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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6304808" data-attributes="member: 17106">Again, context matters. The difference from what I can tell, is that my king was being reasonable, whereas your sage was being unreasonable. Kings are generally busy, insulated, and paranoid people with many highly trained and very conservative servants, whereas sages are not. The sage apparently had an objective in-world reason to be talking to the players, whereas the king does not.However, with a valid explanation-"the sage is off in some other kingdom consulting someone more powerful than you about this cosmic event", "the sage has been captured by a doomsday cult and no one knows where he is"-something like that, then maybe it would be different. The underlying reasonableness of the action matters. Sticking to your guns is not wise if you are being nonsensical.Perhaps inappropriately.To go back to the baseball idea, there are times when umpires do make a call that is both completely wrong and determines the outcome of a game. It's not common, but it does happen. However, the existence of Don Dinkenger does not invalidate the notion of umpiring. Some sports officials take it very hard on themselves when they do think they've made a mistake, and indeed the thing to tell them is to go back out and keep doing their job, not dwell on it.I could come up with plenty of examples of games that went off the rules because the players threw the rulebook at the DM (in some cases me) to do something unreasonable, and then it was later discovered that someone had missed the one key line of text that made them wrong. Or simply because there was an error in judgement that becomes apparent in retrospect.***For one simple one, I recall a player gleefully pulling out the Psionics Handbook, declaring that since spells and powers were often equivalent, he should be able to convert spells to powers. I said yes; I'm a nice guy, right? Then he took the Maximize feat and converted Fireball to a power, and decided to start running around torching people at a level. After all, with powers, there's no limitation with regards to spell levels, so you don't need to be level 12 to maximize a fireball right? The character ran rampant for a little while. Moreover, when his known enemies starting stacking up on fire resistance, he cried foul, despite the fact that he was obviously well known for his exploits and they had every reasonable chance to prepare.Of course, in actuality, there is a clause written to stop metapsionic abuse (called the metacap), but the player missed that one (so he said, anyway), and I only caught it much later. And damaging spells don't convert straight to powers for a reason; because of the damage math and cost (though this point is debatable). And of course, when you light up enough people, your enemies are going to start adapting to you, and the PC had plenty of enemies and no plan B if his ludicrous fire damage failed. But here I am worrying about saying yes to the player and being a nice guy, rather than making objective and sensible decisions. The other players are being marginalized, the game is going off the rails. This was the first of several characters from one player that pushed up to and beyond the limits of the rules and were intended to be mechanically subtle, but to break the game. This is a player who needed to hear the word "no".To me, this is far more typical than the DM overreaching.True, but what 3e brings is in this regard is simply increased clarity. Remember the good ol' circumstance bonus (and encouraged liberal use thereof).The DM is still perfectly free to determine that some jumps are easier or harder than others (and of course, is still determining the layout of the area to begin with and thus what the jump distance is). It's just much clearer what's happening because he isn't making things up on the spot, he's using an established framework.It's the difference between improvising off a theme and improvising from nothing.Some people see it that way, I was never one of them. 4e is another story.It is, however, how the game itself was written, which is what's relevant here.</blockquote>

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