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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 5928462" data-attributes="member: 27160">Not wishing to answer for [MENTION=59043]Walking Dad[/MENTION], who has already answered for himself, but my answer is "Not intentionally, no". But I'm a human being; that means I have a set of assumptions and models that I carry in my brain about how the world works. These are mostly wrong, of course - just like everybody else's - and all of them are unprovable, but they do inevitably colour pretty much every aspect of how I see even imaginary worlds working. And my players may or may not share them.Having a solid, clear set of rules does not change this, of course. But what such rules do achieve is to act as a common yardstick - a common reference and communication about how the game world works. What this means, in turn, is that the players are given agency in their characters since they can have some trustworthy conception of how their character's abilities will work. This allows them to make plans and announce actions with some confidence that the DM will not be totally nonplussed and bring their efforts to a crashing halt by announcing that the situation and/or their character's capability to alter it is actually different in some fundamental way to how they had understood it. That the DM's mental model of the in-game scenario was, in effect, quite different to that of the player.</blockquote>