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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8337354" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Yes, it did. That's the whole thing I've been trying to communicate to you. To me--and people like me, which includes my players--IT DOES EXIST. It really, REALLY does have some kind of existence. Sure, it's not the same as the existence of the keyboard on my lap. But, for us, it's honestly a hell of a lot MORE existent than, say, some dude named Σωκράτης who said some stuff, like, a lot of years ago.You keep insisting that these things are literally completely totally 100% non-existent in absolutely any sense of the word. I'm telling you, here and now, that for me and people like, me, they DO exist, in some limited, contingent sense. Maybe, instead of just flatly denying this, instead of just saying "nope, your feelings are simply wrong," you could try to understand why I might speak of them in this way?And novels are not the same as RPGs. You know this.You don't need to do anything categorically, no. We're not talking deontology here. But I wasn't arguing a categorical imperative here. I was arguing a conditional imperative. Because, as I've said repeatedly, you can never maintain the illusion forever. Eventually one of your players WILL see through it. And that's gonna be a real sad day for them. Why put so much effort into keeping up this front, when you could put that same effort into...having it be, in some limited and contingent sense, "real"? Why not avoid deceiving your players, and instead focus on deceiving the characters?I mean, magical senses are a well-established part of my world. That's the reason I used it. Indeed, that's one (among many, many) reasons why these senses exist in-universe: to clue the players in on stuff they shouldn't be able to observe with ordinary senses, but which they could observe with other senses. (In this case, it was preservative magic on the contents of the chest, because those contents were living things--seeds and silkworms, to be specific).You're conflating things. I don't have to track every single living being. Just things that are potentially relevant. That's, maybe, a couple dozen individual people (most of whom do generally lead pretty boring lives, that's how life usually works) and half a dozen important factions. The only things that start "when the PCs happen to be there" are those triggered by the PCs' arrival. Sometimes, an unexpected but expectable event will happen, usually as the result of rolled dice--again, not "the action happens because the PCs showed up," but rather, the world proceeding as it reasonably should, with various events (fortuitous and fearsome alike) happening to and around the characters.There's still absolutely no NEED to have the world spontaneously START being dramatic, just because the PCs showed up.You know what I meant; please don't play coy. Why shouldn't this be "that sort of thing"? Why should the hooks for situations or quests or whatever be anti-naturalistic, something inserted purely by authorial fiat rather than naturally built into the fiction? I absolutely introduce things the players have to learn about (this happened even in the very first dungeon!), but I always build SOME reason, SOME justification for why they'll be there, and not anywhere else. And if the players miss them...well, that's unfortunate, but missing things happens. Maybe an NPC might find it later (it's not like the locations they visit spontaneously evaporate while the PCs aren't there!), leading to a whole different adventure to take away the dangerous artifact some dangerous madman now has.I would say no, but only by the absolute barest, slimmest, tiniest of margins, a hair's breadth from going too far. The players operated on what information was available to them, and took appropriate measures, those measures just weren't adequate to determine that treasure WOULD be there. You provided a perfectly valid example of why the map might fail to produce treasure even with them taking reasonable precautions (someone else got there first), which would be hard though not totally impossible for the players to learn if they tried to find out. I would, however, be EXTREMELY careful doing this as DM. This is so perilously close to being a jerk DM (and to railroading) that, if the idea had occurred to me, I would probably have dropped it for fear that I would do it wrong, or that my players would feel cheated. In practice, they probably trust me enough to accept that this would kick off some kind of fun adventure, but this IMO should strain that trust. If it is genuinely IMPOSSIBLE for the players to find out that the map won't lead to treasure--as in, the DM will actively negate any attempt to do so, and literally no effort could succeed even at discovering that their efforts are being negated--then I would say it has crossed the line into railroading. Even recognizing Greg Benage's point below (which is quite fair), if the DM is preventing any possibility of discovery until the players are actually on the island and actually see the absence of treasure, that would cross the line. As I said above (which I wrote before seeing this post), it was already a sneeze away from being a problem, enough that I would doubt my ability to do it; adding this in makes it actually a problem.For me, it's a bit more complicated than that. I recognize some amount of (for example) eliding out all the islands you might pass along the way that aren't the island the players set out for, and do not consider such elision "railroading." But if the players choose to engage with the map, and then the DM actively prevents any effort to learn the truth until it's staring them right in the face....I just can't call that not railroading. To reject that as a form of railroading effectively means that, so long as the DM does just the bare minimum effort to earn player interest in the story, nothing they EVER do is railroading, which runs counter to both my understanding of the term and how it's used in practice.</blockquote>

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