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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7605260" data-attributes="member: 4937">Not at all.  Or at least, at my tables I certainly don't keep track of the players stuff, and if the player takes something but doesn't write it down on their character sheet, I'm not at all going to overrule and decide that they have it (unless it has a particular sort of curse).  All I'm saying is that the DM, in his role as secret keeper, can and usually does have information about the fictional positioning that the player doesn't have.  The DM is as it were, omniscient with regards to the imagined world.   The player on the other hand, since his knowledge of the game is filtered by the secret keeper according to what he has noticed or can perceive, is acting under "fog of war".  This is required to allow for the aesthetic of discovery, as it is sometimes called exploration.   Access to the secret knowledge, as you well understand because you go on to say...You aren't as confused as you think you are.Your actual confusion over this is someone has introduced a false dichotomy into this discussion, and you've bought into the false dichotomy and are assuming that people like me are arguing over that false dichotomy.  The question over the rope has never been whether the DM or the player controls the rope.   No one set out to set up a dichotomy over who controls the rope.  The claim that this dichotomy existed, only muddles the conversation and confuses people about what is being debated. The question is over how the rope was introduced to the fiction.I asserted that the rope was introduced to the fiction in one of two ways - by GM fiat, since the GM controls the setting and therefore can add ropes to it by fiat, or else through a process of play.  For example, the rope may be in the PC's backpack because as part of the process of CharGen, the player exchanged a CharGen resource - say "gold pieces" - for a list of approved items and equipment that had approved costs associated with them.  As long as the player has the rope through that established process of play, then the rope exists in the fiction somewhere (even if it is no longer in the player's backpack).   Likewise, a different game might dispense entirely with the traditional equipment list mechanic, and have a process of play where the player begins each session with some number of empty equipment slots, and during the course of the session the player may announce that he's filling an equipment slot with a normal mundane transportable piece of equipment - such as a length of rope.  Again, if that is the case, then the rope exists in the fiction because the player has used an established process of play to bring the rope into the fiction.  While the mechanics seem a bit different from the traditional equipment list mechanic, they are actually fundamentally the same - the player exchanges some sort of limited resource for some other sort of limited resource.  They differ really only in the details.Neither is anything like the GMs ability to bring rope into the fiction.  The GM can just establish that there is an entire room of rope, a whole ropemaker's guild, an entire forest covered in enchanted rope, or whatever else he likes.If we assume that the rope has been in the character's backpack since chargen, then you've constructed a circular argument.  The rope is introduced by the process of play and per your constraint on the situation, no secret knowledge has effected the rope, so yes at this point the rope is by definition introduced to the fiction by the player and that choice was made by the player.   But your statement is as pointless as it is circular, because it argues a point that was never in contention.  The point of contention was whether ropes in a backpack since chargen were introduced to the fiction by the same process as ropes introduced by the GM.   And this rope, just wasn't.  You've already conceded the important point, that the GM may have secret knowledge about the rope and he may therefore overrule the player's understanding of the fiction.   He can do this because he controls the setting, as is implied and required by his job as Secret Keeper.   The player can't have secret knowledge in the same way, nor may he override the GM's knowledge of the fiction by asserting that what the GM thinks about the fiction is not true.   The player isn't the Secret Keeper nor is the player the Referee responsible for adjudicating the results of things.  Nor can the player introduce to the fiction anything not provided by an explicit process of play.   The player can't simply declare by fiat, because he wishes it, that there is a rope in the corner of the cell.   The GM can on the other hand introduce rope any time he wants by any means he wants.   He doesn't need a process of play to do it.   The rope is just there in the setting because the GM declared it to be so.  Yes, exactly!  And so, much less obviously, is a game where the player can declare without permission from the GM or without any recourse to the processes of play that a rope exists.  Because you've already asserted yourself that the GM's secret knowledge could potentially override this authority!   Unless you want to recant that, what you really mean is "I don't see how they support an argument that in a game that has an intact social contract, with an expectation that the PC's inventory is NORMALLY at the player's disposal through his/her control of the PC, that the player doesn't have the authority to reliably have his/her PC retrieve the rope from his/her backpack."And yes, I agree that it normally is, but we've both agreed that there are rare exceptions to that where the GM can overrule the player because the GM has secret knowledge.But again, this is all a red herring that someone else in the thread introduced to confuse things.  No one has ever asserted that the player's inventory isn't normally within the player's control.   The real question is not whether the player controls their inventory, or even whether they normally control their inventory.   The real question was whether the items in a player's inventory could be declared to be there by the player's fiat, in the exact same fashion that they could declare by fiat the intention to climb a wall or attack an orc with an item in that inventor.  In other words, I argued - and still argue - that while a player can by fiat declare what a PC feels, or what a PC thinks, or what a PC does, because the player had control over the PC, their PC's possessions - while they were part of the character - where still external to the PC and could not be controlled or introduced by fiat alone.To disagree with this is to assert that these two propositions by the player are fundamentally the same:A) I draw the +5 Holy Avenger [which my player acquired during play], and attack the Lich King.B) I draw the +5 Holy Avenger [which I'm now introducing to the game's fiction now even though no such item formerly existed because I think it would be cool to have one], and attack the Lich King.That is the real point of debate.  The whole "who is in control of the backpack" canard was a logical fallacy introduced to disguise what I would think is a rather unpopular claim that 'B' and 'A' are actually the same thing for what it is.   And since you've already agreed that one example is "dysfunctional play due to a mismatch in expectations about the allocation of the various roles and duties of playing the game", then I suspect you and I really don't have much to disagree over.</blockquote>

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