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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kae'Yoss" data-source="post: 188136" data-attributes="member: 4134">OK, breaking the rules ain't bad in general. If, through a series of coincidences the player would die, and you decide to reroll that last damage roll to rescue him, I won't say you're a bad DM.But if do things like saying "no, your legen lore spell won't work" just because you don't want the player to learn secrets you wanted them to find out the hard way, you do no good job. If the player surprises you by using fly to get to the villain (let's say, a fighter without spellcasting ability) after all (although you didn't want him to reach that one) and you make a heavy storm come up on a sunny, cloudless, calm day, making it impossible for the PC to fly there, you're a lousy GM. If the players take every measure to make their location undetectable to sneak up on a villain they have shadowed for days, and, though he can't possibly know that they come for him, decides to triple the watches just at the moment they go in, you have no concept of rewarding the player's efforts. When you're caught off guard by the players, that can well be because you didn't consider all (or even most) contigencies, and you didn't know what they're capable of. If you ruin the player's plans now with some "higher force" just to save your story is bad DMing!Of course, if you make the villains devious ones, letting them know a lot of things and capable of a lot of things, without giving them godlike (read: DM-bestowed) power, and the players react by being devious themselves, you should reward them. But a DM who regularly breaks the rules in order to make the players weaker, just because he hasn't counted on them doing what they did, this DM will surely punish devious players for "trying to ruin the story"</blockquote>

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