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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8872544" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't think it matters what the poison does.  A fair adjudication of the situation wouldn't involve the GM metagaming over what he wanted the outcome to be.  Yes, the temptation is going to be to go lighter on the player if the poison could be lethal, but that sort of pathway leads to complete negation of player agency.The problem with focusing on what the poison does is that it's part of the whole red herring side discussion of whether lethal traps and contact poisons are good dungeon designs.  It's not really an attempt to engage the subject matter, but an attempt to change the focus of the conversation and win sympathy for the hypothetical player by attempting to paint the hypothetical GM as a bad GM.  It's a rhetorical gambit to derail the conversation.  I've already fully conceded that I'd never get in this situation because I don't use contact poison and don't find this a particularly interesting trap, in most cases I would assume gloves because no one would be adventuring in travelling clothes alone and unarmored in my games, and I would have already established the table rule "If it isn't on your character sheet, you don't have it" for a lot of good and valid reasons, and further that I would have already established processes of play that would encourage using concrete and communicative interactions with the fiction as propositions, such that almost certainly anyone who had in mind the possibility of a contact poison would not offer up some sort of unconcerned proposition and anyone who had in mind the possibility of a contact poison but was uncertain about whether their hands were bare would have first asked questions to establish the shared fiction such as, "I am wearing travelling clothes, what sort of gloves do those come with?".   But all of that has nothing to do with the main questions being raised here, which are things like whether "If it isn't on your character sheet, you don't have it" is a fair standard, or whether the GM is a referee of a game or a mere validator of the player's fantasies.</blockquote>

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