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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9703778" data-attributes="member: 18">Yeah, I definitely don't like it, personally.I've seen DMs do that - like, one of my players who sometimes DMs has done that more than once in a campaign, as attempt to shut down discussion of something. I.e. say OOC that they can trust the NPC organisation or that this object is not, in fact, evil magic. In fact he's done it a fair number of times - he doesn't have my natural enjoyment of watching the players bicker I guess!But to me it points to a bigger problem. You're "telling not showing" in the absolutely very worst way possible, and completely breaking any kind of verisimilitude or immersion. Now, not every campaign has that verisimilitude. Not every player group cares about immersion. So it's not always an issue.I think for minor things, which weren't intended to be major points of contention, but the players are obsessing over because players are like that, it can be fair enough - you're not really doing any damage there, you're just moving things along. I myself had to do it once with a minor and irrelevant NPC shopkeeper the players had become psychotically obsessed with in the middle of a D&D campaign. Like, "Guys, I swear to god, this NPC does not have bodies buried in his basement, he is not, in fact, any kind of serial killer or evil wizard or dark cultist, and I do not understand why you think he is beyond the fact that he has a name that you think is 'creepy' and has a goatee". (This was after they broke in, searched his basement, searched his rooms, trailed him extensively, found nothing, and basically decided he was "too clean" (secret police-ass thinking guys!). Also I didn't give him the goatee, that campaign just said he had one. I have never used a non-evil NPC with a goatee since in a fantasy game, because it's apparently it's deeply triggering to some players. I blame Star Trek!)But I've seen it done at the near-apex/climax of a campaign, like seems to the case here, and that just absolutely took the wind out of the sails of the campaign. Because it essentially made a pivotal decision pure metagame rather than about what the characters actually believed, and also made that decision very easy. And it didn't have to be that way. The organisation (megacorp in soviet's example) could have been slowly built up as actually trustworthy and reliable, at least in a specific, relevant way. The PCs could have been given some kind of in-setting guarantee of their good intentions.</blockquote>

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