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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5403280" data-attributes="member: 4937">I agree to a large extent, and so much of the time when you read about player horror stories its because the DM has inadvertantly or deliberately taken to the Nitro Miller school of DMing - don't provide sufficient information about the game world to the player's to allow them to make informed choices because you think the game plays better when you spring suprises on the players.This is one of the reasons I took care to talk to the player after the event.  From that discussion, I don't think that the fundamental problem was anything you mention here.  The fundamental problem was not that the player didn't understand that stealing horses was felonious behavior, but rather that the player didn't understand that the consequences of his action could extend beyond the current scene that he was in.  The idea that - when playing a game - that the in game actors would have 'memories' and take actions when they weren't 'on stage' with his character, and that they would utilize resources, and indeed that the consequences of actions in one scene could carry over into another scene wasn't something that he had really grasped.   The player was reasoning, in essense, "At the end of the scene, the NPC and his horse will essentially disappear unless I take the horse with me.  This character is no physical threat to me, so my logical course of action at this time is to try to take his stuff before he goes away and I lose access to them."  The player is a first time PnP gamer, with extensive video game experience.  Problems of this sort have cropped up repeatedly.  He's repeatedly engaged in actions that seem utterly irrational to me, but which become understandable if you start to view them with cRPG logic.   For example, he has a tendency to see any scene color as providing a 'minigame' that he can play, with the expectation that whatever said mini-game is will have a better than 50% chance of success and will be profitable to him.  Of course, this is a problem because I'm often not offering a 'minigame' here at all, but for me what is merely local color.   He's extremely good at spotting 'Chekov's Gun', which in some cases means he sees my plots before I plan on having them revealed, but means that he also spots 2 or 3 plots for every one I intend because he's used to a world where adding features to it is expensive and time consuming labor and so you don't add alot of things that aren't absolutely essential to the story and intended to be used at some point.  I have to be really careful about my throwaway lines because they have a tendency to become red herrings at an alarming rate.  He's learning, but its mostly by the school of putting your hand in the fire and finding out its hot.  I just hope I don't kill his creativity along the way.</blockquote>

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