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Wait, is Two Six the new Six Seven????

As the barriers to publishing have largely fallen away, and awareness of other games has massively increased, heartbreakers are now quite rare. Note that OSR type projects where people are knowingly trying to make something akin to 'D&D but different' are not heartbreakers, albeit they may be...

It comes from an essay by Ron Edwards: The Forge :: Fantasy Heartbreakers As coined a fantasy heartbreaker is a game designed by someone with a genuine love of the field, and some cool original ideas that had the potential to be great, but that was blinkered by too little knowledge of the...

I only play with friends. My assumption is therefore that any player input comes from a place of being engaged in the premise and that their request to play a [whatever] is because they have a cool idea and think it can work.

You will have even less time when you become an elected official. But, actually, it's easy. You just write out a list of all the things you don't want, including 'player input'.

Why are you playing with 'some rando' in the first place?

Why are your mature, capable, intelligent players asking for something that is obviously not a good fit for your campaign? Wouldn't your assumption be 'well, let's hear them out and see if we can make it work'?

The hypothetical example only comes up because someone in your group wants to play a turtlechap. The assumption is therefore that they are known to you and already on board with your game's premise and lore etc, they just want to add something to it, and presumably (if they are as familiar with...

Are you running for office? I am so in, albeit I am almost certainly not in your jurisdiction.

Wait, when did the player in this hypothetical refuse to explain and become an irrational child? If that's the sort of people you play with then I get it, I guess. But bad gaming is worse than no gaming.

I think what you're describing here is a failure of game design. Vampire and Cyberpunk 2020 are great games and I love them both but they are textbook (literally) examples of designer aspiration outpacing the available technology. They both have good innovative systems in their own ways but...

I understood burning down the village to be a metaphor even if no-one else did.

I think it's also relevant who your players are. I only play with friends and we have a longstanding group. If I describe a campaign premise, and a player signs up to it, when they start talking to me about playing a turtleman my assumption is that i) they have a cool idea in mind, and ii) they...

I don't think 'play a human but call yourself a dragonborn if you want' is a compromise that would satisfy many people, presumably the player could already have created a character like that without any concession from the GM. But I do agree that your lizardman example or possibly the human with...

"Either the GM's authority is unassailable or the players have carte blanche to wreck everything'

Clerics exist because someone in Dave Arneson's game wanted to play one (as inspired by Hammer Horror films). Dave Arneson didn't say 'No, only my ideas are valid'.

It has never been able to do this. People try to do it. Wizards (and TSR) market it like it can. But it can't.

'There are no turtlemen in my setting whatsoever, and that's that' is quite a strong position to take IMO. It rules out an entire possibility when most D&D worlds literally have dozens of sapient races and hundreds of magical beasts. It seems like a very specific thing to rule out when...

1. It seems to me that it's perfectly reasonable for a GM to set out the types of player characters that are permissible in their game. 2. It seems to me that it's perfectly reasonable for players in that game to ask for permission to play things outside of that scope as long as it is a cool...

I haven't played the games being discussed but I work as an investigator in real life and I've definitely learned that you never (or almost never) really know 100% what's happened. You can build evidence and see patterns and figure out broadly what happened and how, but there are always little...