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While some of it is venting, some of it is also irritation over the fact that the very concept that rules are tools, and thus can be useful in helping achieve some end (like, say, helping players and GMs be on the same page, helping GMs avoid likely problem behaviors, helping GMs identify and...

Why does anyone have to save the group from a crappy player? You make it sound like a hijacking. You have player agency. Just stop playing with that player.

How about the times you keep asserting that every other player is going to do that? That's why I keep going there. Because you keep saying that that's what the players will do, unless they have their benevolent dictator to save them from their jerk behavior. So who's going to save us from the...

I mean, having gone deep into the Game Application Mines, hoping to find even one game that could be a long-term home (prior to Hussar's very kind invitation)...yeah, there really is something of a "I just want to find a game...I'm really really really hoping I can someday find the game I'm...

And if I have a GM I know almost nothing about, I'm going to want more than "Trust me bro, it'll be awesome" for limits. Now that we aren't talking about friends, what are the limits for that power? Because all you're doing now is rolling the dice on whether the GM is "the loudest and most...

Then, frankly, I don't consider that friendship. This is serial acquaintance territory. If Sam can't respect you enough to heed both your interests and theirs, and try to work something out, are they even...like...actually your friend? Or are they just someone who happens to hang out in the same...

I actually haven't had that many personally super bad experiences. I just have a complete distaste for mechanical expectations being shoved into the zero-communication "social contract" where I will be expected to follow instructions that were never told to me and expected to instantly defer to...

Your quest to somehow force people to play multiple characters in any given campaign isn't going to succeed any more than your quest to eliminate multiclassing. Like the thing that is going to happen is people will just choose not to play, rather than choosing to play more than one character...

I like to keep the color coding, but either: Make the alignment thing a genuine inherent aspect of the cosmology. E.g., I have a proto-setting where dragons = angels (since we already have dragon gods!), and thus the entire "Prismatic" flight fell into being demoniacal "Chromatic" dragons when...

Because, in my experience, that is in fact what it leads to. Making the patron "matter" is, specifically, about attaching negative consequences to an exchange made with a powerful entity in order to gain personal power of some kind. Like...it's very literally "you made a deal with the devil...

Well, just for one of them, Classrooms objectively benefit from incorporating some elements of collaboration in addition to hierarchy. Teaching students to express autonomy and actively participate in learning, rather than being reduced to passive rote-memorization observers with no agency, has...

My apologies. I got about three hours of sleep last night and just...completely forgot to write the others. 2: While your (Lanefan's) math adds up--"each person is good at 1/4 of things, therefore to be good overall you need four or more people"--it doesn't actually equate to effective gameplay...

Businesses do, in fact, have hierarchy. Often one actually backed up by the force of law, ultimately. Friendships, in general, do not. If you wish to assert that a leisure-time activity has an innate and inherent hierarchy, you'll need to defend that, not just assert it. Because, as I said...

It would seem inaccurate caricature is not exclusive to those who are critical of classic gameplay styles.

Good. Sustained bad-faith player behavior should get no more (nor less) respect than bad-faith GM behavior.

Do you want me to answer the question, or respect your choice to bow out? I feel I've gotten a mixed message here. But the TL;DR of my point is: You claim a single, central, strong authority is the only shield against "chaos" in social groups. Yet real social groups exist without chaos that do...

But that isn't the only way to create party interdependence. 4e was--by far--the best edition yet made for actually inducing party interdependence, and it had many things you reject, while avoiding many things you claim are necessary. So, again, we're left with something that doesn't actually...

If the GM is guaranteed to occasionally act in bad faith, should we not prepare for that inevitability, rather than shrugging and saying, "What can we do?" Who is the person with the responsibility to keep the peace and adjudicate decisions in a married couple? Who is the person with the...

Genuinely: Why should we design a game with the expectation that characters will be kinda bad at most of the things they'll do, and only decent at (say) a quarter of things they do? That's not a particularly wise game design, I should think! Why should we accept this? Why should we not involve...

Hell, you barely even have that. At least in Gauntlet, it's always some kind of combat challenge so you're always contributing.