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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 7598328" data-attributes="member: 6801228">Dagnabbit. I spent hours going through and reading posts and responding. Then my Twitch account got hacked and dealing with that I copied over everything I had typed. Argh. Attempt #2Okay, he was talking about exactly what I thought he was talking about so I'm sticking by my points. Big difference here is that the characters are also the audience. If the characters are aware of the bomb, then there are only two options remaining. Either the scene turns to absurd comedy or there must be other forces keeping them at the table. Same thing with the players, if they know something, they must address it, which changes the nature of the drama. A lot of the conversation later on focuses on this, and it made me curious about another point I will be adressing further down. Look for your name. You know, for certain character that type of analysis is perfectly fine. Heck, I do it as a player myself. But not everyone wants to play that way. Sometimes players want to be caught off guard instead of making a cost-beenfit analysis for every roll of the dice. How is "guessing" different from a hypothesis? They are looking at the information they have and making a decison based off of that, judging what they think the consequences may be. It is possible we have a difference of terminology at work here as well, I'll be mentioning your name when we get to that section. I hate having to retype everything because of that copy error, but it might end up working in my favor here."Coddling" was never my word choice, so you'll have to bring that up with the poster who said it. I'm also not sure why you think I am worried about "ceding an advantage". I create the entire world and have all the resources in that world to work with, to the point of bending the very laws of the universe if it suits me. I have all the advantages I could ever need. This is about style. My players want to be the characters in the game, and that means they are limited by what those characters could see or understand. For the most part, I do not agree with "needing a meaningful consequence of failure" before asking for a die roll. And here [MENTION=6779196]Charlaquin[/MENTION] and [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] is where I want to discuss something about our word choice. See, I don't see the point in telling my players that breaking down a door with an axe will make a lot of noise. To me, that is unnecessary because it is obvious. As obvious as telling a player that if they attempt to jump over a ravine, they might fall into said ravine. This is obvious, this is knowing how the world works. We assume standards such as gravity and sound work the same as always, until we are given reason to suspect otherwise. To me, this is just telling the players obvious things, the only use of which is if you think they have forgotten this or forgotten they were hoping to remain quite and you are trying to signal to them that they are about to make a mistake. To me, this is not telling them the consequences of their actions, because they are not learning anything new about the scenario. They know no more before you spoke than they did after. So, to me, if you say you tell the player the consequences of their actions, so they can make a more informed decision and not get caught off-guard by knowledge they didn't have (ala Hitchcock) then that means to me that when they are about to jump over the pit you tell them that if they fail they will fall on the hidden spikes coated with poison in the bottom of the pit. If you are just telling them if they fail they will fall in the pit... then you are just telling them what should be obvious from the fact that they are jumping over a pit and might not succeed. After all, knowing there are spikes and poison below is the same as knowing there is a bomb under the table, and when the players go to roll, they know exactly what the stakes are. But to me, that is revealing far more about the scenario than they have any reasonable way of knowing, without them having tested things out. And. I want to throw this out there as well. Just because I don't tell my players the consequences for grabbing the magical orb, does not mean they cannot decide to investigate it and try and figure that information out. If my players want to be cautious and look for answers, to investigate and try and piece together clues about their surroundings, then they are more than welcome to. I won't hide things as impossible to know (unless they truly are impossible) if my players want to take the time and effort to investigate. However, I'm not going to force that mind set on them and I'm not going to assume they would be happier analysising everything. If they do not ask questions and just charge forward, then I assume their character is not asking questions and is just charging forward.</blockquote>

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