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1 year agoMy wife has maybe a couple hundred books. If you don’t count my comics or my RPG manuals-- for reasons– I own maybe a couple dozen. Counting the rooms we don’t normally keep books in, we own a couple of times that average (if it’s correct) per room in our house.
I am absolutely opposed. The most important quality of games like we are discussing is player choice, and in order for player choice to be meaningful, the fictional world of the game needs to be internally consistent. Players need to be able to make decisions based on the information they have, and the consequences of those decisions have to be based on in-universe factors.
The second most important thing, of course, is player trust. When an unprepared umpire puts his foot down and says, “Look, I prepared for you go west, so you’re going west,” the players can at least trust that the rest of the time, when the umpire doesn’t force them to make a specific choice, their choices still matter. Like fudging the dice, it’s a rotten game tool that might save your game tonight, but as soon as your players catch you at it, it will ruin your whole game and probably the next several games afterwards.
It’s Bad Advice from the Dark Ages of our hobby.