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Oct 8, 2012 -- 2:06PM, YagamiFire wrote:

GreyIce that is some seriously good explaining right there. So you would say, perhaps, that there is nothing more important than context provided?

Context provided yes, but also choice.  Players should have a choice that leads to them accepting the negative consequences.  They don't always need to be explicitly told they've made a choice that will have negative consequences, but the choice should be there and it should be deliberate (see the room in Cabin in the Woods for the BAD sort of choices to give your players).  

For example, lets say there's an NPC whose been helping your party.  He's the leader of a group of free Mul who used to be slaves, and he's interested in ensuring the safety of his charges, and also of preventing the slave trade and freeing existing slaves.  The party has a specific goal of defeating a powerful wizard, and to do so they band together with a coalition, part of which includes a band of slavers.  The PCs agree not to hurt the interests of anyone in that group, including the slavers.

When the Wizard allies with the Free Mul and the PCs suddenly find a knife in their back it should come as no surprise.  They made their choices.  They had reasons for their choices, and they might even be serving the greater good, but the Free Mul don't see it that way, and they betrayed the PCs.  This is not "Gotcha!"

So context is important, but so is PC choice.  If the PCs are presented with the coalition as a fait accompli and they THEN are betrayed by the Free Mul AFTER the DM forms the coalition, then it's a "Gotcha!" because the PCs never chose to make the coalition - it was thrown at them, and they dealt with it, and suddenly the DM has become unreliable (because the coalition that looked like a good idea turned out to be a less-than-good idea).  


As for Lunar Savage's door, there's no "Gotcha!" element to it at all.  It's a temporary barrier.  Lets say the PCs find out that the artifact they need is 3 days journey away.  Is that a "Gotcha" moment?  No.  It's a trip, it takes 3 days.  His door takes 3 hours.  Just pacing mechanisms.  Actually his door could be an interesting thing - the logic that your best lock is that the door takes 3 hours to open because you don't even need to guard it heavily.  Just send a patrol by to check it every hour - if the hourglass is flipped, you have a problem.  I'd expect the people who made that door to be very, very smart and be very worried about the possibility of fighting them.

Oct 8, 2012 -- 1:56PM, GreyICE wrote:

The Jewel that the players picked up has a useful magical power, but was once part of a Dragon's horde, and now they're being stalked by an angry red dragon that will attack them - Gotcha!

If a DM did this to me I'd just be like "... really?"  It's so goddamn bad.

While I agree that this is strictly speaking a gotcha, I am not sure I would mind all that much if properly presented. After all, I am playing the game to adventure, and I don't mind the occassional complication. What is more, it is part and parcel of the stories D&D simulates.

Of course, the same situation can also be fun if the players actually realize the inherent risks about an item. I loved it when my players in a recent campaign had an intense IC discussion about the benefits of keeping a magical ring that also happened to be the seal of a now extinct imperial bloodline, but that madmen and influential nobles still claimed to belong to when attempting to reunite the empire. They decide that the ring would not be worth the trouble, selling it for favors and money to the Chamberlain.

In the end, it is all about presentation and player expectation. Most players like to be occassionally surprised. They want to overcome a challenge. As such the occassional gotcha is fine as long as it increases the fun for all at the table.

In this regards I definitely agree with the OP. The words metagame, railroad and gotcha are defined and can be used. The fact that people often associate negative aspects to the term and then use it to tell somebody is running the game wrong has nothing to do with the words. Merely with the fact that many people apparently apply very narrow definitions to the words so that it never applies to their own game, but only to the negative aspects they are discussing about. The discussions tend to be very black-and-white even though it never is in practice. In this regards I see the question of the OP more about when is a gotcha too much, when not

P.S. I still stick to my opinion that the door example is not a gotcha without some more context. It could be a gotcha if the PCs need to get past that door (and know it), but somehow missed the key to open that door, failing as result, because of the DM purposely withholding the necessary information. That is an awefull lot of assumptions though, and in my experience the unopenable door is much more often a sign of extreme railroading or the DM trying to get the players to start problem solving and misjudging the complexity of the puzzle