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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6284168" data-attributes="member: 4937">I believe that 'believable' is a very high objective for the most part you never hit.  I think you can hit a point where everyone willingly suspends enough disbelief to become immersed in the story, and that's enough.I disagree.  In general, realism is the default assumption - walls are solid, for example.  But, this assumption must be backed up mechanically.  If your rules say that rock walls are actually tissue paper, then its time to laugh, go out of character and discuss the issue with your PC's, and then repair the damage to the desired reality by getting new rules.  Hense, while I expect players to assume stone walls are solid barring any other knowledge to the contrary, the rules will back this up upon inspection.  The default way of resolving issues is the rules.  The rules model the setting - not 'reality'.  The goal is versimlitude, not 'realism'.While the DM could use whatever he wants, in fact, by resolving the situation outside the rules he is now playing the game that Balesir warned against.  To understand the situation you must read the DM, because you've just arbitrarily reduced the bandwidth of communication between the GM and the players.  If someone fell off the building, the PC's have a reasonable expectation that the events can be determined in light of the rules.  If someone was murdered using magic, the PC's have a reasonable expectation that the NPC followed the same rules that apply to them.  DM impartiality is meaningless if it only applies to the PCs.In theory they can.  In practice, they don't in a way that gets down to the heart of the matter I mentioned in the prior post.No no no no.  This is exactly the false expectation Balesir rightly warns against.  Reality is not something we all have in common.  Reality may be the same but no one of us actually owns reality and knows it, so perforce everyone's perception of reality is different.Won't happen if you have explicit rules for covering jump.Won't happen if fireball explicitly doesn't set objects on fire, thus simplifying the resolution of complex events like burning something down.   Simply put, fire doesn't spread unless the rules provide for it.  If you want fire to spread in a mechanical way, there has to be a rule.  I have no intention of arguing over how fast fire should spread in the setting.  If I needed to model it, I'd write rules and then derive average rates of spread of fire in the setting from basic rule principles.Rules.  I told Balesir my approach went far beyond what he was suggesting; he evidently didn't believe me.   If a player objects to the reality created by the rules, or I find I object to the reality created by a rule, I try to revise it before the next session.I should hope at least for this sort of example I've fully addressed your challenge.This entire scenario depends on the fact that there are no rules for building bridges.  Further more, the scenario plays out badly because no one bothered to stop the DM and say, "How long does my character think it would it take to build a bridge?" or even, "What are the rules for building bridges?" , nor did the DM, upon seeing the player's confusion stop play and say, "In your estimation, you could fix the bridge in an hour."   This is therefore only a failure of communication, and one that would be fully expected by me because there were no rules.   IF there are no rules for crafting things, you can't expect players to believe that they can do it.  If there are no rules you know as a player for crafting things and you think you may need to craft something, to immediately ask what the rules for crafting are would be a very good idea.It doesn't matter what his goal was, he was in fact adversarial and played gotcha.  It was his responsbility to convey to you the players something that your players would know, namely that in his world it takes 1 hour to build a bridge over a canyon even if you don't have tools.True, but not in the sense that you mean it presently.  Take the following situation:Why does the player have this perception that shooting the rock might cause a cave in and yet this result - this stake on the success if you will - is in doubt?  He has this perception because either there are no rules on destroying ceilings or he doesn't know them.  Immediately, the DM should be aware that he's about to play 'gotcha' with the player.  The player's perception of the world is false, and the DM has a burden to inform the player of the false perception.  So, generally I'll do something like, "Make a Knowledge (Geology and Mining) check to assay the strength of the ceiling."On the basis of that result, success or failure, you inform the player of the particulars regarding the crack, "You don't think it is very deep.  It looks quite sturdy and probably would survive any mortal blow without much damage."  OR "You think the ceiling is actually unstable and a well aimed blow could very well bring down the ceiling over a wide area.  If you continue examining the ceiling for another round, you might be able to determine what areas of the roof are stable or how much you'd expect the roof to fall."On that basis, we now have communication about the stake.  If on the other hand, the player has no relevant knowledge, you say something like, "Well, it's hard to say what would happen if you shot the roof.  The arrow might bounce or it could bring the whole roof down.  You have no way of knowing."Either way, you direct the PC's to the rules governing the hardness and hit points of stone, where he'd note (at least in my game) that thick stone has a maximum hardness of 20, and takes half damage from physical attacks not explicitly designed to harm stone.  His 15 hit point arrow is therefore, at least in this world we are playing in, highly likely to snap and do no damage to a ceiling that is hundreds of feet thick and survived earthquakes for centuries.  You do this because the character has lived in the world and knows how it behaves.  He knows stone is quite durable, and arrows generally ineffective in damaging it - or if your rules say otherwise - stone has 8 hardness and 5 hit points per cubic foot, for example - he knows that too.All the DMs in your example are playing "gotcha!" with the PC's, because the PCs have no way of knowing the stakes and are given no path toward establishing the stakes.  Before I'd attempt to bring down the ceiling with an arrow, we'd need to establish if my character has any reason to believe that any particular thing would result.   Many DMs don't want to say, in large part because they fear their game would be meaningless if they actually empowered PC's with knowledge that they otherwise keep behind the screen.  Their whole game is 'figure out what I'm thinking'.  Balesir rightly warns against that, but he can't imagine how you get away from it despite protesting that you need to follow 'rules'.The problem isn't that you can't design a rules set that covers every situation, because you can and its trivially easy.  The central and important problem is that you can't design a rules set that covers every situation in the way you'd like it to be covered.  But even so, your responcibility is still to communicate with the players.</blockquote>

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