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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 6284139" data-attributes="member: 5143">It is my belief that a game has to be believable and fun.  We watch movies where things happen that aren't believable but are still fun and we accept them because the "realistic" way of doing things would be no fun for the story.  However, in general, I think Hussar and I agree that realism is the "default" way of resolving issues and that the rules attempt to model "realism" but with some abstraction in order to make it easier to handle.  The abstraction often causes issues that you ignore simply because it would take too much time and effort.  However, in situations were you don't need the abstraction you can just substitute realism or what you want to happen in its place.  Someone falls off a building and none of the PCs are involved...either the fall kills them or it doesn't.  It's really up to the DM what happens.  He doesn't need to use the rules for this.If it involves the PCs in some way, then the rules should be followed in order to be fail and impartial.Agreed.  The easiest method is to use the rules as how the world works.  However, the rules don't ever cover everything.  That generally means relying on the one thing everyone has in common, reality or an agreed upon version of reality.  Reality works because because there are probably billions of things the rules don't cover that we've encountered in our day to day lives that we all sort of understand.However, as was said above, the problem is that people are really good at filter the world through their own world view and it often ends up with weird results.  Random examples I can think of from games I've played in include:1. The time that our DM felt that jumping 10 feet while wearing full plate(back in 2e with no real rules on jumping distances) was completely impossible while a player was pointing to the fact that he had 18/00 strength and the world record for long jump was something like 30 feet.  So, if he had the highest strength out of any human ever, certainly he could do the same.2. The time our DM felt houses hit by a fireball spell should burn down in less than 2 minutes and it would take less than 1 before everyone started taking fire damage.  It took about 5 minutes before all the buildings nearby that building were also on fire.  Most of the group felt fire shouldn't spread quite that quickly.There's no good way to communicate these sorts of things in advance since they seem like "common sense" to the DM or to the players involved.  Our DM thought we were completely stupid for casting a fireball spell inside a building because we should know that within 1 round of 2e combat, we'd all die due to fire damage.  Everyone just assumes common sense is the same for everyone.  It isn't.DMs don't manipulate information on purpose most of the time.  But they do so unconsciously or unknowingly.  Take the example above.  If the DM considers it common sense that you can't jump 10 feet in full plate and that obviously everyone should know that, he's unlikely to explain that the chasm in front of your is impassable or that you need to look for another way around.  He'll just assume you already know that and let you decide.To take another example.  We had a DM who gave us a mission that in our estimation was impossible to complete:  We needed to get a caravan full of wagons and animals to a nearby town in a couple of hours with a bridge over a 50 foot chasm destroyed while we were first level.  He expected us to complete the task because the rest of his game was dependent on it.  He expected us just to build a bridge and get it done in an hour.  To him that made perfect sense.  To us, it was completely insane.  Our characters didn't know how to build a bridge, we didn't have tools with us and even if we did, getting it done in an hour seemed unmanageable.There were no rules in the game for how long it takes to build a bridge or what tools you need or what knowledge you require so there were no rules to fall back on.It wasn't his goal to confuse us with a "gotcha" or to be adversarial.  He wanted to provide us with a challenge we needed to solve but based it around information that was different in his head than was in our own.The problem comes down to when the rules don't cover something, which I assume even yours don't.  Each person has their own idea on what is possible, impossible, easy, and hard.Tell one DM that you'd like to shoot an arrow into the ceiling in order to cause a cave in and he'll say "Awesome, roll damage and if you can do 15 damage, that'll crack the rock enough to cause a bunch of big rocks to fall on your enemy killing them instantly."Tell another DM you are going that and he'll say "your arrow bounces off the rock harmlessly, that's what happens when you shoot arrows at a rock, idiot".A 3rd DM might say "Your are purposefully trying to cause a cave-in the the room you are standing in?  You succeed.  The entire room is filled with rocks and everyone dies, including you and the party."When you attempt something not covered by the rules, you should expect all 3 equally.  People have REALLY large differences in their view of "reality".  Which is why most of the time attempting out of the box thinking that isn't covered by the rules is the equivalent of Russian Roulette.Most DMs can think of at least a couple of solutions to problems off the top of their head.  Those ones are always easy because the DM already thought of them and "pre-approved" them.  Then there are the ones that he didn't think of.  Some of those are going to be labelled "awesome", some "interesting" and some "stupid" almost entirely based on the DMs world view.  If you come up with one of the awesome things, you will succeed with flying colours.  The DM will assign an easy DC to roll or skip rolling all together and will come up with rules mechanics on the spot that make the action have a huge effect.  If you do something he labels "interesting", you're likely to have to succeed at moderate DCs and the effect will likely be the same as if you had taken the safe route by choosing one of the "pre-approved" options.  If you do something "stupid", you should except to fail, possibly spectacularly.</blockquote>

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