D&D General No two people ever seem to play D&D the same way, but we can usually find people to play with anyway.

[Charlaquin]

I also tell players what there characters experience through non traditional senses... “you get a bad feeling” but someone on here told me they would never play with my group because that takes away control of there characters.

This is the kind of thing I’ll ague about animatedly on forums - I strongly believe in keeping the PCs’ feelings exclusively under control of the players. But in an actual game, I might grumble internally if told my character “got a bad feeling”, but it wouldn’t actually be a deal-breaker. Maybe if the DM was constantly narrating what my character felt I would eventually quit the game, but most likely it would just be a minor annoyance that was vastly outweighed by how fun the rest of the game is.

 

[DEFCON 1]

One other aspect I think is in play about this is that many of us use posting on the board as a way to entertain ourselves and spend our time doing something D&D-related when not actually playing D&D. And thus we can just type and type and type, analyzing and over-analyzing what it is we are talking about and what it is we are responding to... editing and re-editing to make points that we think are important.

But doing all of that will occasionally take us more overboard with our comments than we ever would have been had we been having the conversation face-to-face. And that's mainly because we can get all our points out on the table without being interrupted or pausing because we know the person we are speaking to has something to say.

I suspect that any of these threads... had they been done in person with folks sitting around a table having the discussion... it would never be as intense as it sometimes might seem here. So I think the best way to look at any of this is assume that anyone who is talking is probably 50% more over-the-top with their comments than they probably actually believe. LOL.

 

[Charlaquin]

Then there’s the way the medium allows for you to break a post down and respond to different chunks of someone’s comment individually, as well as responding to their exact words. Whereas in normal conversation you have to take what someone is saying holistically.

 

[aco175]

Part of the problem is that there are soo many rules and editions. Over the years, everyone has adopted rules that they liked or kept over the editions and other rules are homemade where the books encourage it. It is marginally like Monopoly where I may play with putting money on Free Parking and start with passing out 3 properties to everyone and you do not. It might be more like it poker was 1e with 5-card stud and 2e was 7-card. 3e might be 5-card draw and 4e more like Texas Hold-em. When we discuss the rules, someone will be all, "7-card stud is the best and everyone else is wrong".

 

[payn]

Part of the problem is that there are soo many rules and editions. Over the years, everyone has adopted rules that they liked or kept over the editions and other rules are homemade where the books encourage it. It is marginally like Monopoly where I may play with putting money on Free Parking and start with passing out 3 properties to everyone and you do not. It might be more like it poker was 1e with 5-card stud and 2e was 7-card. 3e might be 5-card draw and 4e more like Texas Hold-em. When we discuss the rules, someone will be all, "7-card stud is the best and everyone else is wrong".

Its fine to prefer 7 card stud and talk about why you think its better than 5 card draw. The problem is folks often say, "7 card is superior and 5 card is inferior." That's a clean version often there are more put downs both direct and indirect like back handed compliments. When folks engage in these types of discussions I do my best to ask them to do so in a less dismissive and more constructive way. Folks who care about honest discussion usually adapt, folks who don't, just want to be dinks. Which is fine, because then you find out who is who.

 

[Charlaquin]

Its fine to prefer 7 card stud and talk about why you think its better than 5 card draw. The problem is folks often say, "7 card is superior and 5 card is inferior." That's a clean version often there are more put downs both direct and indirect like back handed compliments. When folks engage in these types of discussions I do my best to ask them to do so in a less dismissive and more constructive way. Folks who care about honest discussion usually adapt, folks who don't, just want to be dinks. Which is fine, because then you find out who is who.

Further complicating this is the fact that people often bring over assumptions and habits from one edition to another. It’s one thing to say you like 7 card stud more than 5 card draw. It’s another when you prefer 7 card stud, but 5 card draw is what everyone’s playing these days, so you switch over to 5 card draw but add a bunch of house rules to make it play more like 7 card stud.

(For the record, my knowledge of Poker is extremely limited, so I don’t know if that metaphor actually works or not. But I think it at least gets the idea across.)

 

[payn]

Further complicating this is the fact that people often bring over assumptions and habits from one edition to another. It’s one thing to say you like 7 card stud more than 5 card draw. It’s another when you prefer 7 card stud, but 5 card draw is what everyone’s playing these days, so you switch over to 5 card draw but add a bunch of house rules to make it play more like 7 card stud.

(For the record, my knowledge of Poker is extremely limited, so I don’t know if that metaphor actually works or not. But I think it at least gets the idea across.)

Thats true, and a pretty good use of the poker analogy. I know the E-war was hard on a lot of folks, but I learned a ton about what I like and dont like in gaming. I also got a good understanding of what others like and why they do. There were a few miss fires on my part, and folks had to use my method on me at times, but in the end I came away with a better general understanding. So the internet effect isn't always negative, IME.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

I come to ENWorld to continue to learn and improve the gameplay at our tables (where we play 5e). I hope to also pay it forward here by sharing in my own words what I've learned from other posters as well as outside resources that have benefited our groups. By sharing, it becomes a positive feedback loop for me as I'm better able to engrain a concept into how I run and play 5e.

I'm glad for the varied viewpoints brought to bear in these discussions as they help me discover new ideas and new ways of looking at how I run a game - and also help challenge, and often strengthen, how I already approach the game.

Of course, sometimes it's a matter of separating the wheat from the chaff in discussions. Sometimes posters are arguing for the sake of arguing and under no circumstance will back down to admit there is another way to look at things or that they might outright be wrong. That is of course magnified by the anonymous nature of the forum (as others have mentioned upthread).
Also, sometimes posters are arguing under false pretenses - and, likely most often, not doing so deliberately. They may be indicating that a rule or ruling is wrong when they a. haven't really read the DMG/PHB fully to hold a deep understanding of the rule (raises hand sheepishly as something I've done in the past), and/or b. are misunderstanding the assumptions behind the debate (yep, been here too), and/or c. don't actually play the edition being discussed or are bringing in assumptions from other editions/games. Any of these can lead to obfuscation and frustration and make it appear that our games are more disparate than the same.

At the end of the day, if we actually played in the game of another forum poster with whom we seem to disagree, I think such a game more often than not may actually run IRL much the same as our own with perhaps some minor adjustments (which may or may not be annoyances) - and fun would be had.

 

[MGibster]

Come to think of it, there have been an awful lot of new gamers, new in the sense that we had no history gaming together, who quickly bugged out of games after only a few sessions. I always chalked it up to a combination of compatibility issues and general gamer flakiness but maybe it's more about compatibility issues. I know there have been groups I've gamed with where I just absolutely disliked how they went about doing things in game. The players themself were just fine but the way they ran the game just wasn't enjoyable to me. Maybe that's part of what makes it hard to find a group?

 

[MGibster]

I come to ENWorld to continue to learn and improve the gameplay at our tables (where we play 5e). I hope to also pay it forward here by sharing in my own words what I've learned from other posters as well as outside resources that have benefited our groups. By sharing, it becomes a positive feedback loop for me as I'm better able to engrain a concept into how I run and play 5e.

I'm mostly here to argue with @Charlaquin and give @Umbran a hard time. I kid. I kid. I'm here because it's fun to talk about the silly games I love and I get a lot of good ideas from all the participants here.