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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 6204660" data-attributes="member: 8461">I agree that it's an absurd presumption to think that the GM shouldn't set limits on what the PCs can do - but I've encountered people who seem to presume just that. Hence why I was speaking out against that when the specter of that presumption was raised here; I've encountered that attitude before, and I wanted to voice my disagreement with it. That's the sum total of what I was speaking to here.You may take it as a given if you wish, but as I said before, I've encountered that degree of player entitlement more than once before. You may think that arguing against such a stance is little more than tilting at windmills, but I've seen that attitude become a real part of some gamers' default assumptions towards how the game should be run (usually along the lines of "the players should tell the GM what they want to play beforehand, and the GM should then design the campaign around that, rather than the GM announcing what he's going to run and telling the players to make characters that conform to that regardless of their wishes").Your confusion is understandable, since you're conflating two separate points I raised.The first point is that the issue of asking what the motivation is for the GM imposing certain limitations to begin with. I feel that's a useless question to ask, because you can't ever know what someone else's motivation is. If you think that the GM is imposing certain limits because it's a reflection of a politically incorrect ideology that they hold, how do you ascertain that? Do you ask them point blank if they're imposing (to use the example raised in this thread) limits on Strength scores for female PCs because they hate women? If so, how do you know that their answer (which we can presume is a negative) is honest, and not an attempt to avoid admitting to something they know you won't find acceptable? In other words, I'm saying that making presumptions about a person's attitudes and beliefs based on what they do or do not allow in their campaign is a foolish thing to do.The second point is the issue of the GM imposing limits, and then breaking them. This is different because it's not a question of the GM's attitudes and beliefs, but of the internal logic and consistency in the game world. If no dwarves can be wizards, for example, and then the GM introduces a dwarven wizard NPC, that's a question of finding out why - in the context of the game world - that's possible. In that case, I'm saying that there is (or should be) enough trust in the GM to showcase how this can be reconciled with the limitations on the game world while still maintaining internal logic and consistency (which tends to be some sort of exception-based design).To summarize, you can't ever truly know someone's motivations, but you can know if their actions remain consistent within the boundaries they set. Does that ease your confusion? Again, you're confusing the two issues. You can ask someone how things work, and you can ask them why did they do this - the difference is that the former question can be answered objectively, whereas the latter cannot be.</blockquote>

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