He felt it made the encounters more exciting and meaningful. And to a certain degree it did; at least at first. But after awhile it just got annoying. Every encounter had some type of gimmick, weirdness, and/or hidden thingamajig (< please note my clever use of a highly technical term). Pretty soon we spent more time thinking about what he didn't say rather than what he did. At times that might not be bad but it just encouraged metagame thinking.
Sure. You don't want *any* part of your tendencies as a GM to be too predictable. Nonetheless, a fog bank can turn a sniping war in a mountain pass into an exercise in frustration that takes all day and ends up being highly entertaining, even though it actually made any given individual on either side *less* likely to get shot and killed. If your players are used to fighting dragons and consider them 'easy and predictable', you can change EVERYTHING by making them fight *the exact same dragon* while wearing snowshoes or skis and standing on top of 16 feet of powder snow. It doesn't have to be hidden or weird, it can be something simple and obvious that they've known about all their lives.
I must admit I found it funny that my players became paranoid any time random weather generated fog.
Clever skill use can add a lot to a game but players need to know what's meaningful and what isn't. It's very frustrating for players to invest DP's into skills that are never going to have a useful application in your campaign.
Yes, they need to know what's meaningful and what isn't. That's another reason to throw all those niggling little details into your game, to teach them that. If you had enough skill in weather watching to make a good guess, chances are you knew fog was likely before you ever went up the mountain, much less went into the pass, and planned accordingly. If not, then you'll know next time. And you'll choose to learn the skill or not, knowing in advance that on most clear days it's "a waste of DPs".
You can also sometimes have things that are "common, everyday, everyone knows about them" and "hidden and weird" *both at once*. Take the above scenario, the sniping war in the pass. Fog is bad enough, but fog is just a cloud on the ground. If the enemy is in leather or unarmored, using clubs, bows and slings, and half the party is in chain, using swords and maces.... what if that fog is a storm trying to cross the mountain range? Or just on its way to *becoming* a storm? Lightning is an obvious danger, and for just creeping them out and making them run away, St. Elmo's fire is AWESOME.
And once again, if you had knowledge of weather-watching and physics you probably knew there was an electrical hazard and planned accordingly.
Also, personally, I hate it when players have their character learn a skill "just because". If character Grok has been described and played as a character who thinks first-acts second, has shown disdain for those "edumacated" types, and then decides to go and learn Advanced Math because he perceives some advantage to doing so, it drives me nuts. YMMV.
jolt
Me too. A player who will deliberately sabotage their own character concept.... I'll let em know up front that I WILL find SOME WAY to make them pay for that. But then, my players know up front as well that I feel no need to be fair, only entertaining. I tend to play by the rules, but only because GM caprice gets boring quickly, not because I *have to*. I can usually make game logic, entertainment, and rules all run in harness together, but when they can't it's the rules that give way, and my players know it. As far as I'm concerned, any character can learn to do anything. Fine and good. Now Mr./Ms. player, give me a reason why your character would *care* about knowing that skill. And remember that no one promised learning it will be easy.
Now to be fair, people change over time with experience, and I'm okay with someone who started with one worldview slowly acquiring a different one. The dealbreaker is when they try to learn a skill set that someone with that worldview simply wouldn't be interested in, as with Grok's skill in Advanced Maths.
