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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Quixote" data-source="post: 8975060" data-attributes="member: 694">Oh… I don't think I can agree with that at all. Let's be clear here: illusionism is fundamentally a force play — it's forcing a GM-desired outcome in spite of a mechanism for choosing between multiple possible outcomes (be that mechanism a player decision, a random generator, a subsystem of the game's rules, or whatever), while pretending to defer to that mechanism for the sake of hiding from the players that the GM is the one making the decision.A GM/referee doesn't even need partially complete knowledge of the immediate fictional surroundings or scenario to simply choose not to do that.(That said, I'm no more interested in an argument over whether we can or cannot DM a game without some small smattering of illusionism than you are in an argument over whether illusionism is a real thing worth criticizing. These seem to be contentions of the same ilk. If a DM strives to avoid consciously employing illusionism, then to me, that is equivalent to the DM never employing illusionism. We can make the perfect the enemy of the good and treat illusionism like an unavoidable unconscious bias; or we can treat illusionism like a tool that a DM chooses to use or not use, and have an interesting, productive discussion about it.)</blockquote>