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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 5405625" data-attributes="member: 80487">That looks like a good list of very broad categories.Comments:1)    The Hand Wave: All 4 of the A series have "express lines" into them, because the set made up a tournament. A4 was the final round, so the top-ranked teams were going to play it with no choice in the matter in any case. No matter what the initial situation might have been, it would have been just as arbitrary. Getting captured at the end of the previous elimination round is just a rationale that artificially ties the scenarios together because the players have nowhere else to go except right out of the game.(Ditto refusing the "offer you can't refuse" in G1 and elsewhere. In a campaign, you could agree to do that thing, and saddle up ... to high-tail it somewhere else!)2)    Literary Narration: "This is generally seen by players as acceptable resolution narration" because it generally is (by consensus) the proper way in a role-playing game. I'm not playing the role of someone who ** decides ** to fall heels over head with my robe flying up to my waist!Now, this becomes a bother to me when the DM takes over choosing courses of action over which I would actually have control. I have encountered that in playing 4E, which often leaves me feeling reduced to a mere dice-rolling mechanism "along for the ride".I have seen the problem crop up in "boxed text", with a frequency that seems roughly in proportion to the writer's literary pretensions. Writers in that position really need to be mindful of the practical purposes they are supposed to be serving; otherwise, they can make things harder rather than easier on DM and players. DO NOT ASSUME ANY ACTIONS on the players' part unless those are necessary prerequisites to getting to that paragraph!(Obvious and common assumptions such as having some light by which to see are easy to deal with when they happen to be false. I have in mind such presumptions as that the PCs have entered a room in a particular way.)4)    The False Choice: This one seems to me to require a good bit of rail to be laid leading to it, unless one is not only thoroughly capricious but thoroughly immune to being embarrassed. Ham-handed; DM, please consider it deprecated and check out the alternatives.6)    Schrödinger’s Map: This is more truly a false choice (as opposed to a trivial or non-"live" choice). I have found it extremely effective. It can get rather obviously silly, though, if players get a chance to test it even probabilistically. Fire and forget; if it somehow doesn't work the first time, don't repeat it.7)    Endurium Walls: If you're not using super-strength Adaptium℠, you're not fully protected. Nothing less is guaranteed to survive contact with cunning players. If there is a rule, then they will exploit it -- so you need rules that can change in a fraction of a second.8)    Metagame Director: If memory serves, King Arthur Pendragon has no "Intelligence stat", so there's no question of a character being "not smart enough" to conceive of a course of action. However, there are skill ratings and there is a highly developed set of rules for Personality Traits and Passions. A GM could, as you suggest, misuse those.In any game, one technique is to keep asking for rolls until (inevitably) one gets a roll one likes.</blockquote>

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