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I GM as often as I play. GMs don't need some special form of empathy. If you're GMing for people who don't appreciate your efforts, stop GMing. There's no Prisoner's Dilemma around people engaged in a shared hobby activity.

I DM as often as I play, probably a little more. The setting simply isn't that important.

And the point I'm making is that building a setting that isn't anchored in a group of players' interests and choices is a waste of time. Go outside, touch some grass, connect with friends, volunteer at a soup kitchen....anything besides spending effort on Tolkien Pastiche #12014172. And when...

Players still don’t care about lore. They might care about lore if the game is a licensed property they’re familiar with. Or if you present some lore that gives them a clear and demonstrable character-impacting choice within the game. But no one wants to read your game notes to figure out why...

Much like Pam in the Office, I can’t find the difference between these pictures. All 3 of those rationales are terrible.

And that’s totally fine. If a player agrees to a game with a tight premise, and later on decides they don’t want to do that anymore, the onus is on them to step aside gracefully.

85.7%, of course.

You can do whatever you want, of course. But I view Dolmenwood as a setting you play exactly once, and a lot of the joy in it comes from using the detailed character creation rules embedded in the six races of the setting. It’s the exact opposite of what D&D offers, which is centered around a...

Yes, Scott. Obviously when I use a general term I mean absolutely everyone, with no exceptions.

Sure, that sounds like a lot of fun. I’m a fan of tightly specified campaign frames like that. What I’m against is DMs who think only have a setting with six races somehow turns their game into a tightly specified campaign frame instead of just being “normal D&D game, but more annoying”...

Point taken. :). But I meant more in a “don’t try to play a tortle in Dolmenwood.” For Dolmenwood, better to stick to the intended play space because the whole of the game is integrated with those concepts.

We should recognize that some game systems are better for some styles than others. If you’re playing Dolmenwood, you absolutely should NOT be cosmopolitan and allow a bunch of weird races. If you’re playing D&D, you absolutely should. D&D is meant to provide a wide amount of options to the...

It’s the only style we should be encouraging. “Allowed” is a meaningless descriptor, who would have authority to enforce that? But yes, if you’re trying to make a LOTR-style setting while using D&D as your system, you definitely failed to understand the assignment.

Because as a DM, you shouldn’t be having fun by excluding things. Like, just don’t be that guy. Here’s a fun magic trick. You can exclude dozens of races if none of your players pick them. Just don’t use them as NPCs! No one else even needs to know!

I mean, the real thing you can do is make sure to mention in online discussions that cosmopolitanism and inclusion of fantasy tropes should be the default in D&D and D&D-like games, and that the idea of defining settings via strict species curation is an outdated and moldy approach. And you can...

I think it’s perfectly OK to phrase “this behavior indicates this GM and I will clash” as a “red flag”. After all, a red flag isn’t a global indicator. Your red flags may be my green flags, and vice versa.

Agreed. I’m also extremely permissive as a GM, but it’s important to remember that GM permissiveness goes hand-in-hand with player responsibility. A player who wants to play a version of Dragonlance where draconians aren’t just one of the primary antagonists, but rather a possible PC, is also...

It’s not so much anti-DM, it’s being against the large contingent of experienced players that believe DM authority over setting conceits should have special privilege because DMs do more work.

This is my current balanced but organic method for generating stats when we aren’t doing a stat draft. 1) Assign the array 9,10,11,13,14,17 to the 6 stats as desired. 2) Randomly decide one of the 3 lowest stats, by rolling a d3. (As an example, if you have a Str 10, Int 9, and Wis 11, then...

A lot of those ideas make more sense when you’re playing a high lethality game with a lot of PC turnover, AND you expect that the game will continue for quite a few real-life years. There are a lot of us who might expect to only roll up a new character once every 2, 3, or even more years. That...