D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Don Durito]

There seem to be an awful lot of posts on reddit that say things like "We couldn't solve the GM's mystery so he said we are all idiots. How should I deal with this situation as he's a good GM?"

So I don't think bad GM's are that uncommon - or players who put up with then far more than they should.

 

[FrogReaver]

There seem to be an awful lot of posts on reddit that say things like "We couldn't solve the GM's mystery so he said we are all idiots. How should I deal with this situation as he's a good GM?"

So I don't think bad GM's are that uncommon - or players who put up with then far more than they should.

And this highlights the problem. You highlight a person calling his GM overall good with a single situation complained about as evidence of a bad GM.

If that’s the criteria there are no good GMs.

 

[Umbran]

I disagree.

Gravity, for example. Depending on the size/density of your game world it might not have exactly the same effects as here on Earth - someone who weighs 180 lb here might only weigh 165 lb there, using the same sacle each time - but the underlying physics are Type-I.

You can't assume, that, though. You might be playing in the setting of Larry Niven's The Integral Trees, in which folks aren't living on a planetary surface at all.

There can be Type-1 facts, but you have to elucidate which ones they are.

 

[Umbran]

Agree with @Thomas Shey on this one. They may be poor quality data compared to some other types, but often that is all we have to work with.

Garbage in, garbage out. If all you have to work with is bad, then you admit you don't have the information you need, rather than come to erroneous conclusions.

Folks are way, waaay, too reluctant to say, "I don't know." But saying that is fundamental to actual progress.

 

[Umbran]

Sometimes, in cases like this, deferring to the player who knows stuff can be a good approach.

Sometimes.
But, in this case, the player was trying to use their own knowledge to get information their character shouldn't have had.

And in other times...
...look, I'm a physicist. You ask me how things really work, and it will kill your scifi game faster than you can say "Schwartzchild radius".

 

[AlViking]

There seem to be an awful lot of posts on reddit that say things like "We couldn't solve the GM's mystery so he said we are all idiots. How should I deal with this situation as he's a good GM?"

So I don't think bad GM's are that uncommon - or players who put up with then far more than they should.

People like to complain, especially on Reddit. If I wanted I could write up a couple of bad experiences myself, but that's because I've played with a lot of GMs over decades.

Nobody denies there are some bad GMs out there. No one is even saying it mat be hard to find one. But saying that D&D is uniquely overflowing with bad GMs needs more proof than someone complaining about that one person on Reddit.

 

[Umbran]

The problem is this writes off whole categories of social science as "not science" because all you can get are anecdotes.

With respect, social science folks are very clever, and can extract data from what looks like anecdotes.

But, also, yes - social sciences in the past have gotten it very wrong, to the harm of peoples in the past. So, being aware of the limitations of your information, and how far you should take the conclusions you reach, is very important.

And sometimes you can only get so many of them. Arguably, any intermittent phenomenon that can't be duplicated experimentally is "anecdote" but that doesn't stop people from using them because sometimes that's all you've got.

Yes. But, guess what? Science doesn't claim to be instantaneous. Sometimes, you have to wait until you can catch enough of the intermittent phenomena before you claim to understand them.

There's a word for thinking you should generally bull forward with whatever you have, no matter the limitations - that word is "hubris".

The personal anecdotes about gaming are going to be subject to a host of possible biases, and without very careful record keeping, it is impossible to correct for those biases. And, of course, without those records, a person who has become invested in their answer will flatly deny those biases could possibly exist.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

You do realize this entirely writes off any history not backed by archeology, right? I mean, I'm not going to say there aren't problems with history, but that seems an extreme position.

History is not a statistical science. It is our best attempt at assembling some idea of what happened in the past. That idea is often wrong, and any good historian will tell you that if you base your stuff only on secondhand information, it's bad history. Further, any good historian will tell you that even with extensive primary sources, we can still be led astray if all of those sources are biased for the same reason.

Finally, while the ravages of time do act as a selection process, that selection process is not nearly as biased as people volunteering information by self-selection. It IS biased, but the bias is (usually) much more random, which means the data we derive from it can be more meaningful, even if not absolutely so.

Archaeology helps us do the best history. In the total absence of physical data, we rely on a diversity of sources and recognize that sources, even primary ones, are deeply flawed.

Consider ancient Norse religion. It is almost certain that we don't actually understand what their beliefs were, because for whatever (IMO ridiculous) reason, they chose to never write down their religious beliefs, using only pictorial depictions (e.g. carvings of scenes on megalithic works) and oral tradition. It was only when Snorri Sturluson wrote down the Prose Edda, long after Christianity had completely subsumed the Nordic territories, that we got anything, and he is notoriously biased because he wrote that work specifically as a political tract to persuade Iceland to unite under other Scandinavian royalty. Not to mention that the work is so thoroughly Christianized, it tries to pass off the Norse gods as completely mortal heroes of ancient Troy!

We do what we can with what we have, but we do so knowing that it's almost surely got parts that are wrong and we won't know which are which. So we make damned sure our conclusions are small and conservative.

 

[The Firebird]

With respect, social science folks are very clever, and can extract data from what looks like anecdotes.

What happens, metaphysically, when this occurs?

Is it possible to learn this power?

 

[hawkeyefan]

It was a good outcome but if nothing had changed would you have continued to play with them as DM? Because if the answer was no (which I assume) that would have been the other way it would have self-corrected. Sometimes it will be harder to accomplish than others.

But my point is that truly bad DMs (weren't we all once?) won't retain players unless they change.

He’s one of my best friends, so I have a hard time imagining we’d not play together at all. Also, I didn’t say he was a bad GM. I described one bad experience.

And I think that’s probably more important… we all make mistakes, as you say. He made an error in judgment. It’s not so much about the viking hat GM who cackles as he rips up your character sheet. It’s about the GM who doesn’t want to allow a drow PC because they’re all evil, or the GM who shoots down an idea of the players that they’re enthused about because it’s “silly” or something.

For me, it’s not necessarily about bad GMs (though those exist), it’s more about instances of bad GMing.