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Message: <blockquote data-quote="prabe" data-source="post: 8010311" data-attributes="member: 7016699">No worries. I suspect we're disagreeing around the edges, not at the core.There is, I think a difference between the DM removing options that lead away from a preferred story and the DM removing options because they don't make sense, whether "they don't make sense" is because of something that has arisen in play or because there's something the DM knows that the players don't. It could even be just the way the DM thinks. For example, I was playing through the early stages of a published WotC adventure, and we came upon what were clearly signs marking the entrance to a Thieves' Guild Hideout; I said out loud at the table that if this were happening in a campaign I were running, those signs would lead to death traps, because what serious Thieves' Guild has fricking signs. The DM told me flat-out that he didn't want to play in a dungeon-crawl if I ever wrote one.This isn't entirely untrue, but it is eliding the possibility that the players may have acted in ways that have had ramifications. If this is well into a campaign, the players may have had more input into the fiction than you seem to be presuming. I'll admit that I was thinking of the possibility that the DM might have established something as a fact in the fiction, which the players might reasonably be expected to remember--and which it's also not unreasonable for the players to be reminded of, if they seem to have forgotten. If the campaign has much focus on world-building, that sort of thing should be consistent, IMO, and that's the kind of thing I'm thinking of. (Also, if the place the PCs are going has been described previously ...)Oh, sure, there needs to be consideration of the game, and the emergent story, and there should be at least one path through a given obstacle (or a willingness to allow paths to work--I don't insist that the DM know beforehand everything that will work). None of that seems as though it has to contradict the thought that there might be things that just won't work. It's maybe not horrible DMing to give PCs a chance to know that if the players don't (like making an Arcana check before casting Hypnotic Suggestion on a bunch of constructs--something I've done for a new player recently).This isn't too far from how I DM--especially the one party that has several PCs who are effectively researchers, and spend lots of time in various libraries. Letting them know (or have a chance to know) stuff that allows for informed (or better-informed) decisions is kinda rewarding them for building and playing their characters that way.</blockquote>

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