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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Campbell" data-source="post: 7087557" data-attributes="member: 16586">It severely cuts against my interests.It has severe impacts on skilled play of fictional positioning in order to meaningfully effect change in the game world. If I cannot trust finely honed and well developed skills at playing the fiction to have a significant impact on how things turn out than I cannot meaningfully play the game on a strategic level. If I cannot trust the GM to provide real information I can use to reward my efforts to interrogate the fiction than the entire enterprise becomes suspect. If I cannot rely upon the fiction I feel forced to rely upon the mechanisms of the game. When those mechanisms are also not reliable than I must resort to playing the GM. I don't want to play against the GM. It leads to a social environment at the table I emphatically do not care for.I should note that I feel the same way about victory that comes out of nowhere as I do about defeat that comes out of nowhere. Nothing takes the winds out of my sails more than unearned success or winning because someone was taking it easy on me. I want my decisions and those of my fellow players to be the most significant factor in determining outcomes.It severely undercuts my ability to effectively advocate for my character. While related to the above, this is slightly different. In order to play my character as hard as I want to I need to be able to reason about the situations they find themselves in an authentic way. That means reasoning about the fictional world, their place within it, relationships, their intuitions, their knowledge base, and innumerable other details I can not have direct access to.It has a severe impact on the fantasy of being there in the moment and cuts across my understanding of the world we live in. Sure, we miss things all the time. Usually we should have seen things coming long before they actually reared their heads. There are also a wealth of resources out there for understanding the world in which we live. If something eludes us we can generally learn more about it. People are basically simple animals driven by basically desires, belief systems, and emotions. It's the complex relationships that make things interesting.  It results in severely unsatisfying fiction. Strong narratives hang together and feel meaningfully organic, not contrived.  As an audience member when I am hit with a big reveal that was not effectively foreshadowed it feels like a narrative kidney punch. This is not a pleasant experience for me. I have thrown remotes, tossed books across the room, and walked out of movie theaters when writers pull these cheap tricks for shock value. The most effective reveals are things we should have seen coming. I can watch a movie like Fight Club that has a dramatic reveal again and again, enjoying it on new levels because it hangs together organically rather than relying on contrivance.</blockquote>

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