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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadfan" data-source="post: 4713173" data-attributes="member: 40961">Agreed, with some minor quibbles about the meaning of "neutral."  You could be "neutral" in the sense of "not based on the state of the PCs" while still being completely gamist or completely detached from the internal consistency of your setting.  But that's probably neither here nor there, we probably all agree that setting up an encounter where reinforcements hear the noise of battle and join in is a reasonable thing for a DM to do.I agree with the second sentence.  With the first I have some disagreement.  While there may be logic to your decision, there is also a degree of arbitrariness.  Unless the orcs are genuinely necessary (in the philosophical sense of the term[that's a great band name, "Necessary Orcs"]) to the logic and realism of your setting, then you still picked arbitrarily amongst the many reasonable possibilities that would all have matched the logic and consistency of the setting.  Most likely, within the set of "things that would be logical and consistent," the orcs are just one element.  You chose them instead of a different one for reasons that were your own....disagreed.  You can't say, "its neutral that it takes them N rounds to get there because they are X meters from the room" because you are the one who put them X meters from the room, knowing full well that they would then take N rounds to arrive.  You could have put them Y or Z meters from the room, deleted the room, put them in the same room with the original orcs, put the room on the moon, whatever, and when you did, you would have known the in-game effects that were likely when you decided. Of course your decision of X instead of Y or Z was probably perfectly reasonable.  Just don't try to make it out to not be your decision.  Adding one step of reasoning between your decision and the outcome doesn't negate the fact that your decision was the cause of the outcome. Oh?  Not impartial, I'll give you that.  Logical or consistent?  You might be perfectly logical or consistent.  I'll get to why in a moment.Disagreed.  There are no such thing as orcs.  They have no objective distance away, nor any other objective characteristics.   What there is, on the other hand, is a guy named Imaro.  And this Imaro guy had the intention of doing something in a D&D game.  And now maybe he's not going to, because he thinks that it might suck for everyone at the table if he does.  So instead, he does a different, equally logical, equally consistent thing, that he's chosen because he thinks it will be more fun. Now he might be boxed in.  Maybe he's previously communicated every last relevant detail of the orcs to the players, and changing it now will ruin their suspension of disbelief.  But if that's not the case, he's free to change his mind at any time.  How could he not be? Changing your mind about your unexpressed future intentions as a DM isn't changing the game world.  Its just changing your mind.  Its ok to do that. For the record, since I know this is going to come up: 1. If there are zero reasonable alternatives to the originally intended orcs showing up as originally planned, then that may be all you can do.  But there are probably other reasonable possibilities that will be exactly as logical and coherent as the original plan.2. My suggestion that the DM opt for a different, also reasonable alternative is premised on the assumption that there is an actual problem with the orcs being used as originally planned.  So don't tell me, "oh, the PCs can just retreat, why change the world so they don't have to?"  That's fine!  Apparently there was no problem in the first place.3. Some people are going to say that changing your mind about the nature of the orc reinforcements deprives of the PCs of meaningful choice.  That really, really doesn't apply unless the PCs already knew of the nature of the orc reinforcements.4. This isn't about protecting the PCs from bad decisions.  At no point did Imaro bring up whether it was reasonable or not for the PCs to be fighting the ogre and making noise, so I didn't address it.  Obviously unwise decisions should have consequences (at least usually, some unwise decisions in real life don't have consequences, so making every unwise in-game decision have consequences can actually wreck the believability of your game world by emphasizing the presence of a punitive dm/god).  Of course, that doesn't mean that unwise decisions should have lethal consequences every single time, and my argument about "within the larger set of reasonable outcomes, why not pick one that's fun?" applies here as well.</blockquote>

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