NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9701992" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't see what problem that solves.  It just creates new problems.  Never ever approach a question of what should happen here from the standpoint of the ruling being applied to NPCs.  Always the question is what results if we apply this ruling to PCs.  Is it fair to just tell the player, "Turn in your character sheet.  I don't need to roll for this.  Bo has been shot in your head from behind, and your character is dead."  Fiat is not a solution in the general case in part because people are terrible and self-awareness and being unbiased.  Fiat always strays toward, "What do I want the story to be now?" and invariably changes the game from, "What does my character do in this fictional situation?" to "What do I need to do to appease or wheedle or trick the GM?"  The utility of fiat in a game is really small in my opinion, and typically what its really doing is exposing how the rules weren't really thought out that well particularly in an edge case.   In D&Ds case the typical situation where people want to apply fiat are cases where the situation seems to demand fortune be moved form its normal place in the resolution cycle because we aren't dicing for the outcome because we have described the fiction in a way that seems to make the outcome certain.  "You fell from a 200' cliff, you should be dead" is an example of that that has plagued D&D from the start.</blockquote>

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