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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7083888" data-attributes="member: 42582">The advisor can perform whatever actions he wants. But - as a question of framing or adjudication - they won't have any effect.The inability of those actions to affect the attitude of the Baron (towards both advisor and PCs) has been established by the players' victory in the skill challenge. That's what follows from winning the challenge. It establishes finality.To me, that's llike the following scenario:* The group is playing classic dungeon-crawling D&D. * The players come up with a plan to defeat the trolls in room 71 and steal their treasure. Their plan is based on good intelligence about the vulnerability of trolls to fire. Their knowledge of the treasure is the result of casting Contact Other Planes and the various rolls coming up successfully. * The PCs implement said plan, and defeat the trolls. They take the gold pieces out of the dungeon. * For a lark (or perhaps vindictively?), the GM decides, retrospectively, that the gold was really an extended-duration Fool's Gold effect, and overnight all the PCs hard-won gp turn into iron. Which robs them of both treasure and XP.What's wrong with that? It's the GM cheating the players out of their victory by abusing his/her supposed authority over the content of the shared fiction.Likewise in my case.There's no such thing. All the advisor's efforts are wrapped up in the skill challenge that was resolved. The players won, and that settles those elements of the fiction.Why have finality to anything? Why not let every combat go on for ever? Have every monster spring back to life because the gods will it so?Or to look at it another way: you're asking, why pin the entire resolution on X? Well, it has to be pinned on something? So why not X? I mean, that's how the game works.The episode took over an hour of play at the table. It was fun; it was done. The matter was resolved. The players won. They defeated their nemesis socially; in the next session, they went on to defeat him in combat. In subsequent sessions they defeated his army.There's nothing wrong with the players winning. I can come up with plenty of new material to challenge them, without rewriting the outcomes of action resolution to rob them of their victories.Likewise if the players lose, they lose. No retries. The game moves on. We don't need to keep replaying the same scene.</blockquote>

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