Comment on “Speculation”

"The status quo has a very strong motivation to not let things like that happen - and to punish those who follow courses of action that change the status quo. If the players ever get to be big enough to own a .45 of their own, so they can start blasting away with it, everyone in the world will turn around and blast away at the player. Not just the infringed party. Not just the person the players wronged. Everyone. Because everyone is threatened."

Good paragraph.

The shit-game analogue to your sound logic is this kind of arrangement: the DM tolerates all kinds of idiocy in-game with no repercussions for the players - except when they occasionally just drop out the deus ex machina big-guns and blow you up with fiat.

They lack the world coherency to "push back" on the players in a way that has any bite to it, until they decide that the players are doing something they don't like, and then they bring out whatever levels of rails are necessary to stop the undesired behavior. God, it's like a psychology experiment or something - you can pinpoint what the DM is unwilling/unable to tackle by casting about until you strike a rail.

The better DM is transparent. For big-impact questions I think it's worth straight-up saying "I don't have principled rules for this thing yet, but..." Regardless, he establishes in plain sight some provisional rules, and maybe adds the issue to his will-fix list. The DM retains control without needing the illusion of knowing everything, the players get to try their cool plan, and nobody is stressed.

On a tangential topic which came up as I was writing:

For god's sake, I cannot tell you how frustrating it gets to hear someone talk about how they punish in-game as a response to out-of-game trolling. "Yeah, and then I kick him out if he does it again." Oh, he did it again? No shit? I never would have saw it coming... I like your soccer-game analogy for these situations.