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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9622954" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm not sure what you mean by "inference of a rod" - do you mean that, in the campaign timeline, which is ahead of the events you describe in your post, the PC doesn't have the rod? Or at least hasn't been revealed to have the rod? So that having the NPC instant summons it away wouldn't cause contradictions with established events of the fiction?In any event, even with that uncertainty on my part I can say that what you are describing seems exactly like the sort of thing I have in mind. Setting aside the timeline aspect, this sort of thing would come up all the time in my RM play: the players would have their PCs go somewhere, and do or take something, and it would make sense that a NPC would have wards or protections or the like, but I have no prep telling me what those might be, and so stuff has to be made up on the spot, and sometimes retrospectively.I would try and be fair and reasonable - preserving verisimilitude (eg powerful mages will have magical wards) while not just arbitrarily hosing the players (and their PCs) - but I found it hard. And sometimes pretty arbitrary. And sometimes it would frustrate the players, although they could generally see why I was doing what I was doing (ie that it made sense in the fiction). And at the time we didn't really have any more robust techniques available to us.The systems I play now tend not to raise these issues in the same way, because of the ways that they call for rolls to be made and the ways failures on those rolls are narrated. I can't think of an especially high magic example off the top of my head; but in my Torchbearer game, one of the PCs had an Elfstone which was very valuable to her (she was cursed by the magic gem, which caused her to be obsessed with it). When a roll was failed while trying to purchase an item in a village, I narrated the failure thus: when the PC got back home (to her mother's house in the village), she noticed that the Elfstone was missing! Someone had stolen it from her.Instead of having to reason about the skills of the thief, and their opportunities to pick the PC's pocket, and so on - I followed the pacing dictates of the game, and narrated the unhappy thing when the game opened up that possibility for me.</blockquote>

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