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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6852417" data-attributes="member: 42582">When a mathematician makes a conjecture, s/he is not making an assumption.Which is to say that conjecture is not at all a synonym for assumption. To conjecture means to guess, with reasons. Or, what is much the same thing, to hypothesise.Thus, when Frodo said of the passage written above the door to Moria "It's a riddle!", he was conjecturing - making a reasoned guess. One could equally say that he was hypothesising. But obviously he was not assuming anything.In this thread, based on the two relatively lengthy posts from the GM in question, and especially the second one which sets out the events of play in some detail, I am conjecturing that the ranger - who had just been "woken up" following the second melee - was on-hand when the items were bundled together.I am also conjecturing - from the way the GM frequently talks about "the players" or "the PCs" in plural terms - that at this table there is a practice of, at least from time to time, treating the party as a gestalt. In my experience, this is a very common feature of D&D play. And in my view, at a table where this practice is adopted, it is unfair GMing to strongly enforce a disaggregation of PC knowledge and action just at the point where the loot is being sold.For instance, why did the players have the ranger take the armour to sell, and not have the barbarian also go along? In post 134 we are told that the party splits up to undertake various tasks, but there is no indication that this was an important part of a party strategic plan. It just all looks like colour, not high-stakes decisio-making: these guys will do X, these other guys will do Y, we'll meet back at the tavern at the end of the day. It is the GM who retrospectively makes it high stakes by playing on the ranger player's uncertainty/ignorance. I don't think that is good GMing.Also: [MENTION=6778044]Ilbranteloth[/MENTION] and others - I believe that settles the question of whether or not the ranger knew there was a magic ring that had been affixed to the gauntlet.I think it also illustrates my point about the GM unilaterally "disaggregating" the party's knowledge and intentions in a fashion which the table didn't seem to treat as a norm.Anyway, I think that a GM who sets out to "punish" players by turning what the players are treating as mostly colour, "transition" scenes into high-stakes "action" scenes is likely to drive the game in a direction that s/he may later regret: it produces adversarial play and overly cautious action declaration. The players at least need to be told that the game is "always on". In this episode, it doesn't seem to me that they were.</blockquote>

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