I have a friend who spent a lot of the 2010s arguing with me/other friends/randos online that this is gatekeeping. There's a line in the 1990 movie Metropolitan that it always reminded me of. One character is telling a guy she's interested in about her favorite book (I think it's Little Women), and when he starts dismissing it she asks if he's ever even read it, and he says something like "Why would I ever read a novel when I could ready literary criticism about it instead".It's fine to be critical of a work, but it really helps if you can show at least some effing evidence that you've actually read it.
The number of times I've had someone tell me their opinion of something, only to find out later in the thread they were going off of what a wiki told them.It's fine to be critical of a work, but it really helps if you can show at least some effing evidence that you've actually read it.
In one adventure module, I think it was "The Bane of Llywelyn", the party wasted an hour trying to figure out a spiral inlay on the floor in the castle. As a throw-away I had it so no matter where they started walking the spiral never reach the centre, and it just ran them back to the outer edge for some reason.Nothing is more fun than tossing some color into an adventure -- a wizard put a rune on a door that leads into his former lair -- and having the players absolutely spin out over it. (Guys, you really do want to have all four basic pillars covered in Shadowdark before going for non-core classes.)
The amount of paranoia and nervous theorizing over what amounted to "lair of Dead_Wizard_01, keep out!" was priceless.
I have a friend who spent a lot of the 2010s arguing with me/other friends/randos online that this is gatekeeping. There's a line in the 1990 movie Metropolitan that it always reminded me of. One character is telling a guy she's interested in about her favorite book (I think it's Little Women), and when he starts dismissing it she asks if he's ever even read it, and he says something like "Why would I ever read a novel when I could ready literary criticism about it instead".