Many people are more concerned about feigning "civility" than engaging in meaningful discourse.
Since when was poncing about like imaginary elves meaningful discourse? Patooie. I love D&D, but it's a game, and falls very short of any forced meaning that style can inflict upon it.
Dr. Awkward said:
This isn't about telling players, "It's my way or the highway." It's about telling players, "Look, we're in this together. We can cooperate and make a fun game for all of us, or we can piss off and do our own thing alone and not have fun playing a game with each other. I think that the former choice would be the better one." People who are playing the game to win, or playing to crush the other players, or playing just to be a nuisance (whether they know they're doing it or not) are not good players, and a book to teach them how to play might help both them and the people they play with by making them more like the sort of folks we'd all like to game with.
I see your point, but it's a point that I think DMs need to know and players will either know or not depending upon what kind of fun they want to have with the game.
A player who loves improv and story will do this without any sort of manual telling them how, just like a player who loves crunchy mechanics and rulesbits will make a mechanically powerful character using only the PHB and his own imagination. The player who loves history will inquire about it, and the player who loves tactics will use them. Because that's what's fun for them and their imagination. There are useful tomes about min/maxing you character mechanically, and the market can only benefit from books about how to use other styles effectively, too, but those will be even less useful than the Munchkin's Guide books because what they "teach" is much more ephemeral. In other words, making a supplement about how to improv well in D&D will fall short of a book about how to improv well in general. So why reinvent the wheel?
The DM needs to be able to do this MORE than the players. That's why there's volumes more DM advice -- the DM needs to recognize where the players are having fun and emphasize those aspects of fun (or tell the players to look elsewhere if they're uncompromising). The DM needs to include moments of improv for the actor, moments of mechanical difficulty for the min/maxer, moments of history for the historian, and moments of brilliant tactics for the tactician. It's much more likely that a DM doesn't have all these skills, and it's more important for a DM to recognize where he won't give players the fun they want. Players can largely decide for themselves what's fun or not, and generally already have by the time they get to the table.
jim pinto said:
If I sit down and write this book, it will be for everyone. It will talk to each kind of gamer, explain their role and make sure they understand that they are 1/4th, 1/10th, or 1/516th of the campaign; depending on the number of people at the table.
The book will explain Plot-oriented, Event-oriented, Character-oriented, and Location-oriented adventuring.
(someone said something about railroading and that's event-oriented gaming... which I personally hate, but became big when people stopped playing in dungeons and hadn't figured out the other two types yet)
Lastly, there is completely freeform adventuring as well, which would get some attention.
...
The player's should be vested. They should have a reason to show up, just as much as anyone. They should have a vote over what's in the world, what they play next, and what they can do. They don't get a veto. But, they get a vote.
We recently lost a player from our group at home because he couldn't understand or accept these last two concepts and believed everyone could just show up in whatever mood they wanted.
I think your first difficulties are that you are overcategorizing and assuming too much. You're putting "event-based" on a continuum from worse to better that doesn't nessecarily exist. You're delimiting the categories of adventures when a good campaign will have a mix of those and more. You're saying the players should be vested, but that's an opinion, and not one eveyrone shares. You say you lost a player because HE couldn't understand the concepts, without ever addressing the fact that the issue could have been (and probably was) much more complex than that.
It sounds like you want to "fix" bad players. But it's my stipulation that the only bad player is the one who doesn't enjoy herself. So all you need to do is encourage that player to seek what's fun and tell the DM that. It's the DM's job to balance everyone's wants and needs, and that's a much more difficult task (and thus is worthy of many more volumes of advice). And that doesn't require a manual. Just a bit of assertiveness (which not everyone will have, admittedly).