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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(Psi)SeveredHead" data-source="post: 3144571" data-attributes="member: 1165">I think I missed most of those :/Just like the knight code. I barely made my Will save not to jump on that one in the paladin thread...No, I disagree. Players can proactively use a lot of skills, like Gather Information. In my last two sessions, my PCs proactively gathered information, went looking for contacts, made make-shift mortars, and even tried to negotiate with psychotic terrorists. And then there was the Mexican standoff, inspired acting that forced me to think quick. (My players forced me to solve a problem instead of the other way around!) To some extent the skills would be useless without an interesting campaign setting, but on that note, they still decided how they would solve the problem.I read a sci-fi novel called Altered Carbon, as an example. In that setting, humans have developed the technology to transfer their brains from one body to another. A perfect electronic copy of the brain is stored in a "stack" at the base of the brain. It can be transferred to another "sleeve", as bodies are called. Having said that, most people can only get the transfer done once (there's a risk of madness, and I think it's really expensive).Near the beginning the hero is attacked by a man and a woman in a hotel (an AI-run hotel)... he determines they're the same person, copied (and the original person is still out there). I felt a bit cheated. Later, the hero finds one of the villains, shoots him, decapitates him, and burns the body in such a way it looked like he deliberately burned out the head and stack. But that was wrong. He took the stack to the hotetl AI and had the AI torture the stack. I was under the impression (given earlier) that a stack is a stasised copy of your brain (with the occasional update) that he might read. But of course I was wrong... the author knows the campaign setting way better than I did.It felt like a deus ex machina, even though it wasn't. I felt a bit cheated. There's no way I would have figured that out without help.By this point, unless the players know the setting as well as I do, I basically have to hold their hand and tell them what do to.Reactive skills wouldn't work very differently, depending on the setting, I'll agree with that. I just think it's a lot harder for players to come up with interesting plan when dealing with unfamiliar campaign settings. (Medieval is familiar to everyone, even if they get a lot of details wrong.)</blockquote>

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