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  1. EzekielRaiden

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

    [Edit: Please ignore this post. Accidentally double-posted an old, incomplete draft because I was closing tabs and thought I'd failed to post it. I apologize for any confusion.]
  2. EzekielRaiden

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

    My point is that rules are by far one of the most effective tools for helping GMs identify where their skills are mediocre to poor and correct that behavior so that, even if it doesn't become great, it at least becomes pretty okay.
  3. EzekielRaiden

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

    And how exactly do the players communicate this when the GM is beholden to no one and especially not to the players?
  4. EzekielRaiden

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

    That's not what you said. You said: "The group jives with that judgment until they cannot. [...] I realize some DMs are really bad and then you just leave." You have, right there, made exactly that assertion. There are only two states: "liv[ing] with that judgment", or "[DM is] really bad and...
  5. EzekielRaiden

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

    It's not the playstyle. It's the claim that you made there and elsewhere: Either you perfectly trust the GM, never having even the tiniest room to ever doubt anything they ever do, OR the GM is a horrible monster that you absolutely MUST get away from as fast as possible. GMs are either...
  6. EzekielRaiden

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

    It's completely possible to play any version of D&D without that. In no way does that mean you are "leaving D&D". Hell, I'd even argue that Basic and 4e are best played with an alternative approach--and @pemerton has spoken extensively on how and why.
  7. EzekielRaiden

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

    If the DM is reality, how can they ever be wrong? By definition, anything they say must be correct. Period. End of discussion. There cannot be anything else. You are doing that very thing I just mentioned above, that I was so recently told people don't do: the players must be completely...
  8. EzekielRaiden

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

    Pot, I'd like to introduce you to my good friend, kettle.
  9. EzekielRaiden

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

    Perhaps. Yes. Unwritten rules are an invisible spider's web trapping me in place. Written rules are a known structure I can climb on, and even better, I and others can actually see when they're going wrong. Because they aren't invisible. They're visible. That's...the whole point. Unwritten...
  10. EzekielRaiden

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

    You're gonna have a real, real rough go of getting anyone talking about "system" in the usual sense to accept that "GM making up whatever they feel like, no rules whatsoever" is a "system." Because to me that's improv theater with a director. I wouldn't call improv theater a system of any kind...
  11. EzekielRaiden

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

    I have repeatedly given examples, in this very thread, where I spoke about GMs who simply screwed up on something, or did something I considered to be Very Concerning but not overwhelmingly awful. I was told--by several people, including you!--that either it wasn't that bad and I should just...
  12. EzekielRaiden

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

    I really don't think they ARE that rare--or, at least, merely "pretty mediocre" GMs are not nearly that rare. And "pretty mediocre" GM can mean both "just really mid on everything"...and "great at two things and garbage at two things" or "great at two things, below average but still okay at two...
  13. EzekielRaiden

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

    Well, I was speaking more about rules for the friend-group's behavior, but yes, that too. That is, I was thinking of stuff like, say, a rule for who pays for lunch. "We round-robin it based on where your birthday falls in a given year" or "each pays individually" or "we all pitch into a...
  14. EzekielRaiden

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

    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...
  15. EzekielRaiden

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

    And in my experience, social contracts get rewritten whenever it is inconvenient for the person with power to follow them. Guess who has all the power in the social contract you keep pushing? Hence: they are not binding at all, because it's a binding where one person, and ONLY one person, has...
  16. EzekielRaiden

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

    I have not. Ever. Not once. I frankly find it baffling that such a thing would ever occur.
  17. EzekielRaiden

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

    I could not even begin to speculate; it would be from my hindquarters. Believe it or not, I've actually only had very few experiences with "bad" GMs at all. One of them was quite bad, but most of the rest were just really disappointing. But I've had many experiences with very mediocre GMs...
  18. EzekielRaiden

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

    Are GMs looking to punish players? Punitive responses have been specifically expected if players misbehave. Edit: More importantly, the point was that this functionally costs the GM nothing. The players pay at least as much, possibly more, given (as stated) the extreme dearth of GMs. Of course...
  19. EzekielRaiden

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

    Okay. Anecdotes are such incredibly crappy data that they provide essentially zero actual information, and are instead 99.999% noise. Meaning, if you want to pan anything out of them, you need many many many of them. Like, I dunno. Maybe several thousand? Perhaps a hundred thousand? But it is...
  20. EzekielRaiden

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

    Whereas I see the extremely simple and obvious fix of "there are rules we agree to abide by" plus "if we choose not to abide by them, we make that clear and talk it out openly" (which is, itself, another rule we agree to abide by, explicitly). Well, in my experience only certain kinds of...
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