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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5749215" data-attributes="member: 2067">This is a good point, too, because a DM's fiat is subject to a sort of "player approval" like this.If you make drinking a potion a full-round action, and it's a judgement call, it'll only take a few sessions before a player tries to get you to change your judgement by inventing something like a healing-potion beer hat. If you make door-shutting a full-round action, and it's a judgement call, it'll only take a few sessions before a player invents some sort of automated door-shutting mechanism. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Judgement calls are subject to the influence of the player and the whims of emotion. If I am feeling bad for Billy because he hasn't rolled well tonight, I might let him drink a potion as a free action. If I'm feeling touchy because Aimee killed my BBEG during his soliloquy, I might make her take a full-round action to do the same thing. The more judgement calls I make, the more likely one of those judgements will result in a player getting frustrated. Aimee might get (legitimately!) annoyed that I punished what to her was a fun idea. Billy might (legitimately!) feel coddled and not challenged when I felt bad for his crappy rolls all night. A lot of nostalgia for the days in which DMs essentially made up games from scratch seems to miss the fact that DMs are pretty human. Even Monte Cook makes bad calls from time to time. A set of rules to rely on (that are nonetheless changable at a whim) can help ameliorate that problem.</blockquote>

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