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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5686482" data-attributes="member: 54877">In our games for some time now, it has been the general rule that I as the DM handle how the game rules work with the reality of the setting, but we as a group set the genre expectations. If something arises that will cause conflict with the two, I put it to a debate. So if someone wants to "invent gunpowder," I'll get feedback on whether we want gunpowder in our genre expectations. Usually, the players will develop a consensus one way or the other, and that's that. If there is contention, we'll eventually put it to a vote. But I make it very clear what will be the results on the reality. So if we accept gunpowder, the players will have a monopoly for a short period of time. Then they'll have people stealing it and also ticked at them for having it. If this is relatively early in a long campaign, this might mean, for example, that they spend the later part of the campaign worried about someone exploding a barrel of gunpowder under their castle. It means that firearms might take on added importance, compared to the weapons and magic that they have worked so hard to perfect skill with. On the plus side, they'll get to shoot things and blow them up. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> If the players are doing something exotic and fun that fits a particular situation, without any idea that they are setting up new rules for magic and how the world works--I'm inclined to let it go.  This is what makes magic mysterious.  If an alchemist blows up a castle with some strange powder, and the characters don't view this as reproducible, fine. The upshot of all this is that the players are a lot more sticklers for genre expectations than I am. They pretty much police this kind of things themselves, to keep it somewhere they want it to be. The only time I have to get involved is when they are going down a path where they don't see what some of the side effects might be.</blockquote>

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