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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 6567470" data-attributes="member: 6775031">I'm curious as to how the other PCs even knew that you could harness the energy of a dead dragon into enchanting an item. Or how the sorcerer knew that it could gather the dragon's energy for himself. Or, specifically, that he'd need to cast Cyclonic Vortex in order to do so.I mean, I stopped playing 4E after about six months, but it never would have occurred to me that harvesting the energy of a fallen dragon was a thing that you could do. Was it something that the players just made up, because they thought it would be cool if they could do it - and you agreed, because you're following the "yes, and..." school of thought? Or was it something that they knew about, because I guess they'd heard stories of a hero who slays an ancient dragon and uses its spirit to power a sword?Maybe I'm not explaining myself well, because the thing you are describing is definitely meta-gaming in my book. Even if you later came up with a justification for why it was okay for this thing to happen, the real reason why it happened was because you wanted to create an interesting situation for your players.I guess the difference all comes down to timing. Making stuff up ahead of time, because you think it will make for an interesting story later, is fine; changing anything in-the-moment, because you think up something better later on, is less cool. It would have been ideal (in my perspective) if you'd written down ahead of time that the sorcerer can gain this benefit from jumping onto the dragon and casting this spell.There are even games that codify this. They'll say that the GM should write everything down ahead of time, and you're not supposed to change anything later on. I seem to recall that the players can even earn XP (or some other benefit) if they successfully call out the GM for cheating in this manner!And I think that goes back to fairness, for me. It's not "fair" if my character gains a super cool magic power because the DM is changing the world around me such that the thing I want to happen will be the thing that actually happens. As a scientist, I just can't live in a world that shapes itself around what I do or do not want it to be.There's no reason why the DM needs to be covert about this. If my character was in jail, and the other PCs weren't conspiring to get me out, then there's nothing wrong with the DM explaining to the players about how these decisions are being made. Because the players are expected to maintain a strict wall between player knowledge and character knowledge, the DM is free to mention any factors that the characters don't know - things like the reputation of the imprisoned characters, who knows or doesn't know about it, who might be in a position to do something about it, etc.And for things where the DM can't help but be biased, where choosing either way would seem inappropriate, there are always the dice. I was once trapped at the bottom of a pit, and the DM rolled random percentage chance for someone to find me. He listed the base chance from the local encounter rate, with modifiers for the passage of time and likelihood that someone might notice my absence. I think he started with 10%, and it got up to 30% by the third day, when I was miraculously rescued.And yes, that does start with a base of DM fiat (in determining the initial success chance), but by explaining the process to the players, everyone can make sure that it's honest - and call the DM out if something seems unreasonable (if the initial success chance is 70%, for example).Of course, I can also imagine being a player, and not knowing whether I was supposed to keep trying to find my own way out, or whether the DM was planning to have a specific NPC rescue me at the last moment. That seems like a pretty miserable situation. Given the options, though, I would prefer the random chance of death over trusting the plot will work itself out regardless of my actions; there's no way that I can trick myself into expecting to be rescued at the last second, because the DM wouldn't let me die in such a manner.</blockquote>

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