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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6845316" data-attributes="member: 42582">The legal situation is more complicated than this - apart from anything else, the mental elements to a contract (at least in common law systems) are generally constructed "objectively" from the evidence that surround the act of contracting - they are not "subjective" intentions (ie actual mental states).To give a concrete example: if I promise to sell you my house including all fixtures, and I wrongly believe that X is not a fixture, then if I remove X before settlement, when you take possession and discover that X is missing you can proceed against me for breach of contract with some reasonable prospect of success.The issue here isn't that the PC and the NPC had different beliefs concerning what was the subject matter of the sale. The issue is that the player and the GM - real people in the real world, not imaginary people in the imaginary world - had different beliefs concerning what it was that the PC presented to the NPC for sale.I'm with those who think it doesn't make for good gaming to hold the players to a level of precision in action declaration that the GM is applying in this particular scenario; it breeds paranoia, bogs down play and leads to debates (as in this case). The more complex and verisimilitudinous the gameworld, the more this sort of playstyle will cause ruptures in immersion and disrupt the unfolding of events in play; it's not a coincidence that the "precision language" playstyle originated in the ultra-sparse gameworld of the dungeon.In this scenario, even within the framework of the "precision language" playstyle there is a weirdness, that the blacksmith was able to see the gauntlets and ring yet the ranger wasn't. Does the blacksmith have a ring of X-ray vision (for peering into a sack plonked down onto the table)? If not, why was the player denied the visual information available in the scene? This is not like a case in which, say, a player declares that his/her PC drops his/her backpack, forgetting that in a previous session a valuable item had been put inside it.But anyway, I don't really feel that a major challenge of the game should be remembering which item was put into which container. That can make sense in a certain sort of ultra-contrived dungeon play, but once the gameworld expands to include the sorts of challenges and scenarios that are more typical in contemporary fantasy RPGing, the memory challenge seems a little bit dull to me. As a GM, if I want to challenge, or trick, the players I can think of more interesting as well as more verismilitudionous ways to do it.</blockquote>

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