They have a fun and enjoyable game. Your looking at it from the Bad Side of "no matter what the players do they loose". But my game is the Hard Fun game. Players that are intelligent, cautions and thoughtful will have fun.
Okay. "It's just fun for virtuous people" doesn't really...tell me anything.
I get all your experience in Old School play was bad....but, oddly, you don't count any of those DMs as "bad gamers" at all, as you say you have never ever met one....right?
Oh, not at all. The three proper OSR DMs I've had were all lovely people. One of them never used attritional traps (and his traps/hazards were
brilliant and very fun), one used attritional traps extensively and they were the worst part of the experience (which was otherwise pretty good, he had great world-lore), and one used them occasionally and they were, again, one of the worst parts of the experience.
When "the traps were boring" is the most serious criticism I can give, I think I've had at least a halfway-decent DM.
Guess I'll need to do a definition post sometime.
Okay. Just, if you choose to do so, I recommend (a) trying to avoid disparaging styles that differ from yours, and (b) focusing on the actual
process of DMing and playing, not just abstract descriptions of the virtues thereof. E.g., walking the reader through examples of how you prepare something, what considerations you put into it, ways that it can go well and ways that it can go poorly (everyone makes mistakes!), etc. Try to avoid just putting up an abstract descriptor like, "Hard Fun is action-packed and tense. The players have to think and pay attention." That doesn't really tell folks what the term means; it just tells us that you like it and that, when it is done well, some players will enjoy it. It's much more useful to be shown
how and
why "Hard Fun" does what it does, than to be told what "Hard Fun" (or anything!)
feels like when you're playing a good example of it.
