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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 6589056" data-attributes="member: 6775031">And yet, one of the reasons that characters were allowed saving throws against powerful spells and effects is that they should, in some way, have a say in their own fate. Coincidentally, that's one area where 4E differs from every other edition. I mean, I agree with your example, but there's still a (statistically meaningless) difference between the DM asking you to roll a save against death or the DM informing you that you failed your save against death.The GM of an RPG is the god who created that world. The PCs live in that world. The PCs should be more familiar with how things work in that world than the players should. Just like it's not meta-gaming to ask how many HP someone has left, because the PCs actually can see whatever the in-game reality is which corresponds to HP.They don't know. Just like you wouldn't know the outcome, if you were faced with that same decision in real life. The core of role-playing is imagining that you are the character, and making decisions from that perspective.I think that just goes to show how far out of touch you are from what the game was intended to be, and how the game is actually played. This is not difficult for a skilled DM to emulate. The fictional world should also be constrained and driven by causal laws, even if the rules in the book only show us a sub-set of the ramifications of those laws, filtered by what is relevant to a sub-set of the population.Very little within the game-world is not knowable to the players. It's just a question of what resources they care to spend on figuring it out. The GM creates the game-world, and populates it with monsters and NPCs and whatever else, but only the players can decide where the story goes. (By definition, the story is whatever happens around the PCs.)This sort of mismatch should sort itself out within a few sessions, and highlights the importance of talking about what kind of game it is before you start playing. I just wanted to cover the possibility that you might show up at my D&D game, and then not understand what your role in the game is supposed to be; you might feel that your choices don't matter, because you aren't asking the questions that would get you the information you might want in order to make informed choices later on.As I've mentioned many times, no choice is ever truly random. If the left path leads to rocks falling, then there should be some way to determine that, or else it's a DM failure.The players have no way of knowing what any of those adventures will involve, or what threats or treasure might be there, unless they're meta-gaming (i.e. cheating). They have reason to believe that the first two options will involve some spelunking, and the last will involve a lot of walking. If any of them end up somewhere that the PCs don't want to be - giant spiders, for example - then they're free to abandon the quest and find a new one.The decision to visit Tavern X is a decision to encounter those people who have also decided to visit Tavern X. If you then decide that the mysterious stranger possesses this trait, then you are letting player choice dictate her backstory.If the DM makes decisions based on cues from the players, then the player is indirectly authoring the backstory. The player could cause other things to happen in the backstory, by asserting different preferences to the DM.</blockquote>

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