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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7327706" data-attributes="member: 29398">Is the naga in consistent communication with the PC?  If yes, then in theory the PC would be receiving instruction now and then (if not constantly) as to how to react to or initiate developments and would be forced by the Force of Will to obey.  If no, then the enslavement is irrelevant and - after writing the appropriate Belief on the character sheet - both the player and PC can proceed pretty much as they would otherwise normally do.Also, when you said enslavement I was thinking of an actual slave-master situation as in Roman times.  Magical domination takes away any option other than full obedience - the victim (if under constant instruction) becomes little more than an automaton, and if not will still act on what it's been told to do when the chance arises.  Kind of like the Imperius curse in Harry Potter.An analogy, though not the greatest, might be that the race is an opposed check where the search is a passive check.It could, though if the map holds any great importance its location should be noted somewhere.I think of things like this as - again for lack of a better term - hard-coded.  The map's in the desk drawer in room 14.Yeah, I've never been a big fan of that sort of thing either (Dragonlance DL1-DL12, if memory serves, is rife with examples of this throughout).  It's certainly possible to give NPCs all kinds of out clauses and escape strategies, but for my part if the dice say the NPC dies now then dead it is; and any plans I may have had for it in the future go down the drain.  It's just another type of curveball.Why does the DM get to decide?  Because it's the DM's job to set things in place within the dungeon and gameworld - this is part of what makes a DM's role different from that of a player.An analogy is perhaps a Christmas present or an Easter egg.  Somebody has to have wrapped/hidden it, and thus already know what's inside or where it is; and that somebody is analagous to a DM setting up the game world for the players to discover.Also, the very term "action resolution" is here a bit misleading.  Yes a PC has declared an action, and that action gets resolved...but the resolution of that action only applies to the PC and her immediate surrounds, not to anything static within the rest of the game world.  Thus, "successfully" searching for the map in room 11 shouldn't have the map suddenly move there from room 14 - instead, all it accomplishes is to determine that the map is not in room 11.  You allow action resolution to affect the game world itself, which as a side effect makes the game world unrealistically malleable - more like a dream world than a real one - where things move around to suit the action resolution.  (and yes, they move around - unless you posit the map never existed anywhere in the game world before being found, which is even more unrealistic)For consistency, realism, and believability it works better the other way around, where the action resolutions are bound by the constructed world / setting / dungeon.Lanefan</blockquote>

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