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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 6587521" data-attributes="member: 27160">This happens to illustrate an issue I have with this "naturalistic" or "common sense" type of play. The characters might "get in over their heads", or "recklessly" push on. Or they might achieve surprise, overrun the big bad before s/he has a chance to prepare or interrupt something that provides them with advantage (maybe the big bad is in flagrante with their SO?).The point is that your election that they "get in over their heads" and "realize that they brought it upon themselves" is pure value judgement, on your part. The game-players among the players will be working on learning and reading the way your values will work. In the end, the game could be less an exploration of an imaginary world and more an exploration of your personal assumptions and values as a GM. The only reason the game world works this way is because it's the way you (the GM) think it ought to work. The players have no way to know this except to know you; there is absolutely nothing in either the real world or the game world to establish this prediliction in advance.I think it's interesting if you find a 50% chance as a result of some skill check significantly different from a simple, independent 50% chance, but what I had in mind was a simple, independent 50% chance.So, the suggestion is that the GM's intent is a critical element, here? Not merely the fact of what is done, but the intent behind it? How are the players to have any inkling of GM intent?Just for the record, what I had in mind really didn't feature the "fork in the way". You could think of it as a sequence of rooms where the order of entry was random. In other words, the first door leads to one room or the other, and beyond that another door leads to the second room.An interesting sequel to the comparison might be, as well as your view on rolling for which room is through the first door - the clue room or the fight room - would it make a difference if the order of rooms was diced for in advance, before the session, as opposed to when the players announced that the characters were going through the (first) door?They do, but the scenario you have assumed is not neccessarily the one I had in mind.There is a limit to how important this is, of course. The main point of this exercise is to explore where, for you, "the line" is drawn. Extensive work with stochastic occurrences has led me to view randomness as simply representing the impact of "stuff we don't know". An uninformed decision by someone is thus identical, to me, to a random selection. At some remove, it becomes obviously so, but closer in it is sometimes intuitive to perceive divisions in "types of randomness". It's interesting to explore those in this case because I think they are informing your view of (I would say, only apparently) different cases.If there is player information (i.e. the skill check is made) then I exclude it from the scenario. That immediately becomes an informed choice and thus subject to illusionism by any measure.From this point of view, there is arguably an interesting Gamist slant to be had in including the left-right fork. Character skill selection becomes a de-facto way to skew the odds in what remains a fundamentally random selection. So, for the purposes of this exercise, please exclude the "skill check for a helpful skew" possibility.How can the players have any notion of their choice genuinely mattering if they have no information on which to base the decision? The only thing they might possibly perceive is that they are making a genuine gamble - which remains true if a die is rolled for the result. There is, incidentally, no reason I can see why the players should not roll the die (except a purely aesthetic one if they wish to pretend that there is some sort of "reality" to the game world beyond the GM - i.e. a Simulationist agenda).I don't see what is the difference between this and example 2? Can you explain further?As a further explanation of my own position, I really don't see the point of the fork unless it has some value in player decision making. If there is, say, a sign on one or both options, or even a skill check to discern a difference (if we are playing very build-centric gamist) then it makes sense. If it's just going to be random then I would make it random - or set one order or another by the layout of the scenario up-front.As Robin Laws says in Gumshoe - what is interesting about clues isn't finding them, it's what you do with them when you have them. In a sense, this might be the real dichotomy between ROLLplaying (rolling to find the clues) and ROLEplaying (the decisions made once the clues are revealed).</blockquote>

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