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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8958180" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Except they aren't. They are expecting to just do it, without anything else. That's literally what was described. They aren't considering anything else.I'm not saying they have to. I'm saying that doing so out of the blue bothers me. A lot. A character needs a reason for doing what they do unless they're literally insane.Why not? That's exactly how it was described. No mention of refusal to sit at the table, reluctance, nothing, until the saving throw. The OP even describes it as, "Hospitality is big in the culture of this region, and though it's a bit odd that this dude and his servants are in this buried city, it's the first friendly face we've seen in a while." Odd, not instantly suspicious.No. Odd. Not sketchy. That's a big part of my problem here.Because, unless there is an extremely good reason otherwise, characters' pure roleplay actions should occur for reasons those characters can at least somewhat describe. Because the story being told matters at least as much as the bare rules.Why do we play Dungeons and Dragons and not Statistics & Spreadsheets? Because the fiction is absolutely vital to the experience. Flaunting that, turning it into an irrelevancy that we just crumple up and discard because it might cause a mathematical inconvenience, is hypocritical; the only reason the players care about taking the action is to protect the safety of the fictional character attached to the data.So you are perfectly content with characters who perform insane, disjointed actions and neber justify or explain anything they do with any connection to the world? Why do you play TTRPGs then, and not...literally anything else that doesn't expect such a connection to the state of the fictional world?I'm saying that in this context there isn't one, and the players were clearly lifting no finger to try to provide one. Otherwise, I'm sure [USER=97077]@iserith[/USER] would have said so. I welcome their correction if I am mistaken.Why does it matter that an NPC not prepare perfectly-tailored plans to defeat every secret thing the players cooperate to do? Why does it matter that agents in the world act with some approximation of rationality and sense (unless they are, in fact, actually irrational and/or senseless)? Why does it matter that cause comes first and effect comes after?Because without these things, the fictional world is senseless, cannot be reasoned about. Can it even be said to have meaning at that point? And if it's meaningless, why are we playing D&D and not Statistics & Spreadsheets?Could. Wasn't. That is the whole point. There was no other reason, and even the reason you mention is weak as hell because Iserith's description makes zero mention of such concerns until after the saving throw. Only then is it suddenly sooooo concerning that this guy is in a weird place offering food. That makes no sense! Why would their paranoia suddenly flare to life when they had observed...nothing at all?Now, as I said, I would totally support players wanting to see if they could detect that something occurred, or if they (passively) noticed anything odd about the food or their host/the servants, which sounds like some kind of Perception-type roll (though I could see maybe Medicine/Healing or, in a pinch, Nature to identify Ser Fruit-Eater's symptoms.) If someone in the party has a notable paranoid streak, I might even let them leverage that! There are a ton of ways to do the work that justifies the refusal described here (so long as the players are willing to accept the potential ramifications of that choice: rudeness to a host can be a serious insult and could cause problems the party might rather avoid more than the poison!) The players clearly aren't interested in showing that work. They just want the results without the work. I oppose this.</blockquote>

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