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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6103545" data-attributes="member: 4937">You've put a really big emphasis on how you do things differently, but you've mostly protested in the abstract without a lot of concrete examples.  The one concrete example you've provided of your GMing style didn't seem to me to line up with your claims about your GMing style, and instead showed you to be a pretty standard DM doing pretty standard things that well accord with my understanding of how to GM.  You say you GM 'No Myth', but then in your example you have pretty clear 'Myth' involved.  You say you allow players to scene frame, but it’s pretty clear in your example you overruled the player's suggested scene and countered with one of your own.  Indeed, it's clear from your example that the player had no expectation he could frame a scene.  You say you shouldn't frame scenes without clear up front stakes player initiated stakes, but then you fudge that by suggesting that since players trust their GM you don't really have to do that.   You've offered up as a resolution running lengthy scenes as brief 'skill challenges', something not at all outside the scope of what I consider effective scene framing and entirely different than letting players choose to skip complications if they aren't interested.In short, you've done a lot of protesting, and a lot of referencing texts in a very loose indefinite way, but I've seen very little indication that how you run your table is really all that incompatible with how I run my table.   Can we get more specific examples perhaps where your DMing philosophy was leading you to make choices contrary to how I would - or how at least you think I would - run the same scene?  Don't just tell me how you do it different.  Show me.  Obviously.  Not a terribly great example.  If the player proposes that they buy a horse, then the player has blessed that course of action.   What I meant was more like, banging to a scene where the player is thrown from his horse because his horse threw a shoe and shied, and the player hasn't even bought a horse, and you the DM say, "Yeah, you did that off stage.  I didn't think shopping was important, but mark off 25 g.p."  However, we'll run with your scene anyway.Provided the player initiated the purchasing of the horse, it's completely normal to presume that there may be secret information.   Often a DM exercises his right to withhold information from a player by rolling skill checks/saving throws/etc. secretly, and then recording the information.   Even if the DM doesn't do this, and its consider 'dodgy' under the groups social contract, if players throw dice that could lead to knowing meta-information not available to their PC's then the expectation is usually that the player play as if he doesn't know that information.   At my table, I generally roll secretly, because I prefer it that way and over the years I've discovered that my players generally prefer that I roll the dice secretly as well because its burdensome to have to pretend you don't know something that in fact you do (and also, table conflict results if one player believes the other is meta-gaming improperly).As you note however, the key here is being fair to the character.  If a player initiates buying a horse, I always give the character the benefit of the doubt.  They'll always try to appraise the horse or horses available and get the best deal possible.  I would never play ‘gotcha’ with a player and tell him, “You forgot to ask for an appraise/diplomacy/sense motive check, so I assumed you failed.”   How detailed I’d make the skill test and how much I would play it out would depend on many factors – how many players are in the campaign, how important is a good quality horse to the scene, how  reasonable is it that there are at least some good horses readily available for purchase?A sample medium complexity resolution would be:a)    I assign some chance that an exceptional quality horse is available, and determine if the PC found something special based on the size of the area and its fame in horse flesh.b)    I make an appraise check for the player to determine if he can find a good horse (or the best horse).  He gets a +2 bonus if he’s trained in Ride or a +6 bonus if he has at least 5 ranks, per my house rules.   Depending on the result, I describe giving accurate or inaccurate information the sorts of horses available.c)    I randomly assign an appraise check to the merchant, and let the merchant appraise the horse.  Depending on the result, I make assumptions about what the merchant is willing to sell the horse for.  (The merchant thinks his bad horse is good, or good horse is bad.)d)    I determine the price the merchant is willing to part with the horse based on a diplomacy check on behalf of the player and any special social modifiers that might impact that (disadvantages like misanthrope, clueless, or second class citizen, visible mutations from a sorcerous bloodline, social rank, relationship to the merchant, xenophobia modifiers, etc.).e)    Player agrees to pay the price on a particular horse of a particular quality.  You now have a horse.That should take about two minutes.  For a more complex scene, I might play out several merchants do actual IC role-play and assign chances that a merchant is dishonest and is deliberately trying to conceal the horse’s quality, this involves sense motive to note the dishonest demeanor and additional opposed skill test to determine the fraud.  However, I’m generally never going to do that unless I only have 1 or 2 players and I know that they are of a more thespian bent, because it’s too boring to the other players to listen to this sort of low stake drama for more than a minute or two.  For large groups, 6 players or more and a journey of no particularly pressing importance, I’ll probably do simple resolution by assuming an average horse and making a single check to determine price – moving the scene along with minimal fuss.Agreed.  However, I’d always essentially offer to play this out in detail.  The player would need to indicate IC that he clearly wasn’t interested, at which point we do a simple resolution and generally speaking I’m going to assume you’ve accepted the risks.  Also note that I consider NPC’s generally far more important than horses, and I’m generally going to lavish more detail on any NPC than I am a horse unless I know with certainty that the player is looking to treat the horse as an NPC (maybe the character is a mounted specialist or the player has explicitly made his close relationship with animals part of his beliefs/interests).  Thus it’s highly unlikely that I’m going to assume ‘average NPCs’, especially when by definition anyone willing to go into spooky places and fight Grell is not average.  As an aside, ordinary mercenaries in my campaign world just will not do that for any price for what I consider really obvious reasons, even in the unlikely case that they’d be willing to work for the PC’s at all (the PC’s would essentially need to have local reputations and high social standing to recruit a mercenary company, and the commander would more or less demand equal standing with the PC’s and the right to retain command of his people even then.)  Even a King bloody well can’t recruit mercenaries to fight a dragon, and the captain of the company would politely as possible tell the King he was daft and ask if the king was really willing to try to arrest the company for refusing to accept contract, and politely note that he might have a hard time hiring mercenaries in the future if word of this sort of treatment gets around which he’s sure it would, because the church of Hastophal the Valiant – which he happens to be in good standing with – is going to find out and make sure word gets around.  There is only one mercenary company in my canon as it stands – The Blackswords – that willingly do ‘hero work’, and they’ve been in the sole employ of the Grand Duke of Harlund for better than 400 years now to the extent that for all intents and purposes they are a regular army unit – household troops of the Grand Duke.  That isn’t to say that you can’t hire spear carriers to fight a Grell, but they won’t be ‘ordinary’ soldiers unless you can make a pretty epic diplomacy check (with expectation of at least some IC speech making).  However, even hiring spear carriers is illegal in most locals unless you’ve obtained a license to form a mercenary company from the local authorities.  Most magistrates frown on forming private armies without their permission, or putting armed parties on the roads or in to the wilderness where they might be mistaken for bandits – and possibly with good cause.  That issue is usually settled well before players start hiring small armies though, either because a PC has knowledge (law) or because the first random encounter with a Knight of the Road has them getting a stern lecture on travelling the King’s road armed without a license and how if they didn’t seem honorable men and he hadn’t heard good things about them, they’d certainly be facing the gallows for banditry right now.  And in some locales, that men’s the PC party better think about paying up with the local Mercenary Guild and/or temple of Hastophal (whose church basically runs the in world equivalent of the Red Cross/United Nations/Geneva Convention) before taking certain sorts of jobs, or there are going to be some really ticked off mercs complaining about scabs.  And as a further aside, ‘Adventurers’ as a concept doesn’t really exist in my campaign world.  Groups like the PC’s are once a century sort of things.  You tell someone you are ‘adventurers’ and they’ll think they mean you are rich tourists.   You tell someone that you are a mercenary company that slays dragons, and they’ll assume (usually rightly I might add) that you are Heroes in the full ancient Greek usage of the word and that the gods must be up to something.  “Oh, you guys are the Argonauts… I’ve heard of you.”My point being that, “We hire some disposable spear carriers off of a price list with the same stake and expediency that we buy rations or ammunition.”, just doesn’t work for me period, and to a large extent that has nothing to do with ‘player stakes’ or ‘scene framing’ and has nothing at all to do in my opinion with a conflict between setting and story goals.  I reject the whole notion that the story exists independent of setting, or that hiring mercenaries is somehow an inherently drama/story goal.  Even if the character had the belief, “I will get others to do my dirty work for me”, it isn’t implied that player is free to not explore that and it just all works out.  Even if I do some sort of medium complexity resolution in under two minutes with player tacit acceptance of risk, the NPCs will be NPCs with personalities and agendas of their own.  This is NOT by my understanding in any fashion antagonistic of a narrative agenda, although the particular way you might conduct the interviews could be (ei, raise a narrative stake as a DM and then don't follow through with it).</blockquote>

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