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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6586486" data-attributes="member: 42582">I deliberately used the word "covert". As in, not apparent to the observers (in this context, the players). Deception (eg lying) is one way to do this, but often not explaining your reasoning and methods can be enough.More context is required to diagnose a playstyle. (That's partly why I think actual play examples are more useful than hypotheticals.)If the lieutentant is there before the fact, but the players don't know, and realistically couldn't have known - if the lieutenant is an instance of secret backstory - then I think it GM driven play, yes. At that point whether its illusionistic in some strict sense is a secondary concern to me as a player.What additional context would lead me to characterise it as illusionistic? The GM knows that the players are planning to have their PCs take down the leader; the GM knows that they don't know about any lieutenant, and are not planning around any such contingency; the GM has various opportunities, in the course of play, to make the existence of the lieutenant known, or at least easily knowable, and doesn't take or develop those opportunities; so that, when the PCs do take down the leader and the lieutenant then emerges from the shadows, it's as if the players' efforts to shape the narrative were for naught.There are more or less skilled ways to flag stakes and manage the resolution of declared player actions; and there are different criteria of fun.If what is fun for the players is finding out whether or not the GM has in mind a lieutenant who will pick up the scheme once the PCs kill the leader, then the scenario I've described, whether handled illusionistically or not, will probably be fun.If what is fun for the players is defining their PCs in orientation to some goal or endeavour in the fiction, and they  have played through to what they regard as the culmination of that, then having the GM spring a fail-safe on them will probably not be fun, and it will not be very relevant whether or not the GM wrote the notes for that failsafe then and there, or two years ago when prepping the campaign.I can give concrete examples from my 4e game.The players set out to have their <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?353496-First-time-godslayers-PCs-kill-Torog" target="_blank">PCs destroy Torog's soul abattoir, and then kill Torog</a>. They succeeded in destroying the abattoir, and in the course of that the invoker/wizard had to choose whether to send the flow of souls to Vecna or the Raven Queen. He chose the latter. It was a high stakes moment - at the table between me and the player, because the issue of his simultaneous loyalty to the Raven Queen and to Vecna had been percolating away since the beginnings of paragon tier, and now he finally had to choose; in the fiction, because the rise-and-rise of the Raven Queen at the hand of the PCs has turned out to be one of the core themes of our game.It would completely invalidate that choice for me to subsequently declare that Vecna had a back-up plan whereby he could steal the souls anyway, so the PC's decision to uphold the Raven Queen over Vecna didn't really matter.Another example:The paladin of the Raven Queen had developed a rivalry with <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?340383-PCs-kill-Ometh-leading-to-open-season-on-the-Raven-Queen-s-name" target="_blank">Ometh</a>, an exarch of the Raven Queen whom she had inherited from Nerrul when she overthrew him to become god of death. Eventually, Ometh appeared to challenge the paladin (and his friends). In the ensuing fight, when it seemed that Ometh was going to lose, he tried to open negotiations, warning the paladin that only a pact that he, Ometh, had reached with "beings from beyond the stars" was keeping the Raven Queen's true name secret.When the PCs went on to kill Ometh, the consequence was that those beings from beyond the stars tried to reveal the Raven Queen's name (to an angel of Vecna), and the PCs then had to stop that from happening (in so far as at least half of them wanted the name to stay secret).Again, having laid the stakes on the table, and the players then having made decisions in relation to those stakes, I have a duty (as GM) to honour those outcomes, and not to pull out secret backstory (whether authored on the spot, or months/years earlier) to retrospectively change those stakes.It's actually completely trivial to foreshadow the existence of a lieutenant who might pick up the scheme - the most obvious way, and not necessarily a bad one, is to have the lieutenant present in the final confrontation, and to have the leader hand over the baton and the lieutenant then try to escape while the PCs are locked down with the leader plus minions.This reveals the stakes to the players, and permits them to make choices about how they respond. (Mechanical design becomes relevant here. 4e is well-suited to this sort of thing, in a way that (say) RuneQuest is not, because 4e gives players plenty of options to step up their efforts and make last-ditch attempts eg by spending action points, deploying their dailies, etc).The question is whether the stakes are supposed to be covert.In player-driven play the stakes, by definition, should be known to the players, or at least knowable. I've got nothing against surprising the players - but the surprise is delivered in the course of framing and/or resolution, not as part of the narration of the outcomes and consequences.The threshold for knowability is obviously fuzzy, but "you missed a clue two years of play ago and never had another chance to pick it up" falls well below my personal threshold. "You could have easily got the information in the current scene but didn't" is about where my threshold sits - an example is the sample skill challenge in the 4e DMG, where the players don't automatically know that the duke can't be intimidated, but can get that information easily with an Insight check - and even if they only learn it the hard way it doesn't end the encounter with an auto-loss.Here's a <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?312367-Actual-play-another-combat-free-session-with-intra-party-dyanmics" target="_blank">relevant example</a> from my own game: due to a confluence of circumstances, the PCs ended up agreeing that a cleric of Torog whom they had taken prisoner would be imprisoned rather than executed. None of the PCs (or players) was happy with that outcome, and there were mutual recriminations. The dwarf fighter-cleric blamed the others for making a promise in his name; the others blamed the dwarf for turning up and learning what had been done, rather than keeping his nose out so that they could finish the business (including not keeping the promise!) in secret.At the end of the whole affair I twisted the knife a little, pointing out that, as a powerful priest of the god of jailers, it seemed unlikely that the NPC would spend any more time in prison than she wanted to. That extra bit of consequence hadn't been stated at any earlier point in the scene, but everyone know she was a cleric of Torog, and everyone knew that Torog was the god of jailers, so the dots were there to be joined at anytime - it was just that I, as GM, was the one who ended up joining them, as I said to twist the knife.That satisfied my standards of knowability - it didn't introduce anything new to the narration of outcomes that the players didn't already have access to.</blockquote>

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