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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9641820" data-attributes="member: 42582">Your post took me back to these two Vincent Baker blogs:[URL unfurl="true"]http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/502[/URL][URL unfurl="true"]http://www.lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/432[/URL]In the second one, Baker says the following:give the moment of judgment to a player who's strongly invested in getting it right, not in one character or another coming out on top. Player 1 wants the game to have a reliable-but-interesting internal consistency, but STRONGLY wants Bobnar to have the high-ground advantage. Player 2 wants the game to have a reliable-but-interesting internal consistency, but STRONGLY wants Bobnar to NOT have the high-ground advantage. Player 3 STRONGLY wants the game to have a reliable-but-interesting internal consistency, and doesn't care a bit whether Bobnar has the high-ground advantage. Which player should get to judge Bobnar's position? (Hint: Player 3 should.) . . . for some groups, the GM solution works great. I strongly hold that it's because those groups carefully arrange their responsibilities and self-interests, and coordinate mechanical benefits with non-mechanical (but nevertheless entirely real) costs and risks - techniques, I'm talking about, that are available to game designers - not because those groups are magic.In the actual play where [USER=6785785]@hawkeyefan[/USER]'s use of Rustic Hospitality was hosed by the GM, the GM was not like Player 3. Rather, the GM had a scene he wanted to frame - and so was an instance of Player 2, and then used his power as GM to hose the power.From a game design perspective, this can be linked to certain features of D&D 5e: it tends to rely heavily on the GM introducing prepped situations/encounters in order for game to progress interestingly - or, to put it another way, it doesn't foreground alternative reliable means of achieving interesting situations and interesting play. (Not to say that 5e D&D must be like this. I'm identifying a tendency, not a cast-iron necessity.)The previous paragraph describes the third of [USER=6785785]@hawkeyefan[/USER]'s possibilities in post 2701:The second of those possibilities is also a departure from the Player 3 position, and is another tendency in some mainstream D&D play: the GM has an interest in maintaining control in general - an interest that may be to a degree self-proclaimed, but that is also, to some extent, encouraged by the game rulebooks - and hence declines to allow the player to exercise control by deploying their ability.Furthermore, to me, it certainly seems pointless to include unreliable currency in the game if a GM has already prejudged - as [USER=6795602]@FrogReaver[/USER] appears to have - that the conditions that enliven it are typically never available. I mean, it would be pretty odd to interpret a typical FRPG "higher ground" rule to require being hundreds of feet above the battle field - as opposed to, say on a table, or a tree stump, or fighting downwards on a slope, as per Baker's example which clearly contemplate melee combat.So likewise, deciding in advance that a D&D PC being pursued ipso facto means they are a danger to the common folk, and hence that hiding them is ipso facto a risk to life, seems to make inclusion of the ability equally pointless.It seems to me that, if Rustic Hospitality is an agreed component of a PC's build, the central moment of judgement is whether or not there are any common folk about (eg does the lizardfolk village, or the underground Drow city, count?). Once that has been established, the default surely is that the ability does what it says on the tin, unless and until the player declares an action that generates the risks and dangers the ability talks about.Maybe trying to hide from Asmodeus, or a powerful dragon, also pushes things too far in terms of risk or danger. But given the way the ability is described, and the obvious trope that it draws on ("Folk Hero"), the evil vizier or sheriff's soldiers and spies clearly can't be ruled out from the start.</blockquote>

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