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<blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 2694815" data-attributes="member: 2067"><p>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. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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?</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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).</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="I'm A Banana, post: 2694815, member: 2067"] 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. 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. 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). [/QUOTE]
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