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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 7757635" data-attributes="member: 6775031">As a general rule, any coincidence that happens in the backstory of the campaign is perfectly fine. Even if it's a million-to-one chance, if it already happened, then that's the premise which everyone has agreed to follow from. The prior probability of anything that's already happened is 100%.As a player, I'm constantly on the lookout for GMs trying to cheat. (Not because I've had any bad experience, personally, but because these forums are full of so many horror stories about terrible GMs who never understood what they were doing wrong.) As such, whenever something unlikely happens during the game, I have to ask myself whether it was actually a coincidence or whether the GM was cheating to contrive it.If the party shows up at a tavern which the king is patronizing incognito, along with a doppleganger trying to assassinate and replace him, then that's an unlikely coincidence. The chance of such a thing naturally occurring based on the events of the world is very, very low. To contrast, the chance of such a thing occurring if the GM is cheating in order to contrive interesting events around the players is not-as-low. Therefore, the only rational belief on my part is that the GM is cheating, and I can be confident in that belief to an extent based on the prior probability that this would be a bad GM multiplied by the difference in probabilities of the explanations for that observation.In essence, contriving coincidences around the party is a form of meta-gaming. It is the GM role-playing the setting inauthentically, by abusing their out-of-game knowledge that the players are playing a game. That being said, contrived coincidence can be perfectly acceptable, if the circumstances would otherwise warrant meta-gaming. For example, if a new player is joining the game, then it's acceptable for the party to find them under such circumstances that would allow them to trust each other and work together. Even if it's moderately improbable, the alternative - making a player sit out of the game for hours at a time - would be worse. As always, though, the GM should avoid going overboard by making the events more improbable than they need to be.</blockquote>

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