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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 9855339" data-attributes="member: 87792">The thing is that you're moving the goalposts from "stolen from the PCs, especially in an invasive way with no respect for precautions taken or expected to be taken by the PCs" to the more general case of "find and retrieve quests". Find and retrieve quests are still around. But the specific disrespectful trigger of "You got robbed out of nowhere of something on your person (or indeed of your person themselves) despite having taken reasonable or even assumed precautions because I the DM say so and I have the power to do that in my world" are almost invariably bad design.I mean last month I stole the entire species of one of the PCs other than the PC themselves. This was, admittedly, six ribbets (Daggerheart frog people) on an island in the middle of the sea as a consequence to the PC boasting of the legions of ribbets to some demons. Who did some scrying to find this legion, saw the frogspawn, and thought "we can use that for shocktroops given how fast they breed even if currently so few reach adulthood".But this wasn't a display of blatant disrespect of either the characters or the actions of the players. I didn't just do a "You wake up in jail", stealing their bodies nor did I utterly ignore their competence or their precautions to steal all items of a certain type no matter where on their body they had hidden them. Instead I stole something that was where the PCs weren't and that they weren't trying to protect. (And now they've from a species that hovered between 6 and 8 rescued a couple of hundred incubated ribbets they are wondering about ecological disaster - but that's an issue for future PCs; there were reasons I'd been calling the ribbet PC "The Harbinger" for several sessions before they even knew the ribbets were missing).You don't have the PCs "wake up and find something missing"; you steal what they weren't protecting because they were doing other things. Especially things the PCs themselves pointed to when talking to bad guys.This. Which is not what happened in this thread - and is why "you steal off the bodies of the PCs so they wake up to find their property missing" or even "You steal the PCs themselves so they wake up enslaved" has more or less been consigned to the dustbin of history and deservedly so but the more general case of find and retrieve quests are here to stay.</blockquote>

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