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I think the reason you aren’t seeing answers to that question is that the answer is « it depends ». Game’s a bash-the-door dungeon crawler, if the PC wants to be a gnome in a world in which gnomes aren’t established, it’s tough to see how that impacts much of anything. If the game is a Feywild...

Funnily enough, so do wise players. It’s a bit of a tautology both ways: what makes a person wise? The fact that they consider the long term ahead of the short term.

7. The big one: failing to explain why you’re doing something.

Neither will your friends.

« Earning trust » is a regular outgrowth of playing an RPG. One of my players ran a one-shot. I said sure: a one-shot is not a big tome commitment. The game wasn’t great. Heavy railroading, canon characters acting inconsistently, DM being unprepared. Afterwards, when he proposed an actual...

If you’re running a kick down the doors, fight the monsters, take their loot kind of game, it really shouldn’t matter that one player wants to be a tabaxi and another one an artificer. The problem comes when you are running such a game and ban various races and classes because they don’t match...

I think that is all the players are asking for as well. The disconnect comes between those who believe that a reasonable compromise is achievable in virtually all cases with good faith players and those who believe the DM having the last word is either an absolute right or an absolute necessity...

Facts not in evidence

I said that I liked the change to rule zero. The change doesn’t have to prevent bad DMs from DMing badly to be a positive change. It is enough that it reminds good DMs what is important and provides good advice to average and inexperienced DMs, which it does.

Except you keep on insisting that players are incapable of doing this. Why is it that you believe that a DM can take a long view of the game but players can’t? Neither will DMs, which is precisely why all authority shouldn’t be invested in them.

Only if you’re the guy that insists that all jedi have to be human in a Star Wars game.

Unfortunately, lost the reference, but it’s a cool story. In « the Wilds beyond the Witchlight », in the early carnival portion, there is a minor character, a surly clown named Thaco who guards a gate. Certain grogs on enworld hated this, posting about how WotC was being divisive, how this...

But that’s equally true if the DM makes the ruling without the players’ input. The problem is being stuck with the ruling, not that it originated with the DM or players.

You’re in no position to call strawman when your last post literally compared your players to animals too dumb to avoid overeating to death.

You said : you fail to see how the formulation of rule zero could have an impact on bad DMs. It can. First, you keep repeating the canard that bad DMs are rare, therefore we don’t need to take them into consideration when providing advice. This is incorrect. We were all bad DMs at one...

As a DM, I can be heavily invested and motivated in a game even if I don’t 100% get my way on everything. Earlier, someone gave the example of a tabaxi PC. Even if my plan for the world didn’t include tabaxi, it seems to me that I wouldn’t be justified in saying that because of 1 tabaxi I am...

Gygax was wrong about a bunch of things, that included. I’m not typing this on a Turing machine, despite the fact that Alan Turing is one of the fathers of computing.

That assumes only a bad DM can benefit from the advice. Everyone benefits from the reminder that you aren’t DMing in a vaccuum, and that your players aren’t evil trolls trying to screw up your game.

I skipped both 3e and 3.5e for several reasons, including the reification of RAW. System matters. I believe that 5e has fewer of those epic rules battles, and it definitely isn’t because 5e has shifted more power to DMs.

That’s just wrong. DMing is a skill like any other. We were all bad DMs when we started, just like I was a terrible tennis player when I started. The vast majority of DMs get better. Bad advice to DMs makes it less likely that they will improve. Good advice makes it more likely they will...