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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 6577171" data-attributes="member: 6696971">I can't quite get my head around how you could come to this conclusion.  Off the top of my head, I can think of several cognitive biases that constantly assail every person during play (including the GM), the GM during prep, and during post-game evaluation:Availability heuristic biasCurse of knowledge bias (probably the biggest problem that GMs in such a scenario face)Framing effect biasObserver expectancy effect biasSelective perception biasYou can only on rare occasions utterly "defeat" these biases or, for that matter, even be aware that your objectivity is being assaulted by them (even if you're a person possessed of hyperawareness).  This isn't even bringing in various mundane features of everyday life (lack of sleep, distraction, general fatigue, other stress).Further, I believe that you cut your teeth on AD&D2e?  That game is much more exploration centered than 3.x (which I believe that you also play/played).  The generic process for a GM prepping an AD&D exploration scenario involves:* Establishing what locale/terrain type this specific section of the adventure will take place in.* Establishing what is concretely where.* Establishing the very specifics of the what.* Establishing movement rate per exploration turn in a specific locale.* Establishing frequency/% of random encounters with respect to turns.* Establishing encounter tables; populating them with kind/types, lethality, % chance for each.Merely the last two, encounter table construction/management, are utterly rife with various biases.  Further, none of the above even involve the myriad offscreen/undiscovered backstory evaluations/references (temporally and spatially) and the various rulings that you're going to have to make throughout the course of a session (because various subsystems/PC build mechanics are utterly incoherent with respect to each other).  Even if you've (meaning people running a game - not you personally) managed to convince yourself that you're running a cognitively unbiased, perfectly parameterized model run of a high fantasy world in an AD&D game...while simultaneously not falling prey to any of the above cognitive biases when actually running the game (eg having a conversation with your players), consider the inescapable reality that each and every one of your players at the table (who are trying, and failing to one degree or another, to manage their own cognitive biases) are (mis) perceiving and assimilating the (mis) information they believe you are conveying from moment to moment via their own biased mental models.</blockquote>

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