As someone else said: holy thread necromancy, Batman!
And I actually don't accept this as an example, no matter what Mr. Allen's character says. Stories are not "lies" even if they do not depict actual facts, as
Tolkien said quite eloquently.
This is like saying in a sports game, because the referee can award and remove points, penalize teams, move the players around, and perform a whole slew of other things that break the rules, that the players should be able to do it too. It's just not the case.
Show me even one instance where this occurs not only without the players' knowledge, but
intentionally trying to prevent them finding out. Then, you might have an analogy. Otherwise, what you're talking about is completely different, an open and frank assertion that "hey guys, I/you screwed up, and now something has to be done to rectify that."
@
jrowland
See, I have two huge issues with the "trust" argument.
First, how can you call it "trust" when people have explicitly said that the DM not only
can do these things, but
should do them, and
lie to the players when the players ask if it was done? That's precisely the opposite of "building trust." That's answering direct, simple questions with falsehoods.
Second, my more fundamental beef
isn't even about trust vs. mistrust. It's about making informed decisions, and about enjoying the challenge of a game, rather than a "puzzle" or a pure improv session. I want my choices to matter, and I want my successes to be the consequence of my choices--in addition to my
failures being the consequence of my choices. Because that's how you learn: you take in information, create a plan, attempt to execute it, and review the results, which becomes part of the next round of taking in information. If success and failure are primarily a function of
what story the DM wants to tell, rather than whether the choices were
actually good or bad choices in context*, then I'm not actually
playing a
game. I'm
listening to a
story, where I get to extemporaneously provide the lines and actions for one of the characters.
When I make decisions that are "too good" for the story, then the story will prevent those overly-good choices from impinging upon the narrative (for example, if the group executes a plan exceedingly well and I get a lucky crit, felling the BBEG before he gets a chance to speak). When I make decisions that are "too bad" for the story, then the story will prevent those overly-bad decisions from impinging upon the narrative (for example, an enemy gets a lucky crit after I'm already hurting because I decided to attack again instead of heal--except nope, DM says it's a miss).
BOTH of those situations are removing my ability to actually play a game.
*The context is DM-chosen. I freely admit this. However, the fact that it is DM-chosen is irrelevant. Either the context is accessible in some manner to me, through the lens of the character I play, thus allowing me to acquire information and make an informed choice, which will be good or bad based on all of the information including some I could not access even in principle; or the context is
not accessible to me, in this case because the context can be rewritten not only without my awareness but specifically so that I
won't be aware of it, in which case my choices are fundamentally invalid from the get-go, even if they lead to the goals I sought.
