Immanuel Kant: World's Worst DM?

Immanuel Kant was a philosopher I wrote about back when I was more interested in doing lecture blog posts. You might recall (or you might already know) (or you might be about to learn) that Herr Kant didn't believe in moral contingencies, so to speak. If something was right (or wrong) then it was always, in all situations and regardless of any consequences, right (or wrong). Most famously, he held that it was immoral to ever tell a lie. The basic reasoning, without using terms specific to his philosophy, is that every time you tell a lie, you degrade the truth a little. You might spot some problems with this, the most common objection being the following hypothetical scenario:

You've got a houseful of Jews, just, you know, crammed in there. Tons of Jews. More Jews/m^2 than a synagogue selling kosher hot dogs with a Hannukah discount. Also, you're in WW2-Europe, so that's probably bad. You should move either to somewhere less war-torn or to the future. Anyway, your friendly neighborhood Gestapo officer comes by and says: "Herr Kant! [see that? foreshadowed.] Do you have any Jews?" and you reply...? Herr Kant replies "yeah, I've got a houseful." Most people think the right thing to do is say something more like "Nope. I don't have anywhere to put Jews, because all my spare bedrooms are filled with spare copies of Mein Kampf."  (Kant didn't have Nazis but addressed the same problem with a generic murderer.)

So yeah, let me get to the point here. Kant didn't lie, or claimed we shouldn't, George Washington-style. It is my contention that this would make him a terrible Dungeon Master. Let me enumerate all the things my players believe which are false. (If you're one of my players, don't read the below.)

--This story was planned out beforehand. Well, I mean, yeah, sort of. I mean, I put these monsters together so that they'd work correctly. And I do have an idea for an eventual plot, if we keep playing long enough that you guys find it. But, uh, I wasn't expecting the session to last that long, so I had to make up names for the last two NPCs you met and I'm generating this mossy cavern thing you're in as you insist on exploring further. That map I just drew with Vis-a-Vis is complete and total bullshit, I made it up as I was drawing it and I don't think it bears any resemblance to an actual room that anyone has ever built. I draw slanted lines on it and say "difficult terrain" solely so we're not playing on an infinite grid of squares.

 --Monsters are unchanging, immutable entities which don't change during combat. Sometimes their bonuses waver, sometimes a defense is a little lower. Sometimes, monsters suddenly have 3/4 the hp they had before because, damn, your damage per round is too low for me to sit through that shit.

--Your characters will be perfect counters to anything, ever. I will probably let you have one fun fight where your Avenger gets all radiant-vulnerable enemies. After you blow through that, afterwards it's not going to go that way. No matter how awesome you are under the right conditions, I am the conditions.

And the biggest:

-- Dice don't lie. Sometimes, you get hit with 2d8 + 9, and I roll two eights. Even so, you're only going to take seventeen damage. On the other hand, sometimes you're a tank. Sometimes you've barely been hit all combat and are getting a little too cocky. You might suddenly develop a vulnerability to damage. Sometimes, crits just aren't as fun for me as they ought to be.

I often wonder how moral this is. I mean, I'm not Immanuel Kant, but still. My players are used to games on computers, mostly. They're used to cold equations and random number generators that, despite their mathematical imperfection, work impersonally. Should I be abusing that trust? I think so, and let me tell you why. A DM's job isn't to run the system or to write a story. After all, players could always run the system if they wanted. And there are lots of stories pre-written for D&D. A DM runs the game partially for narrative purposes--people don't want to know the story after all. However, we also need to keep the game working. It has to be fun, it has to be engaging, and it has to be a particular kind of fair that goes beyond strict balancing. That's what a person offers, and it's why I prefer tabletop RPGs to their electronic version. Computers can't lie. A DM can--and I think that's the best part.