Is It OK?

[NichG]

It's true, the way I defined it is pretty broad, maybe too broad.

I think that maybe more usefully, it would apply when this is a pattern of behavior - there are nominally computers in the game which can be hacked and (IC) have important data on them, but in practice the GM will give out the plot-important information with or without hacking, and won't give out any knot-cutting information regardless of hacking.

Also, IME, it's really hard to avoid doing this sometimes in an improv-heavy game. So I wouldn't say it's something where a single instance is a problem.

I think it's clearer to me if one treats as separate things that involve violations or overrides over the degrees of freedom which different participants at the table are ostensibly given control over, versus situations where someone at the table makes a decision that goes against the sense of cooperation or fairness or mutual fun at the table. I don't have preferred terminology for either of those, but I think conflating them leads to less useful approaches when trying to negotiate or resolve the issue...

So for example, things where the GM (or even just 'the rest of the table') says 'Your character does X' or 'Your character doesn't do X' have to do with reneging on the explicit or implicit agreement that 'the player's character is for them to control'. This may come about because, among other possibilities, the player was using the things they have the right to control in a way that violates the culture of the table.

The GM could instead respond using things that are within their right to control in order (NPC actions, builds, etc) to bring about a different outcome. However, there will likewise usually be cultural expectations of the GM as to how and to what ends they should be using their control - maybe they're supposed to keep things fair according to some power scale or difficulty curve, or never build things in an adversarial way (trying to 'beat' the players versus representing a particular world), or always help players realize their ideas rather than thwart them, or whatever.

The reason I think its useful to keep these layers separate is that one is more about explicit boundaries and the form of acts which cross those boundaries, whereas the other is more about 'how people should act' in the given table culture. Both can vary table to table, but the latter is something where at a given table one can expect unresolved disagreement on those values to exist and persist and that's not necessarily a problem that benefits from being tied to absolute language, whereas the former generally needs to be set down more clearly. So you could have a table where one player is like 'in order to trust the GM, I need to have my character take risks and not be swatted down for it' while another player is like 'in order to feel my actions have meaning, I can't be protected from their negative consequences', and the GM can understand and try to accomodate both players even if their expectations are different.

So if those expectations have been trespassed in a way that bothers someone, rather than having a debate about whether all pre-agreements permit that trespass or not, its more important to understand why the people involved are upset and come to a soft compromise about it even if there's no table rule that says 'you have to'. But if there's a violation of a basic assumption of who gets to decide what, then not coming to a shared understanding about what everyone can assume is in their control means that its hard to actually think about how to act at the table at all.