop out of the ceiling... with poison knives! Grah!" Don't do that. Instead, when it's time for a hard move, look back at the setup move(s) you made. What was threatened? What was about to happen, before the PC took action? Follow through on that. Bring the effects on screen. Bring the consequences to fruition.You seem to be envisaging the sort of bad GMing that Harper criticises, rather than GMing that actually conforms to principles like make a move that follows.</blockquote>

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