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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9262890" data-attributes="member: 4937">Yes.  And it's a trivial matter to make the setting constraints of a situation such that the players only have a limited number of options for dealing with it.  Further, the more limited the player character's abilities, the fewer possibilities they can bring to bear both in terms of what they propose to do and in terms of how they can accomplish them.  The first situation of my most recent long running D&D campaign that I designed was that the players were all for various reasons related to the background they had given me in the harbor district of a major city in the early morning when a tsunami was going to occur.  I prepped who to handle each of the 14 different ways that 1st level characters could respond to that situation so that regardless of what they chose to do, I'd not have to come up on the spot with ways of handling it.  If the PC had surprised me with a 15th approach that I had not thought of, I would have handled that as well, but fundamentally the PC's were in a branching path dungeon where they could from 'a' choose to go into different rooms but I had already put up the constraints (the walls) around what they were likely to accomplish.  Generally, I find that I'm a lot more creative than the players are.  The vast majority of things that they could do are things they never even think about.  I never know exactly how they will get from 'a' to 'b' and sometimes they go off the map, but fundamentally I'm always the one providing the choices and they are just picking their way around in the scenario and setting I've created.In any system with a single secret keeper that's always going to be true.  And of course if the system has true narrative control and distributes the power to create secrets across the participants then it's not true that only the GM provides the options, but then you also risk losing certain game aesthetics since the person presented the problem is creating fiat solutions to them (sort of like being able to declare what a legal move for your own chess pieces are on the fly).</blockquote>

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