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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9640328" data-attributes="member: 6690965">This feels like confusion around the word "face" somehow, and drives at that doublethink around play objectives I was talking about earlier. The player wants to make good decisions, constrained by systems that present adversity...if there is a method within that system to lower adversity, it is a good decision to employee it. "Facing cool obstacles" is using mechanics to make problems go away and get the outcomes you want. In a game about steering boats around rocks, the bit where the player decided to be faced with rocks was when they started playing; after that point, they're going to bend all of their resources to not engaging with the rocks. On the one hand, it is obviously a design flaw if they never have to dodge a rock at that point, but on the other hand, it is not at that point the player's job to steer toward the rocks, and it is perfectly reasonable for a player to be upset if the game doesn't offer them a steering wheel.Going back to the initial alarm spells comparison; those don't do the same thing in gameplay. If the nature of a given threat is fixed somehow (setting aside the question of whether a GM can or should do so), the alarm spell will either do nothing, completely counter it or mitigate it in knowable ways. The Aetherial Premonition ability instead skews the percentages on a chance roll for the tamber of event that happens next. Those aren't the same gameplay decision! You can't neatly move the logic you would use to pick one strategy or the other between them, and they don't confer the same kind of agency on what happens next.</blockquote>

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