Players characters evading direct questions

[Reversefigure4]

For what it's worth, here's how the situation might have played out at my table: (cut for brevity)

An excellent summary, and pretty much how it might work at any normal table. But you're forgetting option 3T.

3T
Player: This is total bull****, GM. We should just kill all the NPCs if they won't bend over backwards for no reason.
GM: There's an answer, but I won't tell you it.
Player: This is just like <lengthy angry discourse about unrelated out-of-game incident 4 years ago>.
GM: I was right then too, and I won't change my previous reply to provide more help, even though you're telling me you're frustrated.
Player: <Throws something, curses, and walks off>
GM: See you next week! (Aside) Good thing these players are so terrible they have nowhere else to go, or I'd have no players at all.

[gbaji]

Its actually Brian who is really touchy, Bob is more defiant and does the opposite, but yeah, I can easily see that.

Like, recently, just gently tapping a square on the mat and quietly saying to him "trust me, you wanna move here" was enough to provoke a meltdown.

Maybe it's the way you are doing it? I'd be a bit annoyed with someone telling me what square I should move to as well.

Note the difference between these two scenarios:

"Hey Brian. I think that when you move up to engage the boss gnoll, you should shift your position so that you are not blocking the door, and aren't leaving your back exposed". Then Brian may respond "Huh. That's a good idea. Hmmm... This spot here leaves me exposed to the gnolls on that side. This spot here blocks the rest of the group from getting into the room. But I could move over to this spot, and have my flank to the wall while blocking additional gnolls from getting around me, and be able to engage the big boss gnoll here, while the rest of the party still has room to get into combat by going around that way. Thanks! Great suggestion!".

And:

"Brian. You need to move to this spot". Brian: "Why?". "You just do. It's the best spot. Trust me. You want to move to this spot".

The first provides suggestions as to how to decide what the best spot to move to is, and allows Brian to arrive at that conclusion (hopefully the same one you already did). The second starts at the same point (You've looked at the map, and decided where the best spot is), but has you just telling Brian where to go, and providing no information as to why.

I'm not at all claiming this is the sort of thing that is happening. Just pointing out that there are scenarios where how you pass suggestions or information on to other players can make a huge difference in how those suggesions are received. If you are regularly getting strong negative feedback when you make suggestions to other players about how they could play better, it's probably not a bad idea to consider this.

I guess we are going to have to agree to disagree then. I see the situations as dramatically different regardless of the terminology we use.

Different words? Sure. Functionally different in this context? No. I mean. You can say they are dramatically different, but if you can't say *how* they are dramatically different, then I'm not sure how valuable your position is.

I'm reasonably certain that if we read out the situation to 100 people and then asked them to answer with "yes or no" for each of the questions:

"Was the party mistaken about the significance of the attack on the woods?"

"Did the party misunderstand the significance of the attack on the woods"

Every single person would write "yes" for both. And every single one, if given the opportunity to mention it, would counter with "why did you just ask the same question twice?" If asked why they were "mistaken" or why there was a "misunderstanding" they would give the exact same answer (they didn't realize that the Fae might be interested in the attack on the woods, but they should have").

Let me try coming at this from a different direction then; what, if any, situations would say it is appropriate for the GM to not pipe up and give OOC advice if the PCs are pursuing a path they deem sub-optimal?

Well... You are manipulating the words a bit here. You used the phrase "sub-optimal". That's a very very broad term. Obviously, if picking the lock versus smashing in the door work equally well, but one maybe makes more noise and is thus "sub-optimal" (relative to the other), I would not interject at all. So there's an obvious case right there.

But that's not the case we're examining here. We're talking about a situation where the entire party is completely blocked and unable to continue the adventure because they have failed to pick up on a critical clue and use it properly. They literally went to the Seelie Court to get assistance with the werewolves, and are unable to do that one thing becuase of this. So in this case, I'd hint the heck out of things until they "got it". If I intentionally provided information in my scenario for them to use in a specific way, and they succeeded in getting that information (took the action which got them the "prize"), I'm going to make sure that's not squandered by them forgetting about it later on, or failing to understand what the significance of that information is when it's needed later in the scenario.

Let me put this in another way. Consider my previous example of the locked door with the key hidden under a rock nearby. I may have written into my scenario "If the party goes and talks to Joe the handyman, he will tell them about the hidden key". So... If the party talks to Joe and he tells them about they key, and then go to the house and try to get in, but then stop and try to figure out how to get in, and are talking about breaking a window, or smashing down the door, or some other means, I'm going to at some point tell them "Um... Guys. You remember that Joe told you there's a hidden key under a rock nearby, right?". Which will get them back on track. If, however, they never thought to go talk to Joe and therefore didn't learn about the key, then I'm not going to tell them. Yes. There's a key there. Now, if one of them thinks "hey! Let's look around for a hidden key", then they might find it (search rolls). But I'm not going to tell them, because they have no reason to know about the key. It's up to them to think that there might be one, and then decide to look for it.


Similar deal with your scenario. If they'd never questioned the werewolf and learned about the planned attack on the woods, I would never tell them this. They must figure out other means to convince the members of the court present to help them. But since they did take the previous action of capturing a werewolf and questioning it, and did learn about the attack, then yeah, I'm going to remind them about this when they get to the court and need to use that information to get help. It's literally why they are there, and why I made that planned attack part of my scenario in the first place, so why on earth block my own scenario here? Of course, I'd also assume that they would not have gone to the court without having first obtained a "way to get them to help us" in the first place. That's one of the additional reasons I find this entire sequence very strange. Why did they go there if they didn't have a plan already in place as to what they would say that they had a reasonable belief would get them help? I'm assuming random people don't just show up at the Seelie Court cause they feel like it. This is presuambly at least a somewhat exclusive group and you'd only be there if you really had a reason to be there.

If not "party tells them about the planned attack so the Fae will help them" then why were they there? And if that was the reason, and they were for some reason fumbling around, failing to provide the one thing they were there to talk about, then yeah.... you should prompt them at that point.

I can't quite follow your analogy. Why did they go to the quickie lube in the first place if they didn't see the connection? It feels like a step is missing in the middle. And if this happened to me at the gaming table, I would absolutely ask the GM about the missing step, I wouldn't just passively sit back and blame them for not volunteering the information.

Why did the party go to the Seelie Court? I'm assuming that some NPC told them "go there and ask for help". So let's assume that someone told you to "go to Quickie Lube and ask for help". Same deal. But if you don't know what to say to get that help, you're going to stand around going "um... um... can you help us?". Yes. Not a perfect analogy. Let's assume that what they need is to take a cross country car drive, and someone who knows what the light symbol means knows that they need to get it checked before driving that distance, and tells them to go to the Lube place and get help. But doesn't (apparently) tell them how to actually go about doing it. So the party is telling the QL employees "we need help on a cross country drive", and the QL folks are like "Ok. What help do you need", and getting "help driving cross country" over and over. That's not helpful, right? At some point, someone needs to say "Um... We have this oil lamp looking light on our dash", and then the QL folks will know that they need an oil change.

Now. One would assume that this would actually play out one of two different ways:

1. The NPC friend would not just say "go to the QL to get help with making your cross country trip". That person would say "Go to QL and tell them about the oil lamp light, and they'll fix your car, so you can take your cross country trip", right? I mean, he wouldn't be that obtuse in his directions. Similarly, someone had to have told the party to go to the Seelie Court, right? Why didn't that person say "Go to the Seelie and tell them that the werewolves are planning to attack the woods. That will almost certainly get some faction to assist with the werewolves and clear them out of the tenement for you"?

Do you see how you can provide assistance/hints to the players by using "helpful NPCs" along the way?

2. Assuming no help or suggestions as to what to do or say when arriving at the QL, the GM could have the QL ask more direct questions. "Ok. You need help getting cross country. What's preventing you from doing that? Oh. A Friend told you your car wouldn't work. Hmmm... Do you know why? NO? Hmmm.. Ok. are there any odd lights on the dash that you've noticed. Anything that is out of the ordinary. Oh! An oil lamp light. Well.... you've come to the right place!". Similarly, you could have had one of the Seelie Court folks say "Ok. You need help with these werewolves in your tenement building. Well, we don't have any specific interest in that building, so what else do you know that might make this worth our while? You don't know? Well, is there anything else the werewolves are doing or planning other than just attacking people in the building? Oh. They're turning people? Ok. Do you know why? Do you know if they are planning anything other than just hanging out in your tenement building? Oh. One of them said they're building forces for an attack on Muir Woods. Well... go talk to <whomever>. They're super interested in anything that might threaten those woods, so you might get help there".

Again. Even if you haven't provided direction beforehand, you can draw information out of the players by using NPC dialogue. Don't make the NPCs just static objects passively waiting for the right code words to be spoken to them. This is not a CRPG. NPCs are allowed to be curious, and might very much be interested in what exactly is bringing these people to their court, and may not be satisfied with a mere "werewolves are bad" answer. Well, we all know they are bad, and a threat, and whatnot, but why is this specific group specifically a threat and why should we care about this? If I were one of the court, I'd certainly dig further into this than just surface level questions.

You had the NPCs just repeat the same surface level question over and over, and when they didn't get a different answer, they kinda gave up. And that's doubly strange because, as the GM, you *know* there's another bigger and more legitimate reason for what they are asking. There's a balance point between having NPCs act as though they have GM knowledge and intentionally playing the NPCs super obtuse. I think you went too far in the "obtuse" direction.

Regardless, no, actually, I am not assuming that, because the characters very much DON'T have any knowledge of the fairy world. In White Wolf, magical mists steal people's memories of the Fey, and they had never interacted with fairies outside of the pookha in their party before. Me having people ask them what the werewolf's plan was is throwing them a bone so they can then direct them to the Baron who oversees Muir Woods and would be motivated to help them stop the attack. I just never figured that all four of them would forget the information they learned in the previous scene (a few minutes earlier in real time) or refuse to answer a direct question regardless of not realizing how relevant it is.

And yet. That's what happened. I'm still confused why they were at the court in the first place though. Again, at my table, this would have been totally hashed out beforehand, so there would be no confusion. Was there any discussion by the players as to why they were there, and what they were doing there? It just seems like you had multiple opportunities to remind them about what the werewolf told them, so that they'd not be showing up "empty handed", but you just kinda let them go off with no plan? And then fumble around for hours?

One part of the GMs job is also to kinda keep the game moving. So for that reason alone, just remind them of the info so the game can keep going. This seems like you just let them get stuck in a rut and run around in circles for a very long time, for no real reason or benefit. Remember also that as the GM, part of your job is to assist the players in completing the scenario you have written for them. And yes, there's a balance point between railroading and letting them flail around aimlessly. But, as a general rule, if your players don't know what to do next, assuming they are idiots who can't figure out obvious clues is never going to be productive. The assumption you should make is that the clues you have provided maybe aren't quite as obvious as you thought they were, and that you need to fix this.

What actually happened in the game was: Bob created an illusion, gave it very specific instructions, and then got mad when it continued to follow those instructions rather than taking the initiative ignore the instructions and do something different when it would have been beneficial for him.

Someone (I think Gbaji?) made the suggestion that all illusions and dominated characters be controlled by the caster's player as a second PC to stop this from happening. Presumably, in character, this would mean the caster controls them like an extension of their own body through a telepathic link.*

That's a bit of a modification of what I said. The player should run the illusion as if it was a second PC. The character gives instructions to follow. The point being that it should always be the player who decides how those instructions should be interpreted, not the GM (barring situations like devious demons, wish spells, etc). The whole bit of it requring some kind of telepathic link is your own strawman invention (which I don't recall you even claiming in the original thread, so that's kinda from left field).

When there is a disagreement between the player and the GM as to how the character's instructions to an illusion or dominated creature should be interpreted, the player should win. Because otherwise, you are going to have a GM playing semantic "gotcha" games. And there are very few things in RPGs that player hate more than that. No one appreciates a GM saying "well, you said <whatever> and so that means that <something unintended by the player> happens".

I said this works fine from a game-play perspective, but it greatly limits the setting. Because you can't have stories about a construct that grows beyond its original programming to discover its humanity (Terminator 2, Data or The Doctor in Star Trek, Bicentennial Man, Pinocchio, etc.), you can't have villains who rebelled against their creator (Blade Runner, Frankenstein, any number of rogue AIs), and you can't even have comedy scenes with neurotic, dumb, or less than helpful constructs (Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Star Wars). Also, it limits player options as they can no longer play self-aware constructs like the war-forged in Eberron.

Sure. And if you want to run out a scenario where the sentient-like illusion that Bob has been mantaining for 5 game years has begun making its own decisions and taking on its own personality and explore that, great! But that's not remotely what was going on here. So let's cut out the nonsense counter, please?

This was an illusion spell, cast in a specific location for a specific reason and period of time, and given instructions by the caster/creator as to how to act. When a situation came up that had not been explictly defined in those instructions, you decided to have the illusion do the least useful thing possible, while the player wanted it to do something else that was actually useful. Worse still, your rationalization was that Bob had told the illusion to "act like me", so you reasoned that since Bob's past behavior has been to run/cower from a monster attacking, so would the illusion. But Bob is the final arbiter on what "Bob would do" in a given situation. I'm reasonably certain that if Bob was an illusion and not a person vulnerable to damage from the monster, he would not cower. And even if you disagree, that's not the point. Bob gets to decide how someone "acting like Bob" would act in any given situation, not you. Cause... you know... he's actually Bob and you are not.

This was then straw-manned into "Lol Talakeal wants constructs to turn on the PCs immediately for no reason!" which was not something that ever happened in my game, or ever would happen in my game. If a player created construct ever did go rogue, it would be the end result of a long storyline that was RPed out in detail, not just something random for the lolz.

So a strawman of a strawman? Interesting. It's like a hall of mirrors in here. You claimed that's what folks were saying. All we were saying was that this particular ruling was wrong. Well, and there may have been some observation that this may represent of pattern of you "interpreting dominated creatures and illusions" in ways that those who cast the spells don't agree with. You used a couple other examples in that thread as well, and in every case, the common factor was "I get to say how the NPC/illusion acts even if it's not what the caster of the dominate/illusion thinks should happen" (or even very obviously the exact opposite of what they would want to have happen). Going from there to "Talakeal always does this" is a fair stretch. I can't say what you will always do, or what you want, or anything else. I can only respond to specific scenarios and give my own opinion on those specific things.

IIRC, in that same thread, you also claimed that if the same illusion spell was used to create illusionary guards to provide cover for the fact that the party killed the real guards guarding the castle, that these guards would raise the alarm to warn those inside about the intruders (aka: the party) since "they should act the same as the guards they are illusions of". So... yeah. Pretty sure that's falls into the heading of "exact opposite of what the spellcaster intended".

But in each of those specific scenarios, you did tend to rule in the "I'm going to have the creature/illusion do something that is clearly not what the player wants, because my interpretation of the instructions is what matters". I'm not going to go back down that rabbit hole, but I will correct you as to what my own position and argument actually was. And it had nothing to do with broad proclaimations about what you want. It was 100% about allowing the players to control things that they should have control of. And illusions and dominated creatures absolutely falls into that category IMO.


Additional points:

Someone, I think Gbaji, said that the way to avoid such things was to make it so that magical constructs (he later clarified that he was only talking about illusion constructs and not ones with corporeal bodies) would always act as perfect extensions of their creators will rather than being able to think for themselves. I said I didn't like that idea because it limits storytelling opportunities for plots and NPCs.

You are muddling up the distinction between the player and the character (like you did above, with the whole "telepathic link" bit). The player runs the created/controlled creature. The character decides what commands/instructions are given, but it's the player who decides how the creature/illusions actually should act on those commands. And yes. You can apply this to longer duration (or even permananet) creatures as well. But I'd still be super cautious here, at least with PCs. See. You can run a story where an NPCs creation develops its own personality, turns on its creator, or does <whatever> all you want. Because you are the GM, and you are running the NPC who created the creature and the creature itself. But if this is something cast/created by a PC, then the player is running the PC who cast/created the creature and the player is running the creature itself. You need to get buy in from the player to agree to run with that sort of storyline in your game, in exactly the same way you might run something by the player if you were going to do something similar to their actual PC.

If you ask players ahead of time, you might find many of them quite interested in a storyline about their construct/familiar/whatever gaining its own self sentience and "moving on" in some way from control of their creator. And they may even help facilitate this. But this should not be something "done to" the player, but something "done with" that player.

Different groups might well have different ideas of what an "informed" decision is.

I think at the very least when a player says they're making a decision that makes no sense to you, you have to make sure the player didn't forget something their character would know or isn't misunderstanding something about how the rules or game world work.

That requires talking out of character and basically asking "what is it you're trying to accomplish here" The most likely response is probably #1 - they forgot a vital clue, but it might be that they misunderstood something about the rules or basic situation. It's up to the GM to correct this because the GM is both the character's senses and the one who decides how the rules and game world works.

Absolutely correct. As I suggested earlier, there's a balance point to this, but "informed" also includes basic awareness of how the game setting (and the things/people within it) works in addition to mere facts and data about it. So realizing that "this group of NPCs is probably going to be quite interested in knowing that the werewolves plan to attack somewhere other than in the city" is something the characters might/should innately realize, so if the players reason for not telling them is that they don't think they'd be interested in that information, that's absolutely within the range of things the GM should correct them on.

As to number 3? Same deal. To me, that's just normal GMing. If the players do something and you aren't sure why they are doing it, or what they are thinking, you ask. So saying "why not?" is perfectly reasonable. I'd actually argue that a GM who doesn't ask this is going to eternally have problems with their players doing random things that make no sense. If you don't ask these sorts of questions, then you have no idea "why" the players are making the decisions they are making, and have no way of knowing if what they are doing is the result of a gross misunderstanding of something their characters would/should know is not correct.


I really do think a heck of a lot of this boils back to the basic concept of having open communication between the GM and the players. Everyone should ideally be on the same page all of the time. There should be no surprises (at least in terms of what the PCs are doing, and why they are doing it). The GM can certainly surprise the players, but the only surprises the players should foist on the GM is when/if they come up with some really super clever thing. But that's only a "surprise" until they tell the GM this. And, just as with "really bad ideas", it's just as useful to tell the GM your "really good ideas" well ahead of time too. I can work with the PCs when they come up with those things. Heck. Player comes up with some out of the box idea, I'll ask questions, and they'll ask questions, and we'll have a back and forth while this new/interesting idea goes from "half baked" to "fully formed". I now know exactly what this plan is and what the thinking is behind it, and the player has some confidence that it will actually work since we've already gone back and forth on the structural considerations of the plan and I've confirmed for the player that "this seems like something that may work" (ie: there are no absolute game stoppers that they should know about). That's not to say that there may not be other things they know nothing about, which may interact with "the plan", but at least the plan itself is sound.

A lot of this absolutely depends on trust though. The GM has to trust that the players aren't going to use this sort of process to manipulate things in some way, or wrest additional information out of him that they should not know. And the players have to trust that the GM isn't going to just use this planning session to think of some new thing to put into the game to block their new plan (and yes, I've seen GMs that get almost a "spinning gears in the head" look on their face as they're trying to think of some way to block what you just came up with, which is never a good sight). But yeah. If you don't have this, it's not going to work so well. The main problem with a lack of trust is the simple fact that players will more often than not forget or misunderstand something you've told them and come up with a "really bad/dumb plan", than the will come up with "a really clever plan", so if their standard MO is to not tell you ahead of time, this will most often result in negative results for them.

[Slipjig]

But it also means that as players, we learn that "being stupid/unwary/reckless" is something bad that will be "punished" by the GM. So we get wary. We want to play "right", so we overthink, we don't commit to dangerous plans, we distrust every NPC. We play in a cautious, boring way, because we don't want to wreck the game. Even when we get the fancy of trying something risky or outright stupid just because it's fun, we get blocked by the fact that the consequence of our actions may ruin the adventure for the other players.
And the less we know about the possible consequences of our actions, the more we play in a conservative, control-obsessed, cautious way.

Hmm. To me, that sounds like an upgrade to the typical table, which tends to be full of silly, happy-go-lucky, "nothing bad will ever happen to me no matter how big of an idiot I am" characters (all of whom would be dead in the first 10 pages of any classic fantasy novel).
I don't want my players to be paranoid about EVERYTHING, but I also don't want them to feel like their choices have no consequences, and that they are fated to win no matter how sophomoric their behavior.

[Quertus]

So, are we decided that the reason this happens is because the players have forgotten the relevant details and then lie about it to save face?

Nope.

While I appreciate optimism of all kinds, my experience with your threads and communication style leads me to believe that when the players say they don't trust you to communicate clearly to them and think youre trying to play word games, theyre probably being sincere.

Yup.

Now personally, were I in the position of having both strangers on the internet and people I know in person and regularly talk with doubting my ability to communicate clearly, and were I also inclined to a certain amount of introspection, I might draw the conclusion that I am in fact not communicating clearly, that this is a problem of mine, and that I should deal with it. But that's just me.

Same.

Or, if you want an example from this very thread, NichG blew up at me because he insisted I was "making up stuff to win an argument" rather than accepting my explanation that I thought he was talking about CRPGs as a whole rather than his three specific examples (which I have never played and have no ability to comment on one way or the other).

No comment on how often it's true, but you do come off that way more often than I think you'd prefer.

That's more your players' problem, I have to say. They probably have their own demons to handle, one way or another.

That being said, I think the thing to learn from this thread is: as a GM, if you get confused by what the players do or want, address it OOC immediately by asking them about it, without assuming anything, and explain things if it's something the PCs should be aware of but the players have forgotten, misunderstood when it was explained the first time, or simply ignored due to not paying attention.

I’ll do my best.

Expect an update in a few months where it backfired on me horribly! :p

That does seem to be another predictable pattern of your threads...

I see where you are coming from. But again, to me this is a last resort when the game is about to go off the rails rather than something you do at the first sign of odd behavior.


From a social perspective, I have had far more people go off on me because I pointed out that they might be making a mistake than if I stayed silent. People are really touchy if they think you are telling them what to do or criticizing their decisions. I can come up with a dozen examples just off the top of my head where the GM asking an innocent question caused a player to throw a tantrum. Heck, even as another player it is an issue. Last summer, for example, I played with another group that had none of my usual players in it, and at one point the cleric attacked the monster when we had a PC at negative HP. I said "Are you sure you don't want to heal X instead?" and the guy exploded at me. It was literally the only drama I ever had with that group, and it could have been avoided by just biting my tongue and letting the player go through with, what I felt was, a tactical mistake.


From a game perspective, its really hard to do this without tipping your hat that this is the "correct" course of action. Which is what I was getting at before the thread got derailed with all the discussion of the definition of optimal; if you ask your players why they aren't doing "the correct thing" then you are going to let them know what the correct thing is, and they are going to be tempted to do it, which imo encourages both meta-gaming and linear adventures, whereas a game that allows the PCs to fail can go off in all sorts of crazy directions organically.

For other people suffering from this problem, I might point out that "Don't you want to heal X instead" is you trying to play their character, whereas my example of (paraphrased), "wait, I don't understand: you want to talk to the Fey, because you want them to help, but I don't understand how you plan to convince them to do so." isn't.

But for your table, where you've got the combination of your players, their (perception of) their history with you, and your tendency to try to control the actions of the (other) PCs? I don't have a good strategy for that scenario. At least not one that doesn't involve tech you've never been willing to use, and that, in this case, wouldn't be as effective / as likely to produce good results as in the cases you've rejected it.

I'll ponder the problem.

EDIT (darn my sloth compared to y'all ninjas): Do these! (as I try to play Talakeal )

I actually have a solution for that one: use "Wait, I'm confused. What's going down and why?" Being sure to offer no information or suggestions untill you can ascertain that they have actual facts wrong. Then you just correct or offer the in-character factual information.

Alternatively, "can you explain your thought process here?" is a good one.

Eh? I'm not getting your line of thinking here. If I'm a fire figther, and my job/purpose is to fight fires (or I'm superman, or whatever), then you are correct.

But, as someone who lives in an area occasionally hit by major wildfires, if someone's house is on fire, I'm very much interested in where the fire is headed, whether I need to evacuate, whether I'm at risk of losing my life/stuff, etc. My job is not to put out someone else's house, but I do still care about my house.

That is far more relevant to the scenario at hand. The various fae factions care about their own territories and interests. They may not care at all about the "fire" in the tenement building. The may very very much care if that "fire" is going to spread to Muir Woods though.

And this is the problem, the disconnect that happens when a subject matter expert (you) talks to an ignoramus (me).

I did admit that the "I don't care - where is it headed" line of conversation makes more sense for a fire than most any other example, so at least we're seemingly on the same page that far. But in my neck of the woods, while fire is definitely a threat, my area (most of my area?) isn't known for major wildfires, so we're not as poised to hear, "where is it heading?" in quite the same context. If you moved here, and someone called you saying, "my house is on fire!" and your first response was "where is it heading?", I don't expect them to take it as well as you seem to expect. And while a "there is a fire that doesn't affect me" prompt could certainly have a "how big is it, which way is it headed" type of inquiry, it would be mixed in with questions about how long, anyone in danger, who's doing what to take care of it, etc, without violating social norms. But that moves us further away from the original scenario.

So, yes, while I may agree with your priorities, especially given your experience, it still violates "expected social norms" enough to merit investigation - a red flag to poke at when my house isn't burning down. Once the smoke clears (heh), and I learned of your background, it would make sense, and the "pod person" red flag would be cleared. But, until then (to mix my metaphors or whatever), I'd expect the PCs to slowly back away from the Fey and their odd focus on this (comparatively) irrelevant question. Or (as I've mentioned) for different PCs to view it as the Fey trying to get free information, and to be cagey about giving people who have already said they aren't helping them anything. Or other perspectives, none of which make this a productive line of questioning.

[gbaji]

I did admit that the "I don't care - where is it headed" line of conversation makes more sense for a fire than most any other example, so at least we're seemingly on the same page that far. But in my neck of the woods, while fire is definitely a threat, my area (most of my area?) isn't known for major wildfires, so we're not as poised to hear, "where is it heading?" in quite the same context. If you moved here, and someone called you saying, "my house is on fire!" and your first response was "where is it heading?", I don't expect them to take it as well as you seem to expect. And while a "there is a fire that doesn't affect me" prompt could certainly have a "how big is it, which way is it headed" type of inquiry, it would be mixed in with questions about how long, anyone in danger, who's doing what to take care of it, etc, without violating social norms. But that moves us further away from the original scenario.

Sure. But it's your analogy. And the analogy works better with the assumption that this is a wildfire and there is a concern about it spreading. We are, after all, talking about werewolves and Fae factions. So while the Fae may not care much at all if a "fire" (ie: werewolves) is just in some tenement building in the city, they would be very much concerned if that "fire" (ie: werewolves) is going to spread to areas that they do care about. So where your analogy breaks down is in the exact difference between how you and I are interpreting it. Yes. If it's just a house fire and has zero chance of spreading, then the response "where is it heading?" would seem strange.

But... The only reason the Fae actually care about the werewolves at all is whether the werewolves are "spreading", right? That's literally an assumption baked into the scenario Talakael has presented to us. They don't care about werewolf activity in town (a house fire), but do care if the werewolves are going to expand outward and attack areas outside the city (a wildfire). So if we are to use a fire based scenario, then "wiildfire that might spread to affect us" is absolutely the relevant model to use here, and thus the question "where is it heading?" is not only not strange, but absolutely what would/should be expected. This is literally the *only* question (related to the werewolves) we should expect them to be asking about.

So, yes, while I may agree with your priorities, especially given your experience, it still violates "expected social norms" enough to merit investigation - a red flag to poke at when my house isn't burning down. Once the smoke clears (heh), and I learned of your background, it would make sense, and the "pod person" red flag would be cleared. But, until then (to mix my metaphors or whatever), I'd expect the PCs to slowly back away from the Fey and their odd focus on this (comparatively) irrelevant question. Or (as I've mentioned) for different PCs to view it as the Fey trying to get free information, and to be cagey about giving people who have already said they aren't helping them anything. Or other perspectives, none of which make this a productive line of questioning.

Well, and this is where the whole "have open conversations/dialogue" bit comes in. I guess maybe I'm a bit chatty when I GM (probably more than most). I would never just have my NPCs sit there and give short direct short answers to direct questions and nothing else. If I was running a Fae noble/whatever, and someone came up to me asking for help with a pack of werewolves in thier building, I would not just stop with "that's not important/interesting to me". I would have the Fae ask about the werewolves, and then explain that "We don't normally intervene in werewolf problems in the city", but then I'd follow it up (cause... chatty) with "You see. We Fae are mostly interested in areas outside the city. We maintain various areas based on our individual factions and abilities and how they relate to these various areas. Lord Bulwig over there controls the fields just to the south of town <insert additional information about his area, followers, etc>. Lady Gerring over there controls the area around the river all the way down to the lake <insert more information about her people/area>. And Baron Dodad over there, he's mostly interested in forests and woods <insert info about his stuff> and there are rumors that he's set up a new enclave in Muir Woods". See. Now we've given some infomation, and a subtle hint to the players by reminding them about the woods. I'd then follow that up with more conversation "And while we don't normally involve ourselves with activities in town. We will do so if those things threaten to spill out into our own areas of interest" (another not so subtle hint). And if those hints aren't enough, follow up with: "We would be greatly interested in your werewolf problem if we knew that their activities may lead to actions that affect us in our areas, so if that is the case, I would suggest that you go speak to the various lords and ladies who may be impacted. If that were the case, of course! Oh! I see the buffet has opened up. Can't miss the stuffed artichokes! Ta ta!".


Obviously, you don't just rattle this off like a script, but encourage the players to actually engage in dialogue. But you want to make sure you give the players some kind of guidance and direction if they at all appear to be lost or have forgotten what they are there for, or don't seem to be able to clue in to what they should be doing to get what they are there for. Ideally, each step in that conversation would include the PCs asking questions like "what do you guys do?" and "where do you guys have influence/interests?" and "what sort of thing might make you interested in the werewolves activities?". Again though, that's "ideally". Sometimes, players are just a bit passive. When that happens, you can't be passive as well, or it'll be like two wallflowers on a date at a school dance, both standing next to each other akwardly saying nothing. If the players aren't asking the obvious questions, then lead them a bit.

That last bit is highly table dependent. Some tables have players that are super active and inquisitive and will practically drill you with questions about everything, and engage every single NPC, and try to get every scrap of information they can out of them (they're "chatty" as well). But some tables will not. In the later case, the GM really has to take the initiative here. Otherwise, social encounters like this will siimly fail. I've also found that if you engage in this kind of "guided social encounter" a few times, the players will start to become more comfortable with them. They'll get the feel for what sort of stuff should be talked about, and what kind of information they should be looking to get, and they'll start actually being more proactive themselves. But that will never happen if both sides are just barely talking to each other.

[Talakeal]

No comment on how often it's true, but you do come off that way more often than I think you'd prefer.

Absolutely. Certainly far more often than I would prefer.

For whatever reason, something about the way I talk means people tend to assume that I am lying rather than merely having a miscommunication.

For what's its worth, its something that happens to me frequently irl as well as on the forum. I don't know how many times growing up when my parents would adamantly insist that I had told them an absurd and self-destructive lie for the sake of causing drama. For example, all of my friends parents were convinced their kids lied to get out of trouble, but my parents are convinced I lie to get myself *into* trouble for some inexplicable reason rather than simply accepting that we had a misunderstanding of some sort.

An excellent summary, and pretty much how it might work at any normal table. But you're forgetting option 3T.

3T
Player: This is total bull****, GM. We should just kill all the NPCs if they won't bend over backwards for no reason.
GM: There's an answer, but I won't tell you it.
Player: This is just like <lengthy angry discourse about unrelated out-of-game incident 4 years ago>.
GM: I was right then too, and I won't change my previous reply to provide more help, even though you're telling me you're frustrated.
Player: <Throws something, curses, and walks off>
GM: See you next week! (Aside) Good thing these players are so terrible they have nowhere else to go, or I'd have no players at all.

Lol!

Four years pssssh, that's child's play. Try thirty.

In all serious though, its the lack of the green part that is the problem imo. Between my processing disorder and (I presume) my players ego problems, they never outright tell me they are frustrated. Atleast, not until long after it is too late to rectify the situation. Instead, they leave me to pick up on it, and if I do it wrong, well, that also prompts an explosion.

Maybe it's the way you are doing it? I'd be a bit annoyed with someone telling me what square I should move to as well.

Note the difference between these two scenarios:

"Hey Brian. I think that when you move up to engage the boss gnoll, you should shift your position so that you are not blocking the door, and aren't leaving your back exposed". Then Brian may respond "Huh. That's a good idea. Hmmm... This spot here leaves me exposed to the gnolls on that side. This spot here blocks the rest of the group from getting into the room. But I could move over to this spot, and have my flank to the wall while blocking additional gnolls from getting around me, and be able to engage the big boss gnoll here, while the rest of the party still has room to get into combat by going around that way. Thanks! Great suggestion!".

And:

"Brian. You need to move to this spot". Brian: "Why?". "You just do. It's the best spot. Trust me. You want to move to this spot".

The first provides suggestions as to how to decide what the best spot to move to is, and allows Brian to arrive at that conclusion (hopefully the same one you already did). The second starts at the same point (You've looked at the map, and decided where the best spot is), but has you just telling Brian where to go, and providing no information as to why.

I'm not at all claiming this is the sort of thing that is happening. Just pointing out that there are scenarios where how you pass suggestions or information on to other players can make a huge difference in how those suggestions are received. If you are regularly getting strong negative feedback when you make suggestions to other players about how they could play better, it's probably not a bad idea to consider this.

Perhaps.

I was trying to give subtle hints so as not to bring the whole game to a halt and minimize the amount of OOC information I was giving.

Of course, I have also had Brian explode on me for saying too much. Sometimes I feel like there is a no win situation; if I say too little he gets mad at me for being cryptic, if I say too much he gets mad at me for being condescending. He really just doesn't like being critiqued, and is going to find an excuse to explode no matter how it is phrased in my experience.

Different words? Sure. Functionally different in this context? No. I mean. You can say they are dramatically different, but if you can't say *how* they are dramatically different, then I'm not sure how valuable your position is.

I'm reasonably certain that if we read out the situation to 100 people and then asked them to answer with "yes or no" for each of the questions:

"Was the party mistaken about the significance of the attack on the woods?"

"Did the party misunderstand the significance of the attack on the woods"

Every single person would write "yes" for both. And every single one, if given the opportunity to mention it, would counter with "why did you just ask the same question twice?" If asked why they were "mistaken" or why there was a "misunderstanding" they would give the exact same answer (they didn't realize that the Fae might be interested in the attack on the woods, but they should have").

Yes, those two statements, despite having different wording, are synonymous.

That is not what I am saying I meant though.

What I am trying to say, regardless of the wording, is that there is a fundamental difference between coming to a bad conclusion because you incorrectly analyzed accurate data and coming to a bad conclusion because you correctly analyzed inaccurate date.

Letting the players fail because the GM failed to accurately convey information to the PCs in a way they can comprehend is a bad thing.

Letting the players fail because they came to their own conclusion based on an accurate understanding of the information that was presented to them is ok; and to an extent necessary to prevent railroading.

Again, within reason, these are general principles, not absolutes.

But that's not the case we're examining here. We're talking about a situation where the entire party is completely blocked and unable to continue the adventure because they have failed to pick up on a critical clue and use it properly. They literally went to the Seelie Court to get assistance with the werewolves, and are unable to do that one thing becuase of this. So in this case, I'd hint the heck out of things until they "got it". If I intentionally provided information in my scenario for them to use in a specific way, and they succeeded in getting that information (took the action which got them the "prize"), I'm going to make sure that's not squandered by them forgetting about it later on, or failing to understand what the significance of that information is when it's needed later in the scenario.

Let me put this in another way. Consider my previous example of the locked door with the key hidden under a rock nearby. I may have written into my scenario "If the party goes and talks to Joe the handyman, he will tell them about the hidden key". So... If the party talks to Joe and he tells them about they key, and then go to the house and try to get in, but then stop and try to figure out how to get in, and are talking about breaking a window, or smashing down the door, or some other means, I'm going to at some point tell them "Um... Guys. You remember that Joe told you there's a hidden key under a rock nearby, right?". Which will get them back on track. If, however, they never thought to go talk to Joe and therefore didn't learn about the key, then I'm not going to tell them. Yes. There's a key there. Now, if one of them thinks "hey! Let's look around for a hidden key", then they might find it (search rolls). But I'm not going to tell them, because they have no reason to know about the key. It's up to them to think that there might be one, and then decide to look for it.

You are assuming rails where none exist. Which is a problem with my players, as well as most people on the forums. For whatever reason, players assume everything is a railroad.

It was the players idea to ask the Seelie for help. They could have done so in countless ways. The one they went decided to go for, just telling the Seelie to destroy the fomorians because they exist, didn't work out because they failed their persuasion roll. (Admittedly, it was a rather difficult roll because it was essentially a suicide mission, but as cold as the dice happened to be, it didn't really matter).

I knew, OOC, that one of the fey whom they hadn't met yet was the Baron of Muir Woods, and would be compelled to help them if he was aware of the attack, so I did everything I could in character to get the players to spill the beans so one of the other Seelie could point them in his direction. They didn't bite, and instead made a deal with some goblin terrorists to blow the werewolves up. The game continues in a new direction.

I don't see how this is fundamentally different than your rock scenario except that I was trying to throw them in character hints to get them unstuck.


Were you there for the thread about my party getting stuck in the tomb? Because it is pretty much the quintessential example of this.

Spoiler: The One about my players being stuck in an empty tomb for three hous.

Show

I was running a dungeon layout I got online. It had a "false tomb" at the start to detour grave robbers, with a trap-door leading to the real tomb. There was a switch on a statue that, if pressed, causes one of the fake sarcophagi to roll back and reveal the trap-door. I made the switch real easy to find because I didn't want to waste time, but, of course, the dice crapped out on the PCs and the rogue rolled a natural 1 to search the room.
Brian, who was playing an earth-mage, then cast a speak with stone spell to ask the statue. This was, imo, a brilliant solution , and I spent a moment coming up with a personality for the statue and asked what he says to it. He then commands it open the way. I asked him to actually RP the conversation, he refused, so I told him to roll a charisma check to get the information, and gain the dice crapped out.
(Now, later, this turned out to have been a miscommunication. I thought he was refusing to talk in character and just wanted to resolve the conversation as a dice roll, which is something he has done many times in the past with the argument "I am not as charismatic as my character so I shouldn't have to think out an argument", but it was actually that he thought the spell was akin to a divination spell that forced answers from the stone rather than a spell akin to speak with animals that merely allowed him to talk to rocks. This miscommunication ate up the previous thread entirely, but was mostly orthogonal to the actual situation imo.)
At this point, the players just shut down. They had a party of 12 competent, fully rested, mid level adventurers, including a master earth-bender and a master conjurer, all completely stymied by a simple hidden door after two blown rolls. They couldn't think of anything, either magical or mundane, that could progress the adventure, and I spent three hours of real time trying to get them to try something, anything. I could think of literally dozens of ways they could have bypasses this obstacle, none them requiring specific or hidden information, but nothing. Because after two blown rolls, they had convinced themselves that I was shooting down every possible solution until they came up with some sort of "magic bullet".

Why did the party go to the Seelie Court? I'm assuming that some NPC told them "go there and ask for help".

According to the module I am running, the Changelings of San Francisco hold a big party at the Coit Tower on May 10th that they call the Starlit Night. As a new Changeling in town, Bob was invited so that he could he meet people and learn about them and their culture. Like any court gathering, there is of course politicking, forming of alliances, and trying to figure out whose side everyone is on.

1. The NPC friend would not just say "go to the QL to get help with making your cross country trip". That person would say "Go to QL and tell them about the oil lamp light, and they'll fix your car, so you can take your cross country trip", right? I mean, he wouldn't be that obtuse in his directions. Similarly, someone had to have told the party to go to the Seelie Court, right? Why didn't that person say "Go to the Seelie and tell them that the werewolves are planning to attack the woods. That will almost certainly get some faction to assist with the werewolves and clear them out of the tenement for you"?

Do you see how you can provide assistance/hints to the players by using "helpful NPCs" along the way?

That's what I was trying to do!

If they had told ANY changeling about the attack on Muir Woods, they would have been pointed directly to the Baron, but they didn't despite being asked repeatedly what the werewolves were planning. Nobody knows about it except the PCs and one of their werewolf allies who knows next to nothing about the Seelie. Although in hindsight I suppose I could have had said werewolf take the initiative, but that would require both me knowing about the PCs plan in advance as well as their reluctance to talk about the planned attack, as well as being willing to deprive them of their agency both IC and OOC).

2. Assuming no help or suggestions as to what to do or say when arriving at the QL, the GM could have the QL ask more direct questions. "Ok. You need help getting cross country. What's preventing you from doing that? Oh. A Friend told you your car wouldn't work. Hmmm... Do you know why? NO? Hmmm.. Ok. are there any odd lights on the dash that you've noticed. Anything that is out of the ordinary. Oh! An oil lamp light. Well.... you've come to the right place!". Similarly, you could have had one of the Seelie Court folks say "Ok. You need help with these werewolves in your tenement building. Well, we don't have any specific interest in that building, so what else do you know that might make this worth our while? You don't know? Well, is there anything else the werewolves are doing or planning other than just attacking people in the building? Oh. They're turning people? Ok. Do you know why? Do you know if they are planning anything other than just hanging out in your tenement building? Oh. One of them said they're building forces for an attack on Muir Woods. Well... go talk to <whomever>. They're super interested in anything that might threaten those woods, so you might get help there".

Again. Even if you haven't provided direction beforehand, you can draw information out of the players by using NPC dialogue. Don't make the NPCs just static objects passively waiting for the right code words to be spoken to them. This is not a CRPG. NPCs are allowed to be curious, and might very much be interested in what exactly is bringing these people to their court, and may not be satisfied with a mere "werewolves are bad" answer. Well, we all know they are bad, and a threat, and whatnot, but why is this specific group specifically a threat and why should we care about this? If I were one of the court, I'd certainly dig further into this than just surface level questions.

From my PoV, this is exactly what I did!

What I didn't do was break character and say OOC "You need to tell them specifically about the attack on Muir Woods of they won't help you".

You had the NPCs just repeat the same surface level question over and over, and when they didn't get a different answer, they kinda gave up. And that's doubly strange because, as the GM, you *know* there's another bigger and more legitimate reason for what they are asking. There's a balance point between having NPCs act as though they have GM knowledge and intentionally playing the NPCs super obtuse. I think you went too far in the "obtuse" direction.

Really? Because I felt like having every changeling go out of their way to ask the PCs exactly what the werewolves were planning was going too far in the "GM knowledge" direction myself.

The whole bit of it requiring some kind of telepathic link is your own straw-man invention (which I don't recall you even claiming in the original thread, so that's kinda from left field).

Its not a straw man. Did you miss the world "presumably" in the part you quoted?

My question is, what is the in character reason why the construct ignores its instructions when it would be more convenient for the PC?

For example, the wizard needs to rest to recover his spells, and explicitly and unambiguously tells his illusory doorman to tell anyone who comes by to go away and come back in the morning. Completely out of left field, one of the visitors has some really important news that the wizards player decides is more important than regaining his spells. In character, why is the illusory doorman ignoring his explicit and unambiguous instructions and letting the important visitor in just because they player of the wizard, who is asleep and unaware, decides it is more important than rest?

Presumably there is *some* in character explanation, its not just running on pure meta-gaming, right? I don't know how you meant for them to convey the information, I was assuming some sort of telepathic bond because you made comparisons to dominate and that is how dominate does it.

I mean, I suppose I could have presumed "for no reason at all", but that seems like an even less charitable interpretation of your words.


Edit: I suppose you could also be saying that all instructions are ambiguous, and it is only fair to let the player resolve all ambiguities despite the role of referee normally falling to the GM. But in this case, I don't know, maybe Glass is right, while I trust Bob not to lie or cheat or fudge dice, I don't trust him not to munchkin and rule things in his favor every time.

When there is a disagreement between the player and the GM as to how the character's instructions to an illusion or dominated creature should be interpreted, the player should win. Because otherwise, you are going to have a GM playing semantic "gotcha" games. And there are very few things in RPGs that player hate more than that. No one appreciates a GM saying "well, you said <whatever> and so that means that <something unintended by the player> happens".

I don't want to rehash a year old argument, but somehow, that conversation got onto the topic of why players are allowed to create free-willed magical constructs in my system at all.

I gave a long nuanced explanation of why I wanted free-willed constructs to be a setting element, and someone, I think Monochrome Tiger, boiled it down to "Talakeal loves it when PC's creations turn on them," despite that never having actually happened in my game.

I thought that was what Glass was referring to, because in response to anything else I can recall from that thread it makes even less sense.

This was an illusion spell, cast in a specific location for a specific reason and period of time, and given instructions by the caster/creator as to how to act. When a situation came up that had not been explicitly defined in those instructions, you decided to have the illusion do the least useful thing possible, while the player wanted it to do something else that was actually useful.

Bob had cast the spell weeks before the encounter in question. He told it to follow around the party, pretending to be me, and using bardic inspiration. It had been doing exactly that without a hitch for maybe a dozen encounters without a hitch. And, after the encounter in question, it continued to do that for dozens more encounters to great success.

From a mechanical standpoint, this doesn't seem ambiguous to me. Nor does it seem unfair to me. Not every spell is guaranteed to be wholly optimal in every situation.

I think I used this example in the previous thread, but if I polymorph the fighter into a red dragon, that is a useful buff, but there is no guarantee that it is optimally useful in every situation; if we run into an enemy who is immune to fire, it isn't unfair that the fighter doesn't suddenly turn into a blue dragon for one encounter to make better use of its breath weapon.

He cast a spell for a specific benefit, and he got that benefit. Just because weeks later a situation came along where it would have been *even better* if he had cast it with different parameters doesn't mean that it is "turning on him" as Glass put it.

Worse still, your rationalization was that Bob had told the illusion to "act like me", so you reasoned that since Bob's past behavior has been to run/cower from a monster attacking, so would the illusion. But Bob is the final arbiter on what "Bob would do" in a given situation. I'm reasonably certain that if Bob was an illusion and not a person vulnerable to damage from the monster, he would not cower. And even if you disagree, that's not the point. Bob gets to decide how someone "acting like Bob" would act in any given situation, not you.

Yeah, Bob made the same argument.

To me, this comes across as a sort of rules-lawyery munchkin argument.

The spell explicitly says the caster can give the illusion general instructions, but does not control it directly.

Bob assumed that by saying "it acts like me" and then justifying litterally any behavior no matter how unlik"nobody knows my character better than I do" he has effectively bypassed the limitations of the spell, turning general instructions into precise round by round control without any drawbacks.

It is a bit like "wishing for unlimited wishes". It is technically correct, but it violates the spirit of the spell.

Cause... you know... he's actually Bob and you are not.

Well, to split hairs, no, Bob is Bob. Bob is not Roxy Connelly the bard / illusionist. And while I wouldn't presume to know his character better than he would, I absolutely think I am less tempted to act out of character for meta-game purposes. And I certainly know well enough that Bob is not going to face tank an angry hydra to give the rest of his party time to get away, because he cowers literally every time his character is threatened in melee.

But yeah, as a general principle, I agree with you, the GM should not violate the "golden box" be acting like they know how to RP a PC better than the controlling player. I would never want to go back to the Bad Ole' Days of AD&D where the DM was free to penalize you XP for "poor role-playing".

Worse still, your rationalization was that Bob had told the illusion to "act like me", so you reasoned that since Bob's past behavior has been to run/cower from a monster attacking, so would the illusion. But Bob is the final arbiter on what "Bob would do" in a given situation. I'm reasonably certain that if Bob was an illusion and not a person vulnerable to damage from the monster, he would not cower. And even if you disagree, that's not the point. Bob gets to decide how someone "acting like Bob" would act in any given situation, not you.

Yeah, Bob made the same argument.

To me, this comes across as a sort of rules-lawyery munchkin argument.

The spell explicitly says the caster can give the illusion general instructions, but does not control it directly.

Bob assumed that by saying "it acts like me" and then justifying litterally any behavior no matter how unlik"nobody knows my character better than I do" he has effectively bypassed the limitations of the spell, turning general instructions into precise round by round control without any drawbacks.

It is a bit like "wishing for unlimited wishes". It is technically correct, but it violates the spirit of the spell.

Cause... you know... he's actually Bob and you are not.

Well, to split hairs, no, Bob is Bob. Bob is not Roxy Connelly the bard / illusionist. And while I wouldn't presume to know his character better than he would, I absolutely think I am less tempted to act out of character for meta-game purposes. And I certainly know well enough that Bob is not going to face tank an angry hydra to give the rest of his party time to get away, because he cowers literally every time his character is threatened in melee.

But yeah, as a general principle, I agree with you, the GM should not violate the "golden box" be acting like they know how to RP a PC better than the controlling player.

So a strawman of a strawman? Interesting. It's like a hall of mirrors in here.

Communication is hard. Communication on an internet forum doubly so.

You claimed that's what folks were saying. All we were saying was that this particular ruling was wrong. Well, and there may have been some observation that this may represent of pattern of you "interpreting dominated creatures and illusions" in ways that those who cast the spells don't agree with. You used a couple other examples in that thread as well, and in every case, the common factor was "I get to say how the NPC/illusion acts even if it's not what the caster of the dominate/illusion thinks should happen" (or even very obviously the exact opposite of what they would want to have happen). Going from there to "Talakeal always does this" is a fair stretch. I can't say what you will always do, or what you want, or anything else. I can only respond to specific scenarios and give my own opinion on those specific things.

Yes. People were giving examples of ways in which the wizard could cast a spell that ended up back-firing on them.

I said that, as a GM, it is my job to remind players if I think they are making a mistake, but it is not my job as a game-designer to "fool-proof" the system so that a wizard can't possibly cast a spell that does more harm than good in the long run.

I certainly never said I was "enamored with the player's creations turning on them", or anything of the like, and indeed I can't recall that ever happening at my table in a quarter century or more of gaming save for, I suppose, demons and undead who simply attack anyone around when they are created if they aren't properly bound.

IIRC, in that same thread, you also claimed that if the same illusion spell was used to create illusionary guards to provide cover for the fact that the party killed the real guards guarding the castle, that these guards would raise the alarm to warn those inside about the intruders (aka: the party) since "they should act the same as the guards they are illusions of". So... yeah. Pretty sure that's falls into the heading of "exact opposite of what the spell-caster intended".

Sort of.

I gave several examples of how "illusions that act on the knowledge that they are illusions" cause more problems than they solve. One of them was creating an illusion of a murder victim to allay suspicion while you make their getaway. I said if he acts like he knows he is an illusion, there is a good chance he will simply give the charade away immediately, and worst case scenario he will even go about trying to report / solve his own murder!

Which then devolved into people asking if it was possible to create an illusion that was actively hostile to the players, and I said only if they explicitly say so or they recreate a copy of a person who was already hostile to them.

But then I clarified that this was only a hypothetical, and if it ever occurred in an actual game I would warn the players and expect them to not go through with it unless they had a damn good reason, for example feigning capture by conjuring illusory guards who will act just like the real thing.

I was then asked why they wouldn't just create illusions who look like enemy guards but have the personalities of double agents, and I said that, again hypothetically, maybe the person interrogating them can read minds or has a really good Insight skill and thus you want the illusions to genuinely believe their own guise.


But the whole thing was just going down a deeper and deeper hypothetical rabbit hole.

I thought I was trying to explain that I am a fair and permissive GM with an open ended magic system that allows players to do anything, but I guess other people were asking leading questions to make me look like a killer gotcha GM? Maybe?

I am still not quite sure how anyone got the "Talakeal is enamored of having the PC's creations turn on them."

It was 100% about allowing the players to control things that they should have control of. And illusions and dominated creatures absolutely falls into that category IMO.

I didn't understand this then, and I don't understand it now.

You later clarified that you were *only* talking about illusions and dominated creatures, but to this day I don't know why.

What is fundamentally different about a sapient being made out of light and sound that should prevent it from having free will or self awareness?

Why would it behave differently than a sapient undead being made out a corpse, or a sapient automaton made out of metal and machinery, or an uplifted animal, or an animated tree, or a wholly organic person conjured from the imagination?

Why is an illusory copy of a living person so very different in behavior from an organic clone?

All of these spells are designed to create independent, sapient, beings. Why does the one created using illusion magic have such sharply different limitation on its behavior?

[Mechalich]

Hmm. To me, that sounds like an upgrade to the typical table, which tends to be full of silly, happy-go-lucky, "nothing bad will ever happen to me no matter how big of an idiot I am" characters (all of whom would be dead in the first 10 pages of any classic fantasy novel).
I don't want my players to be paranoid about EVERYTHING, but I also don't want them to feel like their choices have no consequences, and that they are fated to win no matter how sophomoric their behavior.

The trick is to get the players to increase their personal investment in the gameplay and not the OOC interpersonal table dynamics. After all, the goal is to run the game, not fight interpersonal battles. This can be a difficult path to tread. There is a very real risk that a GM who imposes consequences on characters will have the players feel that those consequences are being imposed upon them and they will increase their investment in playing against the GM rather than playing the game.

Various means exist to mitigate this. For myself, I find it's important to try and sustain the wall between the dual roles of 'game referee' and 'manager of the OPFOR' in the same way that players should try to sustain player/character separation even though there's always some bleed over. This means that sometimes the GM-as-referee has to lay the smackdown on the OPFOR, especially when dice or obvious character traits call for it.

Additionally, it is very important for the players and the GM to manage expectations for the game. You are quite correct that many players expect that their characters are fated to win no matter how sophomoric their behavior, and if that is the kind of game that the majority has collectively decided they want to play, there's only so much pushback that's permissible. If five friends get together for game night and four decide they want to they want to play Munchkin and one wants to play Risk, the one doesn't get to outvote the four. The GM, to a very large degree, is obligated to give the players what they want, and if the GM isn't able to get what they want out of the experience at the same time, then the group needs to break up.

[Telok]

Man but those chonked text walls are whacked. Skippy skip skip. But something stood out

Letting the players fail because the GM failed to accurately convey information to the PCs in a way they can comprehend is a bad thing.

Letting the players fail because they came to their own conclusion based on an accurate understanding of the information that was presented to them is ok; and to an extent necessary to prevent railroading.

My current game is the second run of these players through a setting. Their first run resulted in seven doom clocks. I also write a 'news bulletin' for every couple weeks in-game time (interstellar travel is 10+1d5 days warp time from beyond the outermost planet so adding a minimum of another 10+ days of hard burn in-system). The news is about 25% doom clocks, one result of whatever they did last that made the news, and some random stuff fleshing out the setting or just flavoring.

They've made massively incorrect assumptions about some stuff in the news. I correct things where their characters have direct experience or facts, but otherwise let them run wild. Its possible they'll soon run into a major doom clock that's hitting its catastrophy point. There's three of those getting into the final stages now.

They've been so busy chasing loot, vanity projects, and personal vendettas that they haven't asked any questions about anything. And they're going to blindly walk into absolute meat grinders chewing up whole star systems. Tak, you're nicer to your players than I am to mine. Mine just get fact corrections and tabloid news unless they start asking questions and actually using their contacts. They've barely registered that two or three fleets of warships have been wiped out and the incidents are coming closer.

[Quertus]

What I am trying to say, regardless of the wording, is that there is a fundamental difference between coming to a bad conclusion because you incorrectly analyzed accurate data and coming to a bad conclusion because you correctly analyzed inaccurate date.

Letting the players fail because the GM failed to accurately convey information to the PCs in a way they can comprehend is a bad thing.

Letting the players fail because they came to their own conclusion based on an accurate understanding of the information that was presented to them is ok; and to an extent necessary to prevent railroading.

Again, within reason, these are general principles, not absolutes.

Man but those chonked text walls are whacked. Skippy skip skip. But something stood out


My current game is the second run of these players through a setting. Their first run resulted in seven doom clocks. I also write a 'news bulletin' for every couple weeks in-game time (interstellar travel is 10+1d5 days warp time from beyond the outermost planet so adding a minimum of another 10+ days of hard burn in-system). The news is about 25% doom clocks, one result of whatever they did last that made the news, and some random stuff fleshing out the setting or just flavoring.

They've made massively incorrect assumptions about some stuff in the news. I correct things where their characters have direct experience or facts, but otherwise let them run wild. Its possible they'll soon run into a major doom clock that's hitting its catastrophy point. There's three of those getting into the final stages now.

They've been so busy chasing loot, vanity projects, and personal vendettas that they haven't asked any questions about anything. And they're going to blindly walk into absolute meat grinders chewing up whole star systems. Tak, you're nicer to your players than I am to mine. Mine just get fact corrections and tabloid news unless they start asking questions and actually using their contacts. They've barely registered that two or three fleets of warships have been wiped out and the incidents are coming closer.

I, too, only correct facts, not conclusions. OTOH, IIRC, 2 of the WoD GMs I've had corrected reasonable but false conclusions, but didn't correct facts. So if the character reasonably could have come to that conclusion, it was corrected; if it was completely unreasonable for someone living that life to believe that, it wasn't. That was... pretty terrible.

[Keltest]

I occasionally correct conclusions, but I try to at least gate it behind a history (or whatever is relevant) check, usually as a roundabout way of saying they're making some assumptions that they probably shouldn't be making. My players at least will occasionally make leaps of logic that would land them in hot water if they went completely uncorrected.

[Jason]

Were you there for the thread about my party getting stuck in the tomb? Because it is pretty much the quintessential example of this.

Spoiler: The One about my players being stuck in an empty tomb for three hous.

Show

I was running a dungeon layout I got online. It had a "false tomb" at the start to detour grave robbers, with a trap-door leading to the real tomb. There was a switch on a statue that, if pressed, causes one of the fake sarcophagi to roll back and reveal the trap-door. I made the switch real easy to find because I didn't want to waste time, but, of course, the dice crapped out on the PCs and the rogue rolled a natural 1 to search the room.
Brian, who was playing an earth-mage, then cast a speak with stone spell to ask the statue. This was, imo, a brilliant solution , and I spent a moment coming up with a personality for the statue and asked what he says to it. He then commands it open the way. I asked him to actually RP the conversation, he refused, so I told him to roll a charisma check to get the information, and gain the dice crapped out.
(Now, later, this turned out to have been a miscommunication. I thought he was refusing to talk in character and just wanted to resolve the conversation as a dice roll, which is something he has done many times in the past with the argument "I am not as charismatic as my character so I shouldn't have to think out an argument", but it was actually that he thought the spell was akin to a divination spell that forced answers from the stone rather than a spell akin to speak with animals that merely allowed him to talk to rocks. This miscommunication ate up the previous thread entirely, but was mostly orthogonal to the actual situation imo.)
At this point, the players just shut down. They had a party of 12 competent, fully rested, mid level adventurers, including a master earth-bender and a master conjurer, all completely stymied by a simple hidden door after two blown rolls. They couldn't think of anything, either magical or mundane, that could progress the adventure, and I spent three hours of real time trying to get them to try something, anything. I could think of literally dozens of ways they could have bypasses this obstacle, none them requiring specific or hidden information, but nothing. Because after two blown rolls, they had convinced themselves that I was shooting down every possible solution until they came up with some sort of "magic bullet".

Again, here's how the situation would have played out at my table:
1) If the rogue says "I search the statue" and the switch is supposed to be easy to find, I won't even bother having him roll. He finds the switch after a few moments, they open the door. There's no point in requiring a roll there, because he has guessed the right place to look and there's no trap or hazard to spring.

2) If the rogue just says "I search the room" I might ask him to go into more detail "where do you want to start? Are you running your hands over things or probing with a 10' pole or what?". If he says "I'll go hand-search the statue," then again he finds the switch without a roll needed. If he gives an answer were it's not obvious he's going to focus on the statue or he's not using a method that will immediately find the switch (probing with a 10' pole), then I have him make a search roll.

3) So the rogue didn't look in the right place and rolled a nat 1 on his search roll. The earth-mage says "I cast speak with stone on the statue." I ask, "what do you say to it?" He says, "I command it to open the way." I say "but what do you actually say?" And he says, "I don't want to roleplay it."
Okay, the mage player is clearly trying to get the statue to tell him how to proceed to the real tomb, and he's picked the right place to look - the statue. I decide at that point if the statue has any reason to try to conceal the switch from the mage.

3A) If not, then I say: "The Statue says 'Thank you for asking so nicely. I've been very lonely here and it's nice to hear a kind voice. I can't actually move. You should push the switch on my back'," or wherever the switch is. No roll required because, again, there's no trap to trigger and the statue has no reason not to help. It also doesn't matter if the player didn't want to role-play what he said, because I can still role-play the statue's response. The players push the switch and proceed.

3B) If the statue does have a reason to conceal the switch, I ask for a persuasion roll of some sort. With a success, I say something like "The statue says, 'stupid intruder, even shattering me won't trigger the switch on my back.'" (It's made of rock, it's not all that bright). The players find and press the switch without any further rolls required.

3B) If the persuasion roll fails, then I say "The Statue says, 'I am set to guard this tomb, you are an intruder. I will not tell you anything.'"

4) At this point the players are stymied, like they were in your example. If they sit around discussing what to do but don't come up with any new ideas there is no way I'm going to let them sit there for three hours of real time. Or even one hour. Role-playing time is precious, and the adventure can't proceed until they find the switch. I'm not going to let two flubbed rolls ruin our game.

After about 10 minutes with no declared actions I'd throw them a bone. "You've been sitting here for a while. Everyone make a perception roll." Chances are that someone will make a decent roll, especially if you have a group of twelve (that's a bigger group than I would run by choice). If by a stroke of bad luck no one makes a roll then I wait another 10 minutes and repeat. Eventually (probably sooner rather than later) someone will make a decent roll.

Whoever makes the roll gets, "You hear a faint moan and notice that there is a light breeze coming from underneath one of the sarcophagi. You see a narrow seam along the base that the breeze is coming through." Now the players know there is a secret door and where it is. They can then try to force the door open, look for a switch again and get a new set of search rolls (because they have new information), etc. They should soon be on their way.

[kyoryu]

I'm going to try to cover some general stuff, without getting into too many details.

First, I'd like to frame this by stating that everyone in this thread is trying to help you.. You have a ton of strangers from all over the world taking their time to try and help you, a stranger. Nobody here is here to beat up Talakeal. We all want Talakeal to be happier and less frustrated. Do people get frustrated at you sometimes? Sure. But we're trying to help.

You asked what general trends I saw that I felt carried over. There's a few.

1. You seem to have difficulty understanding that people have a different set of knowledge than you do - both things they know that you don't, and vice versa.
2. You seem to have difficulty understanding how this leads people to draw different conclusions.
3. You seem to have difficulty understanding that your interpretation - your map - of the world is subjective and is not necessarily "true".
4. You seem to have difficulty considering the point of view of others, and making an attempt to understand their map is valid to them, figuring out why they might have that map, and that the actions that they take are valid based on that map.
5. You seem to have difficulty in letting go of your interpretation, and will often reframe things that you have heard in a more hostile way that preserves your map, rather than accepting them as being more benign, and coming from a different understanding of the situation.
6. When given information that contradicts your map, your initial response seems to be to deny it, rather than attempt to understand it. This makes coming to a mutual understanding difficult.

That's just the general stuff, there's some game-specific stuff that doesn't show here but is talked about here. I'll mention those at the end.

The high level advice I'd give you is this - when somebody says something that doesn't make sense or seems hostile (but isn't combined with aggressive language/insults/etc.) start from a place of assuming it's reasonable given that they have a different understanding.. Your job at that point is to understand their map sufficiently that their statement makes sense - you want to get to the point where you can say "well, if I believed X, Y, and Z, but didn't know A, B, and C, I could understand that position". Or, to put it differently, ask what you would have to either know or not know for you to say what they have said.

Absolutely. Certainly far more often than I would prefer.

For whatever reason, something about the way I talk means people tend to assume that I am lying rather than merely having a miscommunication.

I don't see people here saying you're a liar. This is a good example of the "reframing in a hostile way" thing I was talking about. This is a conversation killer, as it puts people on the defensive while simultaneously shutting them down.

In a situation like that, better communication would be "that's not how I see it, or what I said. Can you explain to me what you mean here? What is it you're seeing that I'm not? It kind of feels like you're saying I'm being deliberate deceitful, and I don't think I am. Can you tell me what might make you feel that way?" In doing so, you're validating their view while not agreeing to it, and coming from a place of trying to understand. As Stephen Covey said, "seek to understand first, then to be understood".

You are assuming rails where none exist. Which is a problem with my players, as well as most people on the forums. For whatever reason, players assume everything is a railroad.

I've explicitly said I don't think you're "railroading".

I think what you do is create situations where there is a solution that is obvious to you. Since the solution is obvious to you, it's easy to build the scenario further in a way that reinforces that solution while denying others.

It's an easy trap to fall into without intending to. One of the best ways to make sure you don't accidentally do this is to, for any given scenario, think of three ways the scenario can be overcome in a satisfactory way. That's actually a thing they did on the original Fallout - each scenario/problem/whatever needed to be solved by three archetypes, the sneaky guy, the talky guy, and "Eric" (named after a producer there whose response to any problem in a game was "blow it up"). This doesn't need to be at the obstacle level, but it definitely should be at a level where you aren't committed to one way before you run into a problem. So depending on your game it could be at the "werewolves in teh building" level, or it could be at the "get the Seelie to help" level.

They had a party of 12 competent, fully rested, mid level adventurers, including a master earth-bender and a master conjurer, all completely stymied by a simple hidden door after two blown rolls. They couldn't think of anything, either magical or mundane, that could progress the adventure, and I spent three hours of real time trying to get them to try something, anything. I could think of literally dozens of ways they could have bypasses this obstacle, none them requiring specific or hidden information, but nothing. Because after two blown rolls, they had convinced themselves that I was shooting down every possible solution until they came up with some sort of "magic bullet".

From your stories, this makes sense. You tend to have scenarios where you have a solution that makes sense to you, based on your knowledge and understanding, and also have lots of reasons (usually justified by the situation!) why other plans won't work.

There are two good solutions to this: You can either make the "gate" optional (so if they fail it's just harder) or be willing to accept that almost any plan from the players has a chance of working.

If they had told ANY changeling about the attack on Muir Woods, they would have been pointed directly to the Baron, but they didn't despite being asked repeatedly what the werewolves were planning. Nobody knows about it except the PCs and one of their werewolf allies who knows next to nothing about the Seelie. Although in hindsight I suppose I could have had said werewolf take the initiative, but that would require both me knowing about the PCs plan in advance as well as their reluctance to talk about the planned attack, as well as being willing to deprive them of their agency both IC and OOC).

Okay, here's the thing.

For you, it's easy. The Seelie need to know about the attack on Muir Woods. The PCs know about the attack on Muir Woods. That's clearly a thing that is relevant to the Seelie. They should tell them, right?

I'm going to use the QuickLube analogy, here. The problem isn't that the players don't have the information, the problem is that they don't know what's relevant. It's like, they have a car malfunctioning and the check engine light is on. Seems simple, right? The problem is that the person taking the car to the QL doesn't know anything about cars. They don't know it's a "check engine" light. They know the car has a bunch of lights that go on and off at various times, and some dials that do different things, and the engine makes different noises at different times. They've got a hundred data points, and don't know which ones are relevant. Sure, they were asked about plans, but we'll get to that....

A frequent question you ask is "why don't players do what I expect them to do?" in various forms. The answer is basically one of three:

1. They have different goals than you.
2. They have different information than you.
3. They have a different understanding of the information than you do.

It's always one of those three. (Even if they're "irrational", and I suggest you stop using that as an explanation, that's likely "they have goals related to their irrationality", so it still fits)

My question is, what is the in character reason why the construct ignores its instructions when it would be more convenient for the PC?

I think this is an uncharitable understanding of the situation.

One thing to keep in mind is that time is very compressed in an RPG, and GM<->player is a fairly low bandwidth communication channel compared to actually being in the world. There's another point, too, that I'll get to in a bit.

So, any instructions are likely to be given in less real time than they are in game time. Information is compressed. As such, you have to fill in the blanks. You can choose to do this charitably or uncharitably. I highly recommend you do it charitably.

So, the PC would have more time to give instructions beyond "pretend to be the guard". So, you can take that arguably vague statement in a number of ways - the most likely way would be that the intent of the player is "pretend to to be the guard so I don't get caught", and translate the brief summary of the order given by the player internally into something that conveys that. This is a possible interpretation of the intent, and a charitable one. The player wouldn't give instructions that they knew would lead to the opposite of what they wanted!

In character, why is the illusory doorman ignoring his explicit and unambiguous instructions and letting the important visitor in just because they player of the wizard, who is asleep and unaware, decides it is more important than rest?

Here's where you're losing me. You're claiming that the illusions are autonomous when it leads to them doing things that the players wouldn't like, but lack sufficient autonomy that they can't make exceptions? As well as my previous point of "it's reasonable to assume that the wizard's actual instructions, knowing how illusions work, would include reasonable levels of override for instructions like that". Of course, you could also ask the character if they would have done that, if you're not sure.

Edit: I suppose you could also be saying that all instructions are ambiguous, and it is only fair to let the player resolve all ambiguities despite the role of referee normally falling to the GM. But in this case, I don't know, maybe Glass is right, while I trust Bob not to lie or cheat or fudge dice, I don't trust him not to munchkin and rule things in his favor every time.

This is not charitable, as "the player makes all referee calls" is a clearly bad position to take (at least for the vast majority of things).

The charitable interpretation is "information at the table is lossy and compressed, so clarifying intent, even after the fact, is a reasonable strategy rather than taking instructions as literal word-for-word".

There are cases where you should probably do that (or at least could) like Wish spells. But, as a rule, it's your job as the GM to understand the intent of the players, and err on their side in communication issues. At the minimum, your interpretation of their statements should not result in surprising results that the characters should have known. If the player thinks that their instructions clearly would have resulted in one behavior, but result in another, then that's a GM problem, flat out. Not saying that you're a bad or malicious GM, just that it's your job to interpret player statements into player actions in a way that best preserves intent, given what the character knows and can predict.

This is much more important than a minor bit of potential metagaming.

I don't want to rehash a year old argument, but somehow, that conversation got onto the topic of why players are allowed to create free-willed magical constructs in my system at all.

I gave a long nuanced explanation of why I wanted free-willed constructs to be a setting element, and someone, I think Monochrome Tiger, boiled it down to "Talakeal loves it when PC's creations turn on them," despite that never having actually happened in my game.

I mean... from my perspective, here's what I'm hearing:

1. Automatons are sentient, and can do things beyond what the player suspected.
2. They will do this to do things like alerting guards to the PC's presence, despite the fact that they were specifically created to prevent that from happening.
3. They should not override orders to awake someone to give them important information, as they will slavishly follow those orders.

This feels... inconsistent.

Well, to split hairs, no, Bob is Bob. Bob is not Roxy Connelly the bard / illusionist. And while I wouldn't presume to know his character better than he would, I absolutely think I am less tempted to act out of character for meta-game purposes. And I certainly know well enough that Bob is not going to face tank an angry hydra to give the rest of his party time to get away, because he cowers literally every time his character is threatened in melee.

No. And here's that point I said I'd get to. And I think this is important.

Bob is authoritative on the subject of Roxy (outside of "are Roxy's rules and stat sheet correct in terms of mechanics"). You have an opinion of Roxy, and an understanding of how Roxy might act in a given situation.

Sometimes Roxy is going to surprise you by doing something you didn't expect. This is because Bob has a different mental image of Roxy, and Bob's view of Roxy is definitionally correct (again, outside of "stat sheet adheres to the rules"). That surprising bit is because you have an incomplete and potentially inaccurate view of Roxy.

Okay, so, in the same way, your view of the world, and the spells, and everything else is authoritative. How spells work, how illusions work, etc. - you are authoritative. You are definitionally correct. Sure, sometimes it can be good to consider the view of others and see if that will modify your view, but at the end of the day you are absolutely definitionally correct about everything you say about the world.

Okay, here's the problem. The characters exist in the world, and their understanding is aligned with yours, because they are surrounded by it.. So, Roxy the mage knows how illusions work. Roxy knows what they do and don't do. Roxy knows to a reasonably high level of understanding how they will respond to different commands. Roxy has studied magic for years.

Bob has not.

So when Bob says "Roxy does this", you need to keep that in mind. Roxy wouldn't give instructions that led to the opposite of the obvious intent. Bob might express his desires in that way, but that's because he's not Roxy. Roxy would have the same intent, but express it in a way that made sense.. Roxy has better knowledge of magic, and more time to do it (remember the time compression?) than Bob has.

So, as a GM, your job is to interpret not Bob's words, but his intent. If his intent is reasonable then Roxy does the smart thing to achieve the intent. If the intent is not reasonable, then Roxy would know this (most of the time!) and as a GM it's your job to communicate that to Bob.

Failure to do this will feel like adversarial GMing. It will feel like gotcha GMing. Players should not be surprised by the result of their actions, success or failure, if that result is primarily based on things that the characters know. Like, if casting "open door" causes the door to glow, the player should know that and not be surprised. If it fails because there's some kind of counterspell on it, that may be surprising.

I guess another way of saying this is that there shouldn't be a situation where the player is surprised, but the character wouldn't be?

Communication is hard. Communication on an internet forum doubly so.

Yes.

The best way to ease this is to do a few things:

1. Presume best intent
2. Presume you're talking with reasonable people that say reasonable things.
3. When something sounds unreasonable, presume you're either unaware of something, or are misinterpreting. Ask questions to clarify.

Sound familiar? It's pretty much the same advice I'm giving you for GMing. GMing is 95% communication, and 5% rules.

Yes. People were giving examples of ways in which the wizard could cast a spell that ended up back-firing on them.

I said that, as a GM, it is my job to remind players if I think they are making a mistake, but it is not my job as a game-designer to "fool-proof" the system so that a wizard can't possibly cast a spell that does more harm than good in the long run.

Players should not make mistakes that their characters would know are mistakes. If someone casts fireball five feet in front of them, it's reasonable to remind them that they'll be caught in the blast. If poisoning the Duke creates a power vacuum and will result in a worse leader, the character wouldn't know that (or at least would have limited info on that) and so you don't need to tell them that.

I gave several examples of how "illusions that act on the knowledge that they are illusions" cause more problems than they solve. One of them was creating an illusion of a murder victim to allay suspicion while you make their getaway. I said if he acts like he knows he is an illusion, there is a good chance he will simply give the charade away immediately, and worst case scenario he will even go about trying to report / solve his own murder!

This is, I think, another example of uncharitable interpretation. There's a lot of ways you can interpret them being sentient - from "will follow orders, but use their own judgement" all the way to "fully self-interested". And guess what? Different spells/methods of creation can be at different points on that spectrum! And why would you want spells that were that likely to turn on you? I mean, this seems like a really weird situation to have developed.

If you really want the "automaton gains sentience" story, you can still have that storyline, just the creation of said automaton is tougher than a simple spell. This preserves utility of the spell as is, while still giving you that story hook.

If you really do want to go down the "all illusions are entirely self-motivated and uncontrollable" route then, at the minimum, any mage learning that spell should absolutely know those facts about it (unless it's like some exotic magic they find that's never been learned by another wizard or something like that).

I thought I was trying to explain that I am a fair and permissive GM with an open ended magic system that allows players to do anything, but I guess other people were asking leading questions to make me look like a killer gotcha GM? Maybe?

I don't think you intend to be a killer gotcha GM. I think some of your understanding of the GM's job leads you to looking like a killer gotcha GM. If you don't want to be perceived as one, consider the things I've said.

All of these spells are designed to create independent, sapient, beings. Why does the one created using illusion magic have such sharply different limitation on its behavior?

Someone made the spell. Why would they make a spell so likely to turn on them? Why would others pass along that knowledge? Why would others study, learn, and use it? As a wizard making a spell, I'd want an illusion that would reliably follow orders but have enough intelligence to react to situations rather than simply following a set script. That's the spell I'd want to make. A spell that is "make a creature that is totally out of your control, will act unpredictably, and must be carefully managed to get positive results" isn't a good general purpose spell - it's running that spell like the worst examples of Wish. And Wish is the prime example of "gotcha" GMing, and maybe the one spot where gotcha GMing has a place (and even that is really only if players try to abuse it).

I mean, look at fireball. It can hurt you if you use it poorly, but it's fairly easy to avoid not doing that. It's not a "there's no way you can hurt yourself with this" spell, and its utility warrants the danger. This is like.... fireball that will actively veer into anything it can find to blow up and hurt you, unless you aim it super precisely and in such a way that there's no leeway for it to do so, and that's not always possible. Who would learn that spell? Who would use it?

And, again, if you have that spell, cool. But the mages of your world would know exactly what it was, how it worked, and the dangers of it unless it was some exotic spell that nobody had seen.

[glass]

Are you honestly telling me that you can't tell the difference between "I am enamored of the PC's creations turning on them" and "Self-aware constructs who grow beyond their programming exist in the setting"?

The former is a subset of the latter, but I mentioned the subset because only the subset is an example of the "high risk" elements I was talking about (and because a one sentence representation of roughly a third of a 1000odd-post thread is always going to be somewhat reductive).

Nobody is going to be upset if an NPC's creation turns on them. But when it is a PC who has spent both long- and short-term resources (XP/spells known/whatever and spell slots/mana/whatever) on their creation, the players might. You get that these things are different, right?

No player involved = no player to be upset. Is a player involved = player might get upset.

Maybe a GM who was great and communicating and reading people, and who was strongly trusted by their group, could make that fun. By your own admission, that's not you and your group.

Like I said, this seems to be such a false equivalence that I am having trouble believing it is just a miscommunication and not a deliberate attempt at a bad faith argument.

Y'know how you've complained about people assuming you're being dishonest rather than unclear? Example from you later post:

For whatever reason, something about the way I talk means people tend to assume that I am lying rather than merely having a miscommunication.

Maybe remember that before you jump straight to accusing people of "bad faith" rather than stepping back and thinking about how they might actually have a point?

Why does duration matter though?

Duration doesn't matter. The distinction between being a PC's creation and being a PC matters. Enormously, and obviously.

I certainly never said I was "enamored with the player's creations turning on them", or anything of the like

You spoke approvingly of stories where creations turn on their creators, in the context of a PC's creation not doing what they wanted - the spell was explicitly designed the way it was to facilitate such stories. You very much did say "anything like that".

EDIT: Also, what kyoryu said immediate above. They're spot on.

[kyoryu]

Again, here's how the situation would have played out at my table:
1) If the rogue says "I search the statue" and the switch is supposed to be easy to find, I won't even bother having him roll. He finds the switch after a few moments, they open the door. There's no point in requiring a roll there, because he has guessed the right place to look and there's no trap or hazard to spring.

This.

2) If the rogue just says "I search the room" I might ask him to go into more detail "where do you want to start? Are you running your hands over things or probing with a 10' pole or what?". If he says "I'll go hand-search the statue," then again he finds the switch without a roll needed. If he gives an answer were it's not obvious he's going to focus on the statue or he's not using a method that will immediately find the switch (probing with a 10' pole), then I have him make a search roll.

The assumption at this point is they'll find it eventually - the only question is how long it takes. Is there a time pressure involved? Wandering monsters? Someone chasing them? Supply pressure? If so I might roll to see if anything bad happens... otherwise, they just find it.

3) So the rogue didn't look in the right place and rolled a nat 1 on his search roll. The earth-mage says "I cast speak with stone on the statue." I ask, "what do you say to it?" He says, "I command it to open the way." I say "but what do you actually say?" And he says, "I don't want to roleplay it."
Okay, the mage player is clearly trying to get the statue to tell him how to proceed to the real tomb, and he's picked the right place to look - the statue. I decide at that point if the statue has any reason to try to conceal the switch from the mage.

Yup, figure out the intent (get info), the approach (command the stone), and the opposition.

3A) If not, then I say: "The Statue says 'Thank you for asking so nicely. I've been very lonely here and it's nice to hear a kind voice. I can't actually move. You should push the switch on my back'," or wherever the switch is. No roll required because, again, there's no trap to trigger and the statue has no reason not to help. It also doesn't matter if the player didn't want to role-play what he said, because I can still role-play the statue's response. The players push the switch and proceed.

Yup, no opposition, you did something that should work, and no time pressure.... there's no conflict here, so resolve it.

3B) If the statue does have a reason to conceal the switch, I ask for a persuasion roll of some sort. With a success, I say something like "The statue says, 'stupid intruder, even shattering me won't trigger the switch on my back.'" (It's made of rock, it's not all that bright). The players find and press the switch without any further rolls required.

This is where understanding the actual intent (bullying the statue? Tricking it?) comes into play. You don't need to speak the words, but let me know the angle you're going for.

3B) If the persuasion roll fails, then I say "The Statue says, 'I am set to guard this tomb, you are an intruder. I will not tell you anything.'"

4) At this point the players are stymied, like they were in your example. If they sit around discussing what to do but don't come up with any new ideas there is no way I'm going to let them sit there for three hours of real time. Or even one hour. Role-playing time is precious, and the adventure can't proceed until they find the switch. I'm not going to let two flubbed rolls ruin our game.

Right. And the best way to do this is to not make the door a hard gate. But....

After about 10 minutes with no declared actions I'd throw them a bone. "You've been sitting here for a while. Everyone make a perception roll." Chances are that someone will make a decent roll, especially if you have a group of twelve (that's a bigger group than I would run by choice). If by a stroke of bad luck no one makes a roll then I wait another 10 minutes and repeat. Eventually (probably sooner rather than later) someone will make a decent roll.

This is also where I fall back on "you'll find it eventually if you keep searching". Even if you're rolling for time (and possibly rolls to see if the bad thing happens), you can presume that eventually, someone will find it. If going with the time-based rather than consequence-based approach, I'd probably say something up front like "okay, while the rogue keeps looking, who else is doing other things?" setting the stage for additional rolls to find it.

Overall, this is a great way to handle the situation and almost exactly what I'd do. Talakeal, take note.

[Jason]

The assumption at this point is they'll find it eventually - the only question is how long it takes. Is there a time pressure involved? Wandering monsters? Someone chasing them? Supply pressure? If so I might roll to see if anything bad happens... otherwise, they just find it.

Right. Since there's no trap or other threat the real issue is how much time it takes and whether a wandering monster or something might show up before they've found it.

This is where understanding the actual intent (bullying the statue? Tricking it?) comes into play. You don't need to speak the words, but let me know the angle you're going for.

I would have read "I command it to open the way" as basically a bullying attempt.

[Mechalich]

Chances are that someone will make a decent roll, especially if you have a group of twelve (that's a bigger group than I would run by choice).

I'd phrase that much stronger. A group of twelve players, in tabletop, is doomed, full stop. A group that large will not function.

If Talakeal is running groups of that size it explains a great deal, such as the lack of input and attentiveness noted from all but one or two players, because those one or two players are the only ones that matter, everyone else isn't a real participant and only takes actions when their turn comes up which is probably once an hour at best, so of course they spent all their time checked out on their phones, have nothing to contribute to the active circumstance because they aren't paying attention, and can barely recall the rules.

In general the soft cap for a tabletop group size if seven: one GM and six players, and even that requires a lot of rapid juggling by the GM and fairly simply game systems (admittedly, the WoD is much better suited to larger parties than D&D). Any move above that introduces substantial instability into the game simply as a result of group size.

[Jason]

I'd phrase that much stronger. A group of twelve players, in tabletop, is doomed, full stop. A group that large will not function.

You might be able to get a 12-player group to function for a one-shot or a convention game. No, I would never run a long-term campaign for that many players.

Of course, it may have only been a 12-character group, with some players playing multiple characters or including NPCs accompanying the player characters.

In general the soft cap for a tabletop group size if seven: one GM and six players, and even that requires a lot of rapid juggling by the GM and fairly simply game systems (admittedly, the WoD is much better suited to larger parties than D&D). Any move above that introduces substantial instability into the game simply as a result of group size.

I would say it depends a lot more on what kind of game you're playing than what system. I would think a World of Darkness game is much less well-suited to larger parties than D&D, since the kind of games it seems best suited for are character-driven dramas, which require a lot more focus on each character.

I've found an 8-player beer & pretzels D&D dungeon delve perfectly enjoyable for short-term games.

My weekly group has fluctuated between 3 and 6 players + the GM over the years, but it's more usually 4 players + GM, and we rotate GMs and games.

[Kish]

I don't want to rehash a year old argument,

Then why on earth did you bring up the year-old argument?

[...]and (I presume) my players ego problems[...]
[...] He really just doesn't like being critiqued, and is going to find an excuse to explode no matter how it is phrased in my experience.
[...]
I thought I was trying to explain that I am a fair and permissive GM with an open ended magic system that allows players to do anything, but I guess other people were asking leading questions to make me look like a killer gotcha GM? Maybe?

Heads you're doing everything right, tails someone else is doing something wrong. And you may not understand why Bob and Brian get angry with you, but you definitely understand the personality flaws that drive them and how unambiguously in the wrong they always are.

If this is you being very trusting, I'd hate to see what kinds of things you'd start saying about people if you reached what you think of as cynical.

[King of Nowhere]

Yes. I absolutely have told all my players. I addition to telling them verbally, I also give it to them in writing along with my house rules at the start of every campaign. I make it very clear that I can't read body language and they need to speak up if something is wrong.

It doesn't help though.

My last major drama story involved Bob speaking for Brian and getting his character killed and Brian just sitting there silently and not objecting, but then blowing up at me two days later for not realizing he wasn't giving consent.

And then I have a similar, but much more dramatic story about a former player who was playing the only male in the group, and the rest of the party came up with a plan to have him seduce a female NPC. He went along with the plan, continuing to describe his characters actions as normal, going through with the plan and initiating seduction before we faded to black, but he was apparently uncomfortable with the plan, and expected me to jump in and put a stop to it. But, because I didn't do that, he now tells potential new players to avoid my game because I "raped his character" and might do the same to them.

you have a diagnosed social problem. but some of your players have much worse problems. especially because they refuse to try and do anything about it.

[icefractal]

I mean, IDK if there's a way to "solve" this group, as opposed to individual issues. The core problem (from Talakeal's various threads) seems to be that:

1) At least several of the players want to win entirely on their own skills, with no help or extra leeway from the GM, and if the GM does provide help it taints the victory for them. And they don't just want to succeed, they want to outwit the GM and succeed by more than he / the system possibly expects.
2) Those players also hate losing and will get quite angry when it happens, and not just "angry at fate" but angry at the GM and often the other players.
3) They're not actually Batman; they can't consistently outwit Talakeal, especially while playing a system that he created. They probably do some of the time, but the anger from one failure is much greater than the mellow-ness from one success.

Result: Anger. Making it obviously easier or giving OOC help fails point #1. Arbitrating in a neutral manner fails point #2 if it means they don't 100% win. Pretending to be dumber and letting them outwit him might work if he succeeded on the IRL bluff check - but he doesn't want to do that (neither would I, TBF). Another solution would be to tell them (more politely) to shape up or GTFO, and then enforce that - but that's been ruled out. So AFAICT, it's pretty much unsolvable.

... which is making me wonder why I'm even posting in this thread.

[Keltest]

Solving it is easy. Talakeal just needs to stop playing with these lunatics. He is unwilling to do so for whatever reason, but that doesn't invalidate the solution, he just won't take it.

[Talakeal]

I mean, IDK if there's a way to "solve" this group, as opposed to individual issues. The core problem (from Talakeal's various threads) seems to be that:

1) At least several of the players want to win entirely on their own skills, with no help or extra leeway from the GM, and if the GM does provide help it taints the victory for them. And they don't just want to succeed, they want to outwit the GM and succeed by more than he / the system possibly expects.
2) Those players also hate losing and will get quite angry when it happens, and not just "angry at fate" but angry at the GM and often the other players.
3) They're not actually Batman; they can't consistently outwit Talakeal, especially while playing a system that he created. They probably do some of the time, but the anger from one failure is much greater than the mellow-ness from one success.

Result: Anger. Making it obviously easier or giving OOC help fails point #1. Arbitrating in a neutral manner fails point #2 if it means they don't 100% win. Pretending to be dumber and letting them outwit him might work if he succeeded on the IRL bluff check - but he doesn't want to do that (neither would I, TBF). Another solution would be to tell them (more politely) to shape up or GTFO, and then enforce that - but that's been ruled out. So AFAICT, it's pretty much unsolvable.

... which is making me wonder why I'm even posting in this thread.

This is a fairly accurate summary of my frustrations with our table dynamic, yes.

See, someone gets what I am saying! :p

Again though, I am not so arrogant to believe that I don't have my own flaws that are contributing to the problem.


Of course... this still doesn't address the initial thrust of this thread, which was less to complain about my specific players, but to ask why so many players, both in and outside of my group, refuse to just answer a direct question from an NPC!?!?!?!

I'd phrase that much stronger. A group of twelve players, in tabletop, is doomed, full stop. A group that large will not function.

If Talakeal is running groups of that size it explains a great deal, such as the lack of input and attentiveness noted from all but one or two players, because those one or two players are the only ones that matter, everyone else isn't a real participant and only takes actions when their turn comes up which is probably once an hour at best, so of course they spent all their time checked out on their phones, have nothing to contribute to the active circumstance because they aren't paying attention, and can barely recall the rules.

In general the soft cap for a tabletop group size if seven: one GM and six players, and even that requires a lot of rapid juggling by the GM and fairly simply game systems (admittedly, the WoD is much better suited to larger parties than D&D). Any move above that introduces substantial instability into the game simply as a result of group size.

Yes. Six is my cap as well, which is what we had for that game.

The scenario was designed as an Indiana Jones / The Mummy style race to the treasure, with a rival group of adventurers competing with them to get there first.

BUT... the players decided to instead broker a truce with the other party and team up with them and split the treasure. And so I merged the two parties for the duration of the adventure, and had everyone play two characters, one from each party, for the duration of the session.

1. They have different goals than you.
2. They have different information than you.
3. They have a different understanding of the information than you do.

This still doesn't explain why they won't just answer a direct question.

The high level advice I'd give you is this - when somebody says something that doesn't make sense or seems hostile (but isn't combined with aggressive language/insults/etc.) start from a place of assuming it's reasonable given that they have a different understanding.. Your job at that point is to understand their map sufficiently that their statement makes sense - you want to get to the point where you can say "well, if I believed X, Y, and Z, but didn't know A, B, and C, I could understand that position". Or, to put it differently, ask what you would have to either know or not know for you to say what they have said.

I fully admit I am stubborn, defensive, and obsessive.

But, generally, I give everyone the benefit of the doubt. I try and clarify and ask questions and continue the conversation for long periods of time. I generally assume people are arguing in good faith. For example, a few posts ago, I said I have trouble believing Glass is arguing in good faith, but I actually showed three different people our posts IRL and asked them for a second opinion before coming to that conclusion.

Heck, one of Keltest's complaints about my posting style, unless I am reading it wrong, is that I keep assuming people are misunderstanding me rather than disagreeing with me and continually trying to rephrase my statements over and over again to be clearer.

I don't see people here saying you're a liar. This is a good example of the "reframing in a hostile way" thing I was talking about. This is a conversation killer, as it puts people on the defensive while simultaneously shutting them down.

Most people don't. I certainly don't get that impression from you.

But, for example, NichG was very blunt that he thought I was "making stuff up to win an argument" rather than accepting that I thought he was talking about CRPGs as a whole rather than a few specific examples.

Likewise, that guy I mentioned earlier, very bluntly told me that I was intentionally giving him false answers to questions about my system as retaliation for finding an infinite loophole.

Not only are they calling me a liar, but they are also telling me *why* I am lying. Again, that happens a lot to me, as I said to Quertus, my parents were masters of that game, indeed they took it one step further and assumed I told self-destructive lies for the sake of getting myself into trouble.

And then there was the thread last spring where I was trying to figure out why I had a miscommunication with the GM, and many people, including generally reasonable people like Korvin, were telling me that it wasn't a misunderstanding, I was clearly trying to trick the GM and it backfired. When I protested that this wasn't the case, I have four or five people very bluntly and very nastily trying to "prove" I was lying by pointing out any inconsistency whatsoever in my posts. I explicitly remember one guy telling me that he had proved I was a liar by translated Heart of Darkness jargon into Dungeons and Dragons jargon with the (imo insane) quote "translation is a smile word, lie is a frown word, they both mean the same thing; to say something that isn't true."

And of course, I have had several people accuse me of being the world's most dedicated troll, fabricating hundreds of posts and multiple hundred thousand word campaign journals over twenty+ years all for the sake of pulling the forum's leg.

Again, this isn't the majority of people, its probably just a small vocal minority, but, as Quertus says, it happens a lot more often than I would prefer.

I've explicitly said I don't think you're "railroading".

I think what you do is create situations where there is a solution that is obvious to you. Since the solution is obvious to you, it's easy to build the scenario further in a way that reinforces that solution while denying others.

It's an easy trap to fall into without intending to. One of the best ways to make sure you don't accidentally do this is to, for any given scenario, think of three ways the scenario can be overcome in a satisfactory way. That's actually a thing they did on the original Fallout - each scenario/problem/whatever needed to be solved by three archetypes, the sneaky guy, the talky guy, and "Eric" (named after a producer there whose response to any problem in a game was "blow it up"). This doesn't need to be at the obstacle level, but it definitely should be at a level where you aren't committed to one way before you run into a problem. So depending on your game it could be at the "werewolves in teh building" level, or it could be at the "get the Seelie to help" level.

I don't think this really helps.

I really like Fallout, and I do think that is a great example of game design. I am well aware of how the game has three paths through most problems, one tailored for each of the three pregens, and it has something I have tried in the past.

But it doesn't help, because three paths the PCs won't walk down (for various reasons) is no better than one.

For example, one of my games involved the players finding allies to defend their town from an approaching army. I had three paths planned out, a druid, a dragon, and a lich. The players didn't check out the dragon because they didn't think it was real, didn't wake the lich because it was evil, and turned back from the druid because the path to his grove was too scary. Instead, their plan was to ride griffons into battle. Now, keep in mind, three griffons cannot come close to defeating an army, and the players in question had no ride or animal handling skills, and the griffons were both unfamiliar with them and not trained to accept a rider.

But this was all ignored for the fact that I told them that in my world griffons are too small to fly with a rider, being about the size of a large cougar, and are tamed as hunting hounds, whereas it is the larger hippogriffs that are used as mounts. The players assumed that I had butt-pulled this as the last minute because I didn't want them to ruin my plot with griffons, and when I shot it down, they withdrew from the game and milled around doing nothing for several hours OOC until I was eventually able to badger them into just waking up the lich for the sake of keeping the plot moving.

And like, in the tomb, as I said, there were *dozens* of simple working solutions, but when the players bombed two dice rolls in a row, they convinced themselves that the situation was hopeless and didn't try any more.

One thing to keep in mind is that time is very compressed in an RPG, and GM<->player is a fairly low bandwidth communication channel compared to actually being in the world. There's another point, too, that I'll get to in a bit.

So, any instructions are likely to be given in less real time than they are in game time. Information is compressed. As such, you have to fill in the blanks. You can choose to do this charitably or uncharitably. I highly recommend you do it charitably.

So, the PC would have more time to give instructions beyond "pretend to be the guard". So, you can take that arguably vague statement in a number of ways - the most likely way would be that the intent of the player is "pretend to to be the guard so I don't get caught", and translate the brief summary of the order given by the player internally into something that conveys that. This is a possible interpretation of the intent, and a charitable one. The player wouldn't give instructions that they knew would lead to the opposite of what they wanted!

At my table, we don't play word games. I am not going to twist my player's wording. And, at the same time, players aren't able to come up with some giant instruction book written by a contract lawyer.

I am not going to have a minion betray the caster (unless it makes sense in character, like a scheming devil bound against its will) and am going to have it follow its instructions as I understand them.

But, you can't just change your mind and have it ignore instructions or do something else on a whim.

For example, if Bob orders a summoned demon to kill Dave, and then Brian jumps out and starts attacking Bob, the demon isn't going to abandon its mission to come back and kill Brian unless Bob somehow give it new orders in character.

Here's where you're losing me. You're claiming that the illusions are autonomous when it leads to them doing things that the players wouldn't like, but lack sufficient autonomy that they can't make exceptions? As well as my previous point of "it's reasonable to assume that the wizard's actual instructions, knowing how illusions work, would include reasonable levels of override for instructions like that". Of course, you could also ask the character if they would have done that, if you're not sure.

Illusion is a school, not a single spell. There are plenty of different types of illusions, each of which behaves in their own way.


In Heart of Darkness, there are basically three different types of illusory creatures.

1: Follows a simple pre-programmed command given at the time of casting.
2: Autonomous and free-willed, but the caster is allowed to set their general motivation at the time of casting.
3: One that the caster consciously puppets, dictating its actions from moment to moment.

All three have their own upsides and downsides.

This is not charitable, as "the player makes all referee calls" is a clearly bad position to take (at least for the vast majority of things).

The charitable interpretation is "information at the table is lossy and compressed, so clarifying intent, even after the fact, is a reasonable strategy rather than taking instructions as literal word-for-word".

There are cases where you should probably do that (or at least could) like Wish spells. But, as a rule, it's your job as the GM to understand the intent of the players, and err on their side in communication issues. At the minimum, your interpretation of their statements should not result in surprising results that the characters should have known. If the player thinks that their instructions clearly would have resulted in one behavior, but result in another, then that's a GM problem, flat out. Not saying that you're a bad or malicious GM, just that it's your job to interpret player statements into player actions in a way that best preserves intent, given what the character knows and can predict.

This is much more important than a minor bit of potential meta-gaming.

This isn't about the GM having an NPC ignore orders, or twist orders, or do something the PC didn't intend.

Its about the PC giving a clear and unambiguous order, and then deciding that their minion would then ignore that order when it became the most convenient.

In this case, Bob gave the instruction to follow the party around, pretend to be me, and use bardic inspiration to help the party.

This is fine. This is good. This worked. There were no complaints.

The issue was, when a hydra snuck up behind the party, Bob wanted the illusion to then, of its own volition, taunt the hydra and serve as a diversion while the rest of the party got away.

I said no, because no part of "follow the party around, pretend to be me, and use basic inspiration to help the party" involved suddenly deciding of its own volition to taunt the hydra and serve as a diversion while the rest of the party escaped.


Like, it I tell a golem to "guard a door" and the monster guards the door, it isn't somehow a betrayal or a twisting of the orders because the golem doesn't of its own volition decide that on Tuesday "guard the door" means "cook dinner" and on Thursday that "guard the door" means "paint the house" just because it would be more convenient for the caster at that moment.

Bob is authoritative on the subject of Roxy (outside of "are Roxy's rules and stat sheet correct in terms of mechanics"). You have an opinion of Roxy, and an understanding of how Roxy might act in a given situation.

Sometimes Roxy is going to surprise you by doing something you didn't expect. This is because Bob has a different mental image of Roxy, and Bob's view of Roxy is definitionally correct (again, outside of "stat sheet adheres to the rules"). That surprising bit is because you have an incomplete and potentially inaccurate view of Roxy.

Okay, so, in the same way, your view of the world, and the spells, and everything else is authoritative. How spells work, how illusions work, etc. - you are authoritative. You are definitionally correct. Sure, sometimes it can be good to consider the view of others and see if that will modify your view, but at the end of the day you are absolutely definitionally correct about everything you say about the world.

Okay, here's the problem. The characters exist in the world, and their understanding is aligned with yours, because they are surrounded by it.. So, Roxy the mage knows how illusions work. Roxy knows what they do and don't do. Roxy knows to a reasonably high level of understanding how they will respond to different commands. Roxy has studied magic for years.

Bob has not.

So when Bob says "Roxy does this", you need to keep that in mind. Roxy wouldn't give instructions that led to the opposite of the obvious intent. Bob might express his desires in that way, but that's because he's not Roxy. Roxy would have the same intent, but express it in a way that made sense.. Roxy has better knowledge of magic, and more time to do it (remember the time compression?) than Bob has.

So, as a GM, your job is to interpret not Bob's words, but his intent. If his intent is reasonable then Roxy does the smart thing to achieve the intent. If the intent is not reasonable, then Roxy would know this (most of the time!) and as a GM it's your job to communicate that to Bob.

Failure to do this will feel like adversarial GMing. It will feel like gotcha GMing. Players should not be surprised by the result of their actions, success or failure, if that result is primarily based on things that the characters know. Like, if casting "open door" causes the door to glow, the player should know that and not be surprised. If it fails because there's some kind of counterspell on it, that may be surprising.

I guess another way of saying this is that there shouldn't be a situation where the player is surprised, but the character wouldn't be?

It is a compelling argument.

But it isn't simple.

For example, IRL people are often not great judges of their own behavior, and often claim they would act very differently in a situation than they actually do.

Likewise, sometimes the line between PC and NPC is blurred. For example, a player might miss a session and leave their character in someone elses hands, or you might have a PC from a previous campaign show up as an NPC in the current campaign, etc.

Further, a copy is not the original. The moment it is created, its experiences diverge. Hell, the very act of learning that you are a copy rather than the original is a shock, and most people would not be happy and accept their new role in life as a slave of their creator just because they were a copy of said creator. (see, pretty much any fiction involving clones, from Invincible to Multiplicity to Calvin and Hobbes).

But ultimately, I decided that simply giving the order "pretend to be me" being code for "allow me to play the minion as a second PC" just isn't fair.

It makes the spell far more reliable and versatile than it was intended.
It gives the player disproportionate power and screen time.
It creates a meta-game information problem, as you now have to characters instantly passing information back and forth for no in character reason.

Like I said, its like the "wishing for unlimited wishes," its clever and sounds plausible, but ultimately, no, its just not a reasonable command.

Players should not make mistakes that their characters would know are mistakes. If someone casts fireball five feet in front of them, it's reasonable to remind them that they'll be caught in the blast. If poisoning the Duke creates a power vacuum and will result in a worse leader, the character wouldn't know that (or at least would have limited info on that) and so you don't need to tell them that.

I 100% agree.

(Although if I wanted to split hairs, I could argue that making stupid mistakes in the heat of the moment probably actually happens more often IRL than it does in game).

I absolutely would warn someone in a situation like this.

But this wasn't the argument in the previous thread; the argument was that I have failed as a game-designer if my magic system allows for the possibility of a character casting a spell that bites them in the ass, not that I have failed as a GM for not warning them.

This is, I think, another example of uncharitable interpretation. There's a lot of ways you can interpret them being sentient - from "will follow orders, but use their own judgement" all the way to "fully self-interested". And guess what? Different spells/methods of creation can be at different points on that spectrum! And why would you want spells that were that likely to turn on you? I mean, this seems like a really weird situation to have developed.

Its not a situation that actually developed though; its a forum hypothetical.

The spell is really simple.

You create an illusion of something or someone. The illusion acts like whatever it is an illusion of.

If you make an illusion of your loyal butler, it acts like your loyal butler. If you make an illusion of your loving girlfriend, it acts like your loving girlfriend. If you make an illusion of a wild boar, it acts like a wild boar. If you make an illusion of Abraham Lincoln, it acts like Abraham Lincoln.

What happened in game is that Bob made an Illusion of himself, and then said that should mean he gets to control it as a second player character, and I said no, it is still an NPC and I still decide how it acts in unusual situations.

This then spiraled into hypothetical situations about casters who deliberately choose to make a copy of their enemy, and then the illusion opposes them in an attempt to act like said enemy.

IMO, all of the conflict is coming from people seriously overthinking a pretty straightforward spell, and assuming all of these crazy hypothetical scenarios with unhelpful GMs and players who are simultaneously too smart and too dumb for their own good.

If you really want the "automaton gains sentience" story, you can still have that storyline, just the creation of said automaton is tougher than a simple spell. This preserves utility of the spell as is, while still giving you that story hook.

That just makes the system extra clunky for no good reason IMO.

The key factor is not the nature of the magic, but time. No newly created construct is going to immediately go rogue, it is something that happens over the course of years as a reaction to the world around them.

And, given that standard spells last about an hour, there isn't simply time for this to happen unless you go to the extra trouble of making an construct with a permanent or greatly prolonged duration.

If you really do want to go down the "all illusions are entirely self-motivated and uncontrollable" route then, at the minimum, any mage learning that spell should absolutely know those facts about it (unless it's like some exotic magic they find that's never been learned by another wizard or something like that).

That is neither my intent nor how it plays out at the table.

My intent is that eventually, over the course of years, a sapient construct will grow beyond its initial programming and become its own person, for good or ill.

Someone made the spell. Why would they make a spell so likely to turn on them? Why would others pass along that knowledge? Why would others study, learn, and use it? As a wizard making a spell, I'd want an illusion that would reliably follow orders but have enough intelligence to react to situations rather than simply following a set script. That's the spell I'd want to make. A spell that is "make a creature that is totally out of your control, will act unpredictably, and must be carefully managed to get positive results" isn't a good general purpose spell - it's running that spell like the worst examples of Wish. And Wish is the prime example of "gotcha" GMing, and maybe the one spot where gotcha GMing has a place (and even that is really only if players try to abuse it).

I mean, look at fireball. It can hurt you if you use it poorly, but it's fairly easy to avoid not doing that. It's not a "there's no way you can hurt yourself with this" spell, and its utility warrants the danger. This is like.... fireball that will actively veer into anything it can find to blow up and hurt you, unless you aim it super precisely and in such a way that there's no leeway for it to do so, and that's not always possible. Who would learn that spell? Who would use it?

And, again, if you have that spell, cool. But the mages of your world would know exactly what it was, how it worked, and the dangers of it unless it was some exotic spell that nobody had seen.

Most casters in the world know that creating a free-willed being is equivalent to entering into a relationship. Relationships are a lot of work, but ideally you will get more out of it than you put in.

Someone would cast the spell for much the same reasons they would enter into a mundane relationship.

Why get married? Why train a student? Why hire a mercenary? Why work with a partner? Why have children? Why buy slaves? Why tame animals? Etc.

All of them have the same inherent risks and responsibilities and the same potential for great rewards.

Then why on earth did you bring up the year-old argument?

I didn't. Glass did.

I am just too obsessive not to take the bait.

[Kish]

I stand corrected. You brought up a different thread from even longer ago which no one pushed back on. My mistake.

Whether intentionally or otherwise, you're strawmanning NichG. You said most CRPGs have an element of physical agility (a goofy claim in my view as well as in NichG's). NichG brought up three examples of ones that do not. You continued to repeat your general statement with no examples, also translating what NichG had said into "everyone agrees with my generalization but NichG wants to obsessively focus on three of the tiny minority that do not." The vast majority of CRPGs do not have an element of physical agility: you pause the game completely while you click on whatever you want to click on, or you choose from a menu, or otherwise you choose in a way that's entirely mental. I am mildly curious whether you're blurring action games into CRPGs or generalizing from the small minority of actual CRPGs (Persona, some Final Fantasies...) that do have an element of physical agility.

[Talakeal]

I stand corrected. You brought up a different thread from even longer ago which no one pushed back on. My mistake.

Whether intentionally or otherwise, you're strawmanning NichG. You said most CRPGs have an element of physical agility (a goofy claim in my view as well as in NichG's). NichG brought up three examples of ones that do not. You continued to repeat your general statement with no examples, also translating what NichG had said into "everyone agrees with my generalization but NichG wants to obsessively focus on three of the tiny minority that do not." The vast majority of CRPGs do not have an element of physical agility: you pause the game completely while you click on whatever you want to click on, or you choose from a menu. I am mildly curious whether you're blurring action games into CRPGs or generalizing from the small minority of actual CRPGs (Persona, some Final Fantasies...) that do have an element of physical agility.

Every MMORPG I have played has an element of physical agility (Ultima Online, Everquest, World of Warcraft, Star Wars the Old Republic).

Obviously ARPGs like Diablo have a ton of coordination. And then adventure RPGs like Legend of Zelda, but those probably aren't counted.

All of the Bethesda games in the Fallout and Elder Scrolls series.

Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 (haven't played three). Neverwinter Nights 2.

Final Fantasy games often have small elements of it like needing to input button combinations for Sabin's blitzes or timing stuff.

The Dragon Age Series. The Mass Effect Series.

Planescape Torment.

Knights of the old Republic 1 and 2.


This is a topic that is really hard to avoid making an unintentional "no true scotsman" fallacy because the borders between the genres are really fuzzy, but all of those I have listed are listed as RPGs by several major websites, as are several games like Elden Ring which I don't think of an as RPG at all.

I don't remember saying anything like "everyone agrees with me"; I just said that I thought he was talking about CRPGs as a whole and he accused me of "making stuff up to support my argument", and when I tried to clarify the misunderstanding, he doubled down on the claim that I was making stuff up and blocked be.

[Kish]

Every MMORPG I have played has an element of physical agility (Ultima Online, Everquest, World of Warcraft, Star Wars the Old Republic).

Obviously ARPGs like Diablo have a ton of coordination. And then adventure RPGs like Legend of Zelda, but those probably aren't counted.

All of the Bethesda games in the Fallout and Elder Scrolls series.

Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 (haven't played three). Neverwinter Nights 2.

Final Fantasy games often have small elements of it like needing to input button combinations for Sabin's blitzes or timing stuff.

The Dragon Age Series. The Mass Effect Series.

Planescape Torment.

Knights of the old Republic 1 and 2.


This is a topic that is really hard to avoid making an unintentional "no true scotsman" fallacy because the borders between the genres are really fuzzy, but all of those I have listed are listed as RPGs by several major websites, as are several games like Elden Ring which I don't think of an as RPG at all.

I don't remember saying anything like "everyone agrees with me"; I just said that I thought he was talking about CRPGs as a whole and he accused me of "making stuff up to support my argument", and when I tried to clarify the misunderstanding, he doubled down on the claim that I was making stuff up and blocked be.

Well, unless by "an element of physical agility" you mean "you need to literally have hands," fewer than half the games on your list can reasonably be described that way. (I don't know Elder Scrolls; Final Fantasy does have minor elements; action games are probably not what someone who says CRPGs means; morepigs also have minor elements; for all the others, just plain no. KotOR for the swoop race, maybe?) And you made that claim in response to someone saying they didn't become automatically winnable just because someone knew them. Are you, now, seriously advancing a claim that "click on the enemy" or "move out of the cloudkill" not only qualifies as an "element of physical agility" in Baldur's Gate, but is enough of one to make that much of a difference?

I also can't help but notice that the more insulting half of what you kept saying about NichG--"rather than his three specific examples"--has dropped out of your self-paraphrase now. For whatever it's worth, trust me, they didn't mean anything but exactly what they said and didn't think you were saying anything but what you said.

[Talakeal]

Are you, now, seriously advancing a claim that "click on the enemy" or "move out of the cloudkill" not only qualifies as an "element of physical agility" in Baldur's Gate, but is enough of one to make that much of a difference?

Absolutely.

I frequently wiped in Baldur's Gate because of aim or timing issues. I remember getting the angle on a lightning bolt wrong being a frequent killer, or to a slightly lesser extend misjudging the radius of a fireball.

Heck, simply clicking on the wrong person in combat or missing someone entirely because they were moving was a frequent problem, as was my character taking a bad path because I clicked on the wrong destination and the AI didn't opted to move my by a path I didn't want to go down.

And if you are trying to control a whole part of six characters at the same time, this issues are greatly compounded.

IMO any game that runs in real time rather than being turn-based is going to have huge elements of coordination and reflexes at play.

I also can't help but notice that the more insulting half of what you kept saying about NichG--"rather than his three specific examples"--has dropped out of your self-paraphrase now.

Ok. Now I am totally lost.

I 100% swear to Gygax that I legitimately thought the reason he was mad was because he thought I was making an deliberately false statement about his three specific examples rather than to CRPGs as a whole which is what I meant.

If that was the "insult", then I have no idea what he was mad about in the first place.

For whatever it's worth, trust me, they didn't mean anything but exactly what they said and didn't think you were saying anything but what you said.

What I said or what I meant to say?

Because, if you want to know what I meant, I was honestly trying to preemptively respond to someone using an example of like, a World of Warcraft Mythic Raid wiping despite following a strategy guide, by pointing out that, in such cases, the execution is as important as the planning as those games have large elements of physical coordination, communication, and situational awareness that are simply not present in a tabletop RPG.

[Xihirli]

After about 10 minutes with no declared actions I'd throw them a bone. "You've been sitting here for a while. Everyone make a perception roll." Chances are that someone will make a decent roll, especially if you have a group of twelve (that's a bigger group than I would run by choice). If by a stroke of bad luck no one makes a roll then I wait another 10 minutes and repeat. Eventually (probably sooner rather than later) someone will make a decent roll.

Whoever makes the roll gets, "You hear a faint moan and notice that there is a light breeze coming from underneath one of the sarcophagi. You see a narrow seam along the base that the breeze is coming through." Now the players know there is a secret door and where it is. They can then try to force the door open, look for a switch again and get a new set of search rolls (because they have new information), etc. They should soon be on their way.

I’m not saying I’d never do this but I do try to avoid this; if it is just "roll until you get it, no consequences" I generally explicitly tell my players before the roll is made "this is to determine how long you take, not whether you succeed." And if an encounter or portion of an encounter has no failure condition, I just… don’t call for a roll. If the die’s only function is to hamper their progress why am I taking out the dice?

In this instance I might have the statue guarding a shortcut but there’s a longer and more dangerous passage in that they don’t want to take but is a way forward; that way if they fail and have no new ideas for awhile I’ll just say "I don’t think you’re able to find a better way through. Unless someone has a new idea they want to act on right now how about we move on?"

I once ran my players through a fey dungeon that was directly on the border between the Seelie and Unseelie and was half controlled by each faction.
Aside: I don’t really like there being "good fey" and "evil fey" and prefer to divide them along the law/chaos axis. Chaotic neutral Unseelie and Lawful Neutral Seelie. I’d much rather ask the fey have blue and orange morality than have some always be villains and some always be heroes. Anyway!
The front door on the Unseelie half of the dungeon told the story (through a carving) of the birth of the twin queens and ends with their names being called out. The way to open the door is to proclaim your name, though this isn’t any more spelled out than I said.
The players didn’t figure this out, or if anyone suspected they didn’t like the idea of a magic fey door knowing their names and kept quiet about it. They climbed along the roof until they found a gap that dropped them in the dungeon.

To actually answer the OP’s question about the players distrusting phenomenon, I do have a potential way to build trust in players:
At session zero, ask for a "wish list" of scenes or events they want for their characters. Then, early in the game, within the first five sessions, make one of them happen.
Boom, the players have just seen their trust rewarded. And try and include the rest as well, within reason.

[gbaji]

Letting the players fail because the GM failed to accurately convey information to the PCs in a way they can comprehend is a bad thing.

Letting the players fail because they came to their own conclusion based on an accurate understanding of the information that was presented to them is ok; and to an extent necessary to prevent railroading.

Ok. But which is the case here? I think it's number one. If the players had comprehended that "werewolves attacking the woods is something important to remember and tell the Seelie Court folks" they would have done that.

There was clearly not an "accurate understanding" of the information, because if they had understood it, they would have realized it was significant. It just seems like you feel that "I gave them the information" is the end point of this. But "the players understanding what the information means" is what's actually required here.

Again. You literally asked the players after the fact why they didn't tell the Seelie about the planned attack and they said they didn't realize it was significant. That's not a failure to draw the right conclusion ("tell the seelie"), it's them not having an understanding of what that information meant or why it mattered. This is something that happens commonly when players aren't super familiar with the game setting, or even just specific elements within the game setting. And IMO, it's firmly in the GMs area of responsibility to make that kind of stuff clear to the players.

When in doubt, err on the side of "the players honestly don't know something" and not "the players know, but are for some reason choosing not to use that information". In this case, there's two pieces of information that is relevant. That the werewolves are planning an attack on the woods, and that this is something the Seelie may care about more than the werewolves operating in the city. Your responses to their requests for help may have made them assume that the Seelie just weren't interested in opposing the werewolves, period. It takes a bit of a leap to assume it's not "we oppose werewolves" that matters, but "we oppose werewolves if they are encroaching on one specific location" that matters. The players are unlikely to make that leap.


I think we can get caught up in the nitty details here, but at the end of the day, you are asking why players sometimes evade direct questions. The answer is that the questions, while direct, are not sufficient to clue them in that they should be providing different information. I've already written a whole set of dialogue that you could have used that would have prompted them to do this. You are free to ignore that advice, but then you can't be surprised when the next time something like this happens, you get a similarly "evasive seeming" reaction from your players.

Sometimes players just get stuck. They don't make the same logical leap that we assume they will, and that seems so obvious to us (by that I mean "GMs"). The wrong response to that situation is to just keep repeating the same steps and information and hoping for different results. They're not getting it. Try something else.

Were you there for the thread about my party getting stuck in the tomb? Because it is pretty much the quintessential example of this.

Spoiler: The One about my players being stuck in an empty tomb for three hous.

Show

I was running a dungeon layout I got online. It had a "false tomb" at the start to detour grave robbers, with a trap-door leading to the real tomb. There was a switch on a statue that, if pressed, causes one of the fake sarcophagi to roll back and reveal the trap-door. I made the switch real easy to find because I didn't want to waste time, but, of course, the dice crapped out on the PCs and the rogue rolled a natural 1 to search the room.
Brian, who was playing an earth-mage, then cast a speak with stone spell to ask the statue. This was, imo, a brilliant solution , and I spent a moment coming up with a personality for the statue and asked what he says to it. He then commands it open the way. I asked him to actually RP the conversation, he refused, so I told him to roll a charisma check to get the information, and gain the dice crapped out.
(Now, later, this turned out to have been a miscommunication. I thought he was refusing to talk in character and just wanted to resolve the conversation as a dice roll, which is something he has done many times in the past with the argument "I am not as charismatic as my character so I shouldn't have to think out an argument", but it was actually that he thought the spell was akin to a divination spell that forced answers from the stone rather than a spell akin to speak with animals that merely allowed him to talk to rocks. This miscommunication ate up the previous thread entirely, but was mostly orthogonal to the actual situation imo.)
At this point, the players just shut down. They had a party of 12 competent, fully rested, mid level adventurers, including a master earth-bender and a master conjurer, all completely stymied by a simple hidden door after two blown rolls. They couldn't think of anything, either magical or mundane, that could progress the adventure, and I spent three hours of real time trying to get them to try something, anything. I could think of literally dozens of ways they could have bypasses this obstacle, none them requiring specific or hidden information, but nothing. Because after two blown rolls, they had convinced themselves that I was shooting down every possible solution until they came up with some sort of "magic bullet".

Ok. I still see you kinda being vague and evasive yourself here. Brian came up with a great idea, and it seems like you did everything possible to shut him down. He expects to just speak with the stone and have it tell them where the secret passage/whatever is. You tell him to RP it out (which apparently he's not comfortable with). You then make him make a charisma roll. Why? He's spending a resource (spell) to get information. Just let him use the darn spell and get information. He thinks it's a divination spell, but it just lets him speak to rocks. Ok. But this goes back to "what is the intent of someone using the spell?". What the heck is the use of a spell to speak with rocks/animals/whatever if there isn't some expectation that they will provide useful information? So now he needs to have the spell *and* some kind of persuasive ability/check?

Just... give him the darn information. He's clear he's casting the spell. He's clear what information he wants to get from the statue. But you're still not giving him the information which the statue knows, and could just tell him.

It's really easy. He casts speak with stone. You ask him "what you do you want know?". Brian tells you "I want to know where the secret exit is". You tell him "The statue tells you there's a secret exit in the botom of the sarcophogas, and it can be opened by pushing this button on my back". Done. You move on. Spell expended. Knowledge gained. Party moves on. You made this more difficult by effectively forcing the player to play 20 questions with you. Don't do that.

If they had told ANY changeling about the attack on Muir Woods...

And the fact that they didn't is your first hint that they have either forgotten about that bit of information, or don't think it's important/relevant/significant. That's your clue to step in and remind them about it, or toss in some NPC dialogue (like I wrote above) to guide them to the point where they will naturally talk about it. You are still following this pattern of "wait for the players to say the magic phrase". Don't do that.

Really? Because I felt like having every changeling go out of their way to ask the PCs exactly what the werewolves were planning was going too far in the "GM knowledge" direction myself.

Why? Look. As a GM, I get giving the players the opportunity to make the connections themselves. But if they don't? Why not have even one Fae at the court think to ask "so... these werewolves causing these problems in your building. Do you know if they have any plans beyond just that one location? Because if they are, that would be a problem we'd want to know about". It's just not that hard to do this. It just seems like you get just as "stuck" as your players.

The spell explicitly says the caster can give the illusion general instructions, but does not control it directly.

No. The spell explicitly allows the caster to create/define the personality of the illusion. It's not "general instructions". The caster literally creates the personality that determines how the illusion behaves. That's as close to "it'll act the way I think it should" as it gets. The benefit of this (higher level IIRC) illusion spell is not that the caster "does not control it directly", but that the caster "does not have to control it directly". The assumption is that the illusion will simply automatically do what the caster expects because it's created to behave however the caster expects it to behave. The alternative is to require the player to write a massive document detailing every possible reaction the illusion will have to every possible event that might occur. That's absurd. Just let the player decide how the illusion behaves. Done.

What is fundamentally different about a sapient being made out of light and sound that should prevent it from having free will or self awareness?

Nothing at all? We could ask the same question about the player character though. The PC presumably also has free will and self awareness, yet is being played by the player. We don't insist that this means that the fact that it's being "controlled by the player" means the PC doesn't have free will, right?

So the same player running the illusion also does not remove its free will or self awareness either. So your point about free will is irrelevant to the question at hand.

The actual question is whether the player is "playing" the illusionary character, or the GM is. And despite a spell description that clearly states that the caster creates the personality of the illusion (in the same way the player does for their own character), you have decided that the GM (ie: you) should be the one who decides how the illusion should actually behave and not the character nor the player playing that character.

I get it. It's your game. It's your rules. But if I read that spell description I would also assume exactly the same thing that Bob assumed about how the illusion should work, and who gets to decide how it behaves.

Now. If you want to write the spell such that "At time of casting, the caster must clearly and unambiguously detail every single action the illusion will take in response to every possible event which may occur. Any event which occurs which has not been previously detailed by the caster, will leave the illuision's choice of response up to the GM, who will be free to choose to have the illusion do the exact opposite of what the caster wants" then that's your choice. I suspect that no one would ever use that spell if written that way though.

Why would it behave differently than a sapient undead being made out a corpse, or a sapient automaton made out of metal and machinery, or an uplifted animal, or an animated tree, or a wholly organic person conjured from the imagination?

Why is an illusory copy of a living person so very different in behavior from an organic clone?

All of these spells are designed to create independent, sapient, beings. Why does the one created using illusion magic have such sharply different limitation on its behavior?

They aren't different. I'm not sure where you'd going with this tangent. I'd expect that if I created an undead, it would also do what I wanted. Same with a construct, or familiar, or whatever.

I think the issue is one of specificity. To me, if the player didn't specifically say "I'm ordering my <construct/undead/illusion/whatever> to do <specific thing>", I err to asking the player what their <construct/undead/illusion/whatever> does in response to any thing else that happens. You seem to think the exact opposite. That anything not specifically detailed by the player falls to the GM to decide.

At no point did Bob previously state "if the party is attacked by a monster, my illusion will cower from it". So what exactly the illusion would do in response to an approaching monster was undefined. In those cases, let the player decide. Doing otherwise is just going to cause conflict for everyone, so why do it? It's just strange because you seem to want to put the weight on Bob to anticipate every possible thing and prepare for it ahead of time, but aren't willing to do the same yourself. You could certainly have, knowing that you would shortly be attacking the party with a monster, asked Bob "Um... So Bob. What exactly will your illusion do if a monster appears and attacks the party?". Then you could have gotten Bob "on the record" with his specific commands about the illusion.

But you didn't do this. Now maybe you didn't think of it. But one might suspect that, had you asked him, Bob would have thought about what he wanted his illusion to do in that situation, and he almost certainly would have said "I'd want it to pretend to stand and fight the monster, so as to draw its fire from the rest of the party". I mean, it makes sense to have the illusion do that in that situation, given that it's an illusion and cant take physical damage, right?

Again. We can't know for sure though (but I'd totally take that bet). So yeah. When in doubt, err to the player making that determination in cases like this. Doing otherwise will just devolve into upset players.

[Talakeal]

Ok. But which is the case here? I think it's number one. If the players had comprehended that "werewolves attacking the woods is something important to remember and tell the Seelie Court folks" they would have done that.

There was clearly not an "accurate understanding" of the information, because if they had understood it, they would have realized it was significant. It just seems like you feel that "I gave them the information" is the end point of this. But "the players understanding what the information means" is what's actually required here.

Again. You literally asked the players after the fact why they didn't tell the Seelie about the planned attack and they said they didn't realize it was significant. That's not a failure to draw the right conclusion ("tell the seelie"), it's them not having an understanding of what that information meant or why it mattered. This is something that happens commonly when players aren't super familiar with the game setting, or even just specific elements within the game setting. And IMO, it's firmly in the GMs area of responsibility to make that kind of stuff clear to the players.

When in doubt, err on the side of "the players honestly don't know something" and not "the players know, but are for some reason choosing not to use that information". In this case, there's two pieces of information that is relevant. That the werewolves are planning an attack on the woods, and that this is something the Seelie may care about more than the werewolves operating in the city. Your responses to their requests for help may have made them assume that the Seelie just weren't interested in opposing the werewolves, period. It takes a bit of a leap to assume it's not "we oppose werewolves" that matters, but "we oppose werewolves if they are encroaching on one specific location" that matters. The players are unlikely to make that leap.


I think we can get caught up in the nitty details here, but at the end of the day, you are asking why players sometimes evade direct questions. The answer is that the questions, while direct, are not sufficient to clue them in that they should be providing different information. I've already written a whole set of dialogue that you could have used that would have prompted them to do this. You are free to ignore that advice, but then you can't be surprised when the next time something like this happens, you get a similarly "evasive seeming" reaction from your players.

I think we are just going to have to agree to disagree here.

IMO figuring out the significance of clues and what to do with them is the core gameplay element of mystery scenarios.

I do not consider this to be a misunderstanding, nor do I consider it to be the GM's job.

I think we can get caught up in the nitty details here, but at the end of the day, you are asking why players sometimes evade direct questions. The answer is that the questions, while direct, are not sufficient to clue them in that they should be providing different information. I've already written a whole set of dialogue that you could have used that would have prompted them to do this. You are free to ignore that advice, but then you can't be surprised when the next time something like this happens, you get a similarly "evasive seeming" reaction from your players.

That still doesn't explain why they don't give an answer though. You don't have to understand the significance of a question to answer it.

If I ask you what you had for dinner last night, you should be able to answer me even if you don't know why I should care. You might have a reason to lie or be evasive or tell me to mind my own business of course, but simply not understanding why I am asking in no way prevents you from answering.

Ok. I still see you kinda being vague and evasive yourself here. Brian came up with a great idea, and it seems like you did everything possible to shut him down. He expects to just speak with the stone and have it tell them where the secret passage/whatever is. You tell him to RP it out (which apparently he's not comfortable with). You then make him make a charisma roll.

I am giving Brian exactly what I thought he was asking.

It's not that he isn't comfortable talking in character (in fact, he is probably my only player who is comfortable talking in character). It is that he believes that, because he is less charismatic than his character, it is unfair to force him to construct an argument OOC, and instead he wants me to resolve social challenges by a dice roll rather than actually talking it out so that the numbers on his sheet can do the heavy lifting for him. [I could go on about my thoughts on this, but it is whole other topic.]

I decided to oblige him and give him what he wanted, letting him resolve the social encounter with a dice roll rather than in character dialogue.

But then he bombed the roll.

Why? He's spending a resource (spell) to get information. Just let him use the darn spell and get information. He thinks it's a divination spell, but it just lets him speak to rocks. Ok. But this goes back to "what is the intent of someone using the spell?". What the heck is the use of a spell to speak with rocks/animals/whatever if there isn't some expectation that they will provide useful information? So now he needs to have the spell *and* some kind of persuasive ability/check?

Hold up a second.

This makes no sense.

I presume that you have some sort of social dice mechanic in your game of choice, right? Charisma checks? Persuasion, diplomacy, gather information, etc.? Right? There is some mechanical way to convince people to do what you want?

Are you telling me that in your game, language difficulties completely supersede these mechanics?

Like, if it would normally be a difficulty 20 persuasion check for me to convince the bartender to tell me the name of the local crime boss.

But, if I only speak dwarven, and the bartender only speaks elven, so I need to rely on a Tongues spell to communicate with him, suddenly the persuasion check is automatic and my social skills don't factor into it at all?

What sense does that make?

No. The spell explicitly allows the caster to create/define the personality of the illusion. It's not "general instructions". The caster literally creates the personality that determines how the illusion behaves. That's as close to "it'll act the way I think it should" as it gets. The benefit of this (higher level IIRC) illusion spell is not that the caster "does not control it directly", but that the caster "does not have to control it directly". The assumption is that the illusion will simply automatically do what the caster expects because it's created to behave however the caster expects it to behave. The alternative is to require the player to write a massive document detailing every possible reaction the illusion will have to every possible event that might occur. That's absurd. Just let the player decide how the illusion behaves. Done.

The spell specifically states that the illusion is free-willed and that the caster cannot control it directly. It states that when the spell is cast, the illusionist decides the general details of its personality and appearance, including its allegiance and motivation.

The word "general" in there is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Exactly what does general mean? Well, that's up to the GM.

I know that personally, if someone came up to me with a gigantic list of instructions that covered every possible scenario and was written like computer code or a legal document, I would tell them no, that violates the spirit of the game.

I don't think I am an outlier there, I am pretty sure if I dropped into my local game store and wanted to play in an adventure league, and rolled up with a giant say, a vast contingency spell trigger that was worded like a contract, I would expect to be laughed at. Likewise, I don't think that saying that I could in theory write such a set of instructions, therefore we should just cut out the middle man and let me trigger the contingency whenever I want for any reason, would get me very far at all.

In setting, the spell is being cast in a single round, generally a few seconds at most, and even a ritual casting only takes a few minutes. There simply isn't enough time for a caster to stipulate every little detail and possible condition, even if (and this is a big if) such a thing was theoretically possible for the magic being used.

I think modern editions of D&D actually support this style of play. I know in older editions players would try and use air-tight contractual language for spells, particularly Wish and Magic Mouth, but I am pretty sure such things are no longer allowed by either the letter or the spirit of the rules.

They aren't different. I'm not sure where you'd going with this tangent. I'd expect that if I created an undead, it would also do what I wanted. Same with a construct, or familiar, or whatever.

I think the issue is one of specificity. To me, if the player didn't specifically say "I'm ordering my <construct/undead/illusion/whatever> to do <specific thing>", I err to asking the player what their <construct/undead/illusion/whatever> does in response to any thing else that happens. You seem to think the exact opposite. That anything not specifically detailed by the player falls to the GM to decide.

At no point did Bob previously state "if the party is attacked by a monster, my illusion will cower from it". So what exactly the illusion would do in response to an approaching monster was undefined. In those cases, let the player decide. Doing otherwise is just going to cause conflict for everyone, so why do it? It's just strange because you seem to want to put the weight on Bob to anticipate every possible thing and prepare for it ahead of time, but aren't willing to do the same yourself. You could certainly have, knowing that you would shortly be attacking the party with a monster, asked Bob "Um... So Bob. What exactly will your illusion do if a monster appears and attacks the party?". Then you could have gotten Bob "on the record" with his specific commands about the illusion.

But you didn't do this. Now maybe you didn't think of it. But one might suspect that, had you asked him, Bob would have thought about what he wanted his illusion to do in that situation, and he almost certainly would have said "I'd want it to pretend to stand and fight the monster, so as to draw its fire from the rest of the party". I mean, it makes sense to have the illusion do that in that situation, given that it's an illusion and cant take physical damage, right?

Again. We can't know for sure though (but I'd totally take that bet). So yeah. When in doubt, err to the player making that determination in cases like this. Doing otherwise will just devolve into upset players.

I recall you being very adamant that you were only talking about illusion and dominate.

At first I thought you were talking about any spell which allows you to give another character instructions but you were very firm in dissuading me from that notion.

IIRC, it was actually pretty similar to the interaction I had with NichG in this thread, where I thought a general principle was being described rather than a very specific example, and you were quite irrate as a result.

[King of Nowhere]

Hold up a second.

This makes no sense.

I presume that you have some sort of social dice mechanic in your game of choice, right? Charisma checks? Persuasion, diplomacy, gather information, etc.? Right? There is some mechanical way to convince people to do what you want?

Are you telling me that in your game, language difficulties completely supersede these mechanics?

Like, if it would normally be a difficulty 20 persuasion check for me to convince the bartender to tell me the name of the local crime boss.

But, if I only speak dwarven, and the bartender only speaks elven, so I need to rely on a Tongues spell to communicate with him, suddenly the persuasion check is automatic and my social skills don't factor into it at all?

What sense does that make?

Why would a stone want to hide information?
A bartender may not want to reveal the name of a crime boss to avoid implicating himself. Getting that information requires persuasion.
On the other hand, a bartender does not have reasons to hide where the toilet is. Asking where is the toilet does not require persuasion to get an answer.

What about the stone? Is the location of the secret door more akin to the crime boss, or more akin to the toilet? What are the information that a stone will give up freely and what are those that it will try to hide?
For that matter, what does the stone know?
Seems to me, the most sensible ruling would be, since the stone does not have a brain, a will, feelings or goals, and it is only brought to "life" by the spell, then it should freely provide any information you ask. Just like speak with dead does not require charisma checks.

Mind you, i could accept some metaphysical explanation like "people who built the secret passage wanted it to stay secret, and those kind of expectations reflect on the stone when it is unnaturally brought to life. Such is the nature of magic that it reacts to a strong willpower, in this case the will for the secret passage to stay secret. So you need persuasion". I could accept that because at my table we trust each other; i'd also expect this idea to be applied consistently to determine which information requires persuasion and which does not. But if i was as paranoid as your players, i would see it as adversarial.