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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doug McCrae" data-source="post: 5287337" data-attributes="member: 21169">Glad to hear it!To expand a bit, this is a problem I've been aware of for a while. About ten years ago a GM I knew was complaining about exactly what you describe, the PCs withdrawing, never wanting to interact with the world, turtling. Several people, including myself, told him it was because whenever the PCs touched anything, it bit their hands off. So they stopped touching things.Consequences for PC actions are regarded, rightly, as a good thing. It's more verisimilitudinous and it's fun for the players to see the effect of their actions on the world. My one-and-a-half year old nephew loves it when he puts his hand in front of the hose and the water skooshes all over. It's a natural, deep-seated, source of enjoyment for us humans.Problems arise when the GM has a very negative world-view. This is particularly an issue for Brits and certainly was, and is, among several of the GMs I know. Because of this negative world-view the GM's natural response is to make all consequences negative. That's just how their minds work. The PCs can do A, B, C or D but no matter what they choose, something horrible will happen. It will be a different horrible thing for each choice, but it will always be bad. It will even be quite plausible. After all, something bad *can* always happen. It's always a possibility.Eventually the players learn to do nothing. Unfolding events will still be uniformly bad ofc, but at least they can't be blamed for them.</blockquote>

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