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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6336437" data-attributes="member: 4937">I agree with Umbran's response, but wish to add that I think this argument only really exists in the vague hypothetical space of generalities.  Without knowing the goal and without knowing the setting, we basically have no basis for judging the validity of either the DM or the player's position except or own biases.  We aren't mustering facts or making judgments here.   All we are doing because its all we are capable of doing is displaying our own prejudices.  And the only way to attack the other person's position is through argument ad absurdum because the only available attack is to provide an exception that demonstrates the falseness of the absolute rule.Really, because the original proposition is a nebulous generality, I think our only available response that isn't a gross exaggeration are hedged generalities with no concrete guidance.   All we can reasonably answer is "Maybe, these are the sorts of things you have to weight and consider.", and I think probably almost everyone actually is saying, "Maybe, here is something you should weigh into your calculations", but to the extent anyone's maybe sounds a little like "Yes" or "No", out come the arguments ad absurdum.  An example of an actual impossibility in my world would be a player with the goal of preventing something of consequence that happened in the past from occurring.  This is because time travel does not exist in any setting I run where it's not actually a trope of the setting.  I simply refuse to deal with problems of non-causality because it's too much of a headache, and find it absolutely reasonable of me to set that limit.  A player with this goal would find it absolutely impossible.  Not even the gods of my Homebrew world could accomplish it.   The best you could probably accomplish would be create a world as if the thing had not occurred, where most people could not remember or did not know the thing had occur.  You could expunge the event and its consequences from history, but you could not actually cause the event to not happen.  Even this goal is realistically beyond the scale of any campaign I'm likely to run however, as it would in general involve much higher level play over a much longer period than any prior campaign I've done.  Now, this 'time travel' example isn't really a good match for the specific case imagined by the OP. because I'd assume 'time travel isn't possible' is common knowledge among the learned of my setting and not feel constrained from telling the player my reasoning.  The OP postulates a case where I really don't want to reveal the problem to the player because in doing so I'd ruin a campaign level secret.   I'm having trouble coming up with a strong example of this from my own game, as there are far more things that the learned would say are impossible where they would be wrong than there are things that are believed to be possible but are actually impossible.  I believe that is actually rather logical, because things are believed to be possible usually because they have been and example exists, whereas things are generally believed impossible because they've been tried and failed.  But of course, any number of examples of failure doesn't prove something is impossible, while a single example of success does.  The only case I've come up with that I'd be firm about is that incarnated embodiments of ideas of chastity cannot be rendered unchaste by any means.  In that sense they are unconquerable by definition of who they are.  Immortal ideas don't change, evolve and grow.  They just are.  In general, these sorts of impossibilities that are actually impossible would relate to things 'the Gods themselves' could not do.   A player contesting things that the Gods cannot contest would generally find actual impossibilities.   There are a far larger set of things that are practical impossibilities, particularly within the constrains of a campaign.   For example, it would be practically impossible to conquer Sartha within a single mortal lifetime, and as such, could never happen within a campaign's lifetime because they rarely deal with more than a year or two of game time.</blockquote>

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