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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6284123" data-attributes="member: 4937">I probably came to this view sometime in the early 90's.  During the '80's, I - like probably many gamers - thought that at some level the rules were wrong or incomplete when they failed to simulate 'reality'.  The push in most rules systems was toward greater and greater degrees of 'realism' as a goal in and of itself.  Conflicts over the rules and vagueness in the rules where settled by appeals to realism, which would often lead to long debates over what was realistic.I fear you are describing something about 20 years too late in my own development of my DMing philosophy.  This would have heavily informed my play back in 1991 when it would have been something of a revelation.   I'm not being superior or contentious, but I think you are off on a tangent. If anything, I think your view of the purpose of the rules is probably closer to my view of the rules than it is to Hussars.  I tend to approach the rules as if they were the physics of the world, for that I would for example, never narrate a high level NPC having died of a broken neck after being thrown off his horse, because the players understanding of how the world works based on the rules (rather than reality) would inform them that this was not merely improbable, but impossible.  I've been in lengthy threads here at EnWorld discussing how I approach the game through that perspective, and I don't really want to go through them again, but I've also been in lengthy arguments with Hussar where he denied that perspective and approach in favor of one where the rules were ignored in favor of loosely defined rule of cool (as defined by the player, though exactly how the DM and player were to agree on what was 'cool' wasn't explained, the DM is just supposed to be a mind reader I think).It means that the story teller must accept the burden of communicating the model of how the world works in some fashion.  In my case, this means a 534 page house rules document and occasional interruptions to explain the cultural expectations of the setting as they comes up based on the assumption that even if the player's themselves don't understand the setting, the character's themselves grew up in it and are versed in it.  It means consciously not playing 'gotcha' as the story teller, particularly with hidden assumptions and knowledge.  It means generously interpreting player actions according to the fortune mechanics, and it means approaching question of, "Can I say, "Yes", here?" from the prespective of, "What does it means for the game to make this a legal precedent about how the world works?"Oh noes.  Horrors.And we get back to the whole, "You can't trust your GM", crap.  The fundamental assumption here is that there is an adversarial relationship with a DM that is manipulating the flow of inframation to the PC's in order to surprise them with their unwise uninformed decisions.  Put to analogy, the idea here is that the GM is a bad mystery novelist, who fails to put sufficient information into the story for the resolution of the mystery to make sense to the reader when it happens.  Or in other words, the idea is that the GM cheats. It's a world view grounded in the idea that the sort of play at a table looks like that described by Grimtooth's Traps, where indeed, it would not be possible to play either the rules or the setting, because the GM is playing 'gotcha'.  For the life of me, I can't think of any situation in the last 3 years which fits the scenario you describe.  If I could give my players advice on this it would be, "Please dont' do this.  You try to figure out what I want you to do based on the body language of someone that is autistic and you are almost certainly going to be wrong.  I don't 'want' you to do anything.  I don't have a preferred solution."  The PC's almost always come up with actions and solutions I didn't think of.  By no means does this mean the answer is, "No." or worse "Wrong!"  The answer is defined by the rules and the setting.  I define the answer only to the extent I'm the author of both, but I would like to think that there is pretty thick bandwidth in terms of communicating how things work.  This issue isn't even operative.  And the time that, in the midst of dodging assassins that were trying to kill them, one of the PC's had broadsheets printed up and posted about town, and hired criers to go about town informing everyone where he'd be at a particular time on a particular evening, and then the assassins knew exactly where he'd be and prepared ambushes - I'd like to think that made sense to everyone at the table in retrospect.Sure.  But this isn't the core of the issue either.</blockquote>

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