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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8004693" data-attributes="member: 42582">This goes back to my question: what is the job of the players?Is guessing/inferring what the GM has decided will be the realistic response of the tyrant, or the guards, a meanngful choice? It might be meaningful inference, but if the inference is performed successfully then where is the scope for choice?Another way of thinking about "meaningful choice" is this: do I go along with the tyrant, or do I scornfully throw his offer back in his face? That's a choice about what sort of person I (as my PC) want to be, and what sorts of things I want to do. And if I choose to be the sort of person who scornfully throws the tyrant's offer back in his face, should it follow without further chance for action declaration that my PC is dead?Should the game be a puzzle? A game of following others' leads? A chance to express the personality of one's PC? These are real questions.As for the role of the dice - I think of them as a way of randomising outcomes. Roughly speaking: the players want their PCs to succeed; it's the GM's job to establish opposition or adversity; the dice roll tells us, on any given occasion, which it is. That's pretty much been their role since D&D was invented. I don't understand why you would denigrate the use of dice in the way that you do.Although you refer to the PCs I think you mean the players. The PCs are making guesses only in imagination. The players are actually deciding what moves to make as they play the game.And you seem to be assumng that it is the job of the players to guess, or to infer, what it is the GM has in mind. That's one way of playing the game. I don't quite see why you would describe the resulting choices made as meaningful. Putting the right number in the sudoku box is a choice, but it's a meaningful one only insofar as if I do it wrong I won't solve the puzzle. Is RPGing puzzle-solving?As for the idea that a reaction roll might make the tyrant play competely against personality: does this tyrant never laugh? have no friends? who knows everything about a person? In the real world people surprise us, surprise themselves, change even. In fiction the same is true: Saruman was good but turned to evil; Denethro was good but turned to evil; Boromir was good, and died good, but on the way through suffered a fit of evil madness. Gollum nearly spares Frodo - in another world he might have. In a RPG how to we model these aspects of character?As for the drunk guards, how are the players meant to judge that there are guards, or are not? That they are sober or drunk? That they are loyal or rebellious? I don't see how the guards' drunkenness - were a roll of dice to suggest that that was the case - would be some sort of distinctly aribtrariy or unknowable input into the situation.This thread is the second in recent times where an OP has explained how s/he had guards arrive to tell the PCs what to do, with the result that the PCs fought their way to freedom, or tried to. In both cases posters referred to the players as having instigated violence. In both cases my response is the same: if the GM in a D&D game has armed NPCs tell the PCs what to do, under (express or implicit) threat of violence, it is the GM who has instigated the violence.D&D is a game which puts interpersonal violence front-and-centre of both its action resolution mechanics and its fiction. It takes its genre inspiration from fantasy stories in which the protagonists fight rather than surrender. If the players have their PCs surrender to the demon on the 10th level of the dungeon just because the demon tells them to, would anyone consider that good or sensible? In the OP's scenario, how are the players meant to know they can plot a daring escape? The GM hasn't told them that the guards won't kill them. No mechanic is being used to determine what the guards or the king will do with these prisoners. Many posters in this thread are saying that escape would be unrealistic, and that once the guards turn up the execution should simply be narrated by the GM as the inevitable outcome of the players' choice to oppose the tyrant.How are the players exepcted even to recognise that surrendering is a "meaningful" option?</blockquote>

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