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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 8872264" data-attributes="member: 8461">Again, this isn't a question of "need." I think that the scenario described above (in my previous post) works just fine, even if it doesn't "need" to be that way. There's room on the player's part for understanding that, in having failed his roll, he's going to be exposed to the poison. I suppose there's room for debating who should craft the specifics of the scenario (if they care to; plenty of groups don't feel the need to spell out how everything happens from an in-character standpoint), but I don't see it as being any sort of serious abrogation of the table's social contract for the DM to describe some mishap on the PC's part which makes that happen.And the story of Reginald the Rogue works just fine for the game-table as it does the novel. Quite frankly, while it's a little flowery, that would work just fine for any DM adjudication of what happened when a PC fails a roll. Because, as some other people have put forward, sometimes the gloves do in fact do something, so something else must happen to get the contact poison onto his skin, because that's what the dice say happened. In that regard, the DM saying it was the PC's fault strikes me as being entirely legitimate, particularly since it strains the imagination how else it could have happened.Quite frankly, making allowances for the fact that sometimes the DM will violate a player's agency strikes me as being the basis for trust around the table. Wielding that level of authority in a manner that's fair, in accordance with what everyone thinks of as "fair," is a far higher bar to meet than simply telling them never to cross a particular line. I think that making allowances for the idea that sometimes the DM is supposed to narrate what your character does, particularly for when it's an outcome you don't want to happen but which the game's events have mandated will happen, is an important part of what the DM brings to the table.Sure, the DM could absolutely make that call. But by that same token if they can see a way that the PC conceivably could be exposed to the poison (in a manner that everyone at the table considers plausible, rather than vindictive; for the purposes of this particular debate, we all seem to agree that's the case), then it can absolutely go the other way. If the PC is fiddling with the chest with gloves, then even leaving aside the issue of whether or not it can seep through them, there's room to understand that that alone doesn't necessarily obviate the entire issue of being poisoned.</blockquote>

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