rentar42

One approach would be to tell them.

Not everything that the GM says to the player necessarily needs to be character information.

Of course, you don’t want to ruin their suspense by telling them too early or too directly, but something along the lines of “as you hear the sound of many footsteps closing in, you remember that you thought you heard a “click-thunk” back in the mansion, but brushed it off as your nerves back then … maybe you did trigger that silent alarm after all.”

I find that to be a tricky thought experiment.

Can you run a country in a way that peppers the general population with “all is well” propaganda thoroughly and still manages to capture all the necessary information to make properly informed decisions at some high level?

You’d need some “elite” layer of people who get to see unfiltered, honest information, but how would you even collect that information if even local, low-level government actors are subject to (and meant to believe) the propaganda?

Basically what I’m asking is: if I ignored moral concerns, is there a world where keeping the majority ignorant could actually lead to more efficiency than letting knowledge of the state of things spread?

The Ministry of Truth will make sure those facts are well-documented.

Mind me asking where that was? Highschool/Sound of Music makes me guess the US. And what decade roughly?

If it was the US then I’m impressed how successful that myth was communicated outside of Austria. I always thought that was mostly our own delusion.

Honestly I don’t believe “Hitler was an Austrian” is as important for Austria to come to terms with as it is to accept/finally internalize that Austria wasn’t “the first victim”, but to a large degree welcomed the Anschluss (not 100%, obviously, but quite a big majority).

That is unfortunately pretty true. The So-called Austria victim theory, which is basically “oh, we poor Austrians were Nazi Germanys first victim!”, is obvious bullshit.

This was only really officially stated to be definitely false in the late 1980s … and there’s still plenty of people who probably would believe it or at least like to pretend that that was the case.

But as I said: at the very least we got to the place where pretty much any official/political actor has to acknowledge that it’s wrong.

The Pope is the infallible word of God

Well. Yes and no. The Pope has the capacity to provide infallible words according to church law. But that ability is used surprisingly rarely.

Just because he uttered “man, that’s the best bagle ever” during breakfast doesn’t mean that it’s suddenly sacrilegious to claim any other bagle is/was better.

The pope has to be speaking “ex cathedra” for it to be considered infallible and there’s some pretty severe limits on what that means and what topics that can be about. The last two times this power was used were 1854 and 1950, so not really a frequent thing.

I just find that an interesting detail.

And religion is all about what should be instead of what is, so there shouldn’t be any precedence for being practical.

I agree. But this isn’t about religion per se. This is about the church. And church and religion are two very different beasts. And in matters of the church they are required to take practicality into consideration.

Note that I’m by no means defending the catholic church here, I too think they did many, many harmful things and suspect their overall effect on the world is net-negative by many metrics.

There is no pace at which he could have gone that wouldn’t have created some backlash.

If he had waited a hundred more years, there would still have been backlash.

The catholic church is an organization that is built around stability first and foremost. It changes, of course, but very, very slowly. That is very much by design.

That design has helped them “survive” for as long as they did, but it might end up being what eventually leads them into irrelevancy.

That really sucks for the country, but I want to be nit-picky for a second:

Should drug gangs, even violent ones, really be considered terrorists? IMO that word requires some political/social aim, whereas I suspect the drug gangs really only have financial/power aims and aren’t particularly interested in social change (outside whatever they need to stay in power).

Or even worse: not taking money yet, but signalling that they would be willing …

I wonder how that worked out …

Or at least honor the ancients by using Impact font with a black outline. There’s a reason why that was/is that is used heavily.

The secret is to do everything as improvisation. If there is no preparation, then there’s no lost time!

…

Who am I kidding? I’ve not played in months and haven’t GMed in years …

You only need to follow this advice if you (the player) have an antagonistic relationship with your DM.

Your character might suffer from the ideas you give them, but the player should get enjoyment from the situations you got.

More often than not the best answer to “Wouldn’t it be hilarious if X happened?” is “Would it? Let’s see! …”