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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadence" data-source="post: 8690021" data-attributes="member: 6701124">From a gameplay perspective, the things in 5e about asking if you have a particular contact in an area based on your background,  or if you know a certain thing based on your skill, or adjusting to have an item you almost surely would have carried but forgot to write down, sound at least vaguely in the ballpark to the loadout to get an item from a short list.It feels like they recognize that surely the player doesn't know everything in the characters background and can't remember every little detail, but they don't require the player to narrate something out of the linear time structure during play. Consider some different DM responses to a D&D player asking if his character knows any contacts in the bar he just entered (in the city he lives in and has streetwise for but hasn't RP'd much in yet ):(a) The DM says "sure, you know <makes up name> over in the corner from some past work and found him helpful before" and then lets the character go ask questions about the current circumstancesvs.(b) The DM says "sure, you know <makes up name> over in the corner from some past work and found him helpful before" and then asks the player to RP some small talk with them about this shared past you need to make-up on the spot before asking the questionsvs.(c) The DM says "sure, tell me who they are and how you know them" and then letting them ask the questions.vs.(d) The DM saying "Sure, we're near the end of the session and will get to it next time.  This week, send me who you meet there and what you did with them in the past.  Unless it's bonkerballs we'll run with that." Things like (b) and (c) just disrupt the feel of fantasy RPGs for me - I have to step out of just thinking about my character in the here and now and start narrating other people in the world and maybe even the past.   Even after playing it quite a bit, I still don't like 13th Age's montages and similar things.It also feels cognitively differently to me to ask what I could have done in the past to make the current situation manageable than it does to ask what should I do right now. Of course I can't pre-kill the person I'm currently talking to, but I could put have broken in and replaced their bullets with blanks.  So it might not be the kind of time travel that let's you go kill the genocidal monster as a baby and change the present, but is it distinguishable from one of the time travel types where anything you do in the past was already done there?   Similarly, is the flashback loading of a non-standard item indistinguishable in play from having a magic item that can produce just about anything once in a while if you can tell a good story as you pull it out?  (Batman, for the first time ever, pulls a vacuum sealed steak out of his utility belt to distract the hungry dog, telling Robin "Why I scouted the place out yesterday and came prepared today!")To be fair, it seems like it would be odd to jump to thinking of time travel and magic bags if one was told in advance "it's like a heist movie where there are flashbacks showing things", although it apparently was enough of a concern that the BitD writers felt the need to point out it wasn't time travel.  But in a fantasy world that might have time travel or magic bags? I wonder if it is related to being annoyed when fair play mystery rule 8 isn't followed (where the detective in a story has access to a clue that the reader wasn't let in on).  Or if it is related to preferring a super hero comic book series where the next story is foreshadowed gradually over the issues coming before it (common in the  Avengers of the late 1970s) instead of the issue having a flashback that was never foreshadowed or seen before to justify something.</blockquote>

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