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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4701405" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm not the one that brought it up, but I'll make a stab at it. That doesn't go nearly far enough.  If you truly wish to make your world have padded walls and appropriately safe chopped up rubber floors, you must decline to put any level inappropriate challenges in the game world at all.  Afterall, if a player truly wishes to go 'fight a dragon and take its gold', so long as there are any dragon's anywhere, the PC might be able to discover this and take off on his quest.  Of course, you can always argue with the player that his activities are to no avail, and place every obstacle in his way, and see to it that all sorts of things happen on the way to the dragon so that by the time he reaches it he's certain to be able to dispatch it.  But this is a distinction with no difference.  Either way, the dragon doesn't exist until such time as you deemed it appropriate, and the PC is sure to figure out eventually that everything he does or chooses is pointless because there is no real connection between causes and effects.  It's all your story, and none of it his. I think you are quite wrong.  Quite unlike the circumstance I just outlined, there is a distinction there.  If I write a play in which there is a pistol on the mantle in scene one, then the audience of the play will know that at some point that pistol is very likely to be fired and when it is fired it will seem a perfectly reasonable thing to have occured.   But if I write a play in which there is no pistol on the mantle, and in scene 5 suddenly a character goes to the mantle pulls a pistol off and fire it, the audience is likely to go, "Huh, where did that pistol come from, it wasn't there before."  The experience is quite different for the audience, because, among other things in the former case the audience is likely to think the story about the characters, but in the latter case the audience is likely to think the story is, "Where did the pistol come from?", and waste lots of time and effort on that question.  And generally speaking, if the history of literature is any evidence, the audience is very likely to find the latter play lacking in merit compared to the first one.But we are talking of RPG's, and in them the audience of the play also takes the role of the lead actors within it, and so the matter for them is far more acute.  For if the pistol is pulled off the mantel when it wasn't there before, its they that it will be pointed at and they that must act the scene.  But if the pistol has been there all along, then they will surely say, "I saw this coming; it's time for the pistol to be fired." or even better, "Ahh... so this is the time for the pistol to be fired; what a clever twist." or perhaps, "Great Scott! Why didn't I see it before!  The pistol!!!"And I speak here with experience as a player, that to experience a 'play' where the pistol has been there all along is far more sublime and enjoyable than one where it wasn't.</blockquote>

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