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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8592462" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't think the normative language ("too many") is necessary. It seems more productive to recognise that you have a different priority from them - their priority is that the desire "story beats" occur and be experienced by the players; your priority is a type of "integrity of the challenge" that would be disrupted by the kinds of in-the-moment changes/fudging that are being discussed.Here's an excellent example of why normative language is best avoided. Your willingness to allow changes of statistics before entering play works for you. But there are approaches - some of the classic approaches that I mentioned upthread and [USER=7026617]@Thomas Shey[/USER] commented on - where what is in the GM's notes, and particularly the dungeon map and key, are expected to be inviolate, because part of the point of play is for the players to engage with and work out that hidden information, and they can't do that if it is subject to change.To be clear: I am a very poor practitioner of that classic style, very rarely attempt it (unless you count my recent Torchbearer sessions) and am not advocating for it in this thread. I'm just using it to illustrate the point that different groups of RPGers have different play priorities, and those different priorities make different techniques - including changing stats during or before encounters - more or less useful. And so it seems more helpful, in discussion, to bring out those features of different techniques and their utility for different approaches, rather than to adopt normative orientations towards them.I mean, the words "needed" and "necessary" here really mean wanted and desirable. It's about preference and play priorities.In my Traveller campaign, I have tended to make up the geography - be it local, or interstellar - "just in time", often in front of my players with them aware that I'm making it up, because it is no part of the play of that game to uncover hidden geographic information. But when I recently GMed a session of White Plume Mountain, and running Torchbearer over the past several weeks, I have religiously stuck to the prep as best I can, because part of the point of those RPG experiences is for the players to cleverly engage with the pre-established geography of the setting.There are all sorts of deception that are not cheating, from parents telling kids about Santa, to teachers fudging answers to questions about what will be on the exam, to white lies told to smooth over socially awkward moments, to the performances of stage magicians.Clearly you do not place the same priority on GM as deliverer of a performance and RPG play as experience of a tightly pre-scripted story as Coleville apparently does. That's fine. As it happens, nor do I. That doesn't mean that Coleville is cheating. The inference from preference to norms, here, is unsound.Speaking a bit abstractly - thinking across a range of RPGs beyond just 5e - there are other possibilities here. For instance, in Burning Wheel if a monster introduces a new creature, a player is entitled to ask about how many "points" of build it has (there's a bit more to it than that, but I hope I've conveyed the idea). In Marvel Heroic RP, the stat block for an opponent is normally much more public than in D&D. In many systems, there are approaches to consequence narration which mean that harder than expected doesn't entail TPK, let alone "game over".My reason for making this point is to further illustrate why I think talking about play priorities, and how different available techniques - some of which are system-dependent - support or undermine them, is a more profitable approach to discussion than a strongly normative orientation.</blockquote>

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