Quote:
Originally Posted by unipus
[snip]I also absolutely never give my players perfect information. Maybe I don't give them enough information -- but I base this on their skills, experience, and spotting roles, as well as the conditions. At night? Usually nothing more than "you see some silhouettes approaching," and if they get closer or have light or during the day more details like "they seem military" up to "you can tell they have AKs." Only under good conditions or good rolls do they get "it's a Soviet soldier with an AK-74 and..." and the level of detail depends on experience. So we had a recent game where one character needed to explain to another the magic of thermal imaging technology and how they really didn't want to fuck around with it.
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This is so little understood. A good maxim in life is "no one ever has 100% information in
anything". You get this hammered into your head when you study history and I find it applies it everything.
It also really brings scouting into its own, players should of course be encouraged to act and steal the initiative if an opportunity presents itself but I really like players who'll look at a situation and say "no, too tough". Many years ago I had players assault head on a hardened position and after the inevitable spate of woundings and two deaths I had to ask them why on earth they thought it was a good idea to attack. The general consensus was that they didn't think GMs put up challenges they couldn't beat straight on. I had to explain that beating that enemy involved not being detected and circumventing them.