The always-thoughtful John Kim (who I interviewed for TT) has this to say about informed player decisions:
In general, I would say that if the player can’t make informed decisions about what game actions she needs to take to accomplish what she wants, then resolution is at the wrong level. Either the player needs to be given more information such that she can make informed decisions, or the resolution should be done at a higher scale [emphasis mine].
He goes on to give an example:
For example, if the players don’t have enough information to determine what they should do to find the sewer entrance, then I might simply have them make a single roll (say, Gather Information in D20) to find it. If I don’t want it to be a single roll, then I have to provide them with enough information to make informed decisions.
Man, but that’s a good way of putting it. (The whole post is here: Player Knowledge, Planning, and Intent.)
That is a good way to phrase it. I’ve been preaching for years now the need to give the players more useful information so that they can make good meaningful decisions. I’ve never seen the idea put so clearly.
Nodding… yep, that seems exactly right.
Agreeing with everyone else here. The article defines what I would consider a sort of best prcatice for GMing.
100% agreement. The DM has the ultimate responsibility for the party, because he’s the one feeding them all the knowledge. When the party fails to act in a rational manner, the DM generally shares some of the blame (not necessarily all of the blame, and not necessarily all of the time).
That said, some misdirection and vagueness is necessary, but when the party constantly misses the clues, perhaps they’re not really “clues”.
This is exactly why John needs to write a GMing advice book. 😉