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Message: <blockquote data-quote="billd91" data-source="post: 6321532" data-attributes="member: 3400">Part of the issue is those guidelines, as well-intended as they have been, also bring unintended consequences that affect the game. If the GM deviates from them on the low or difficult side and the players know of them, that breeds dissatisfaction. Both players and GMs may see them as rules to be followed rather than guidelines to be either followed or not depending on the campaign. They breed expectations on how an encounter must play out rather than how the encounter is likely to play out (or even may play out depending on how loose the guideline is and how true to the inherent assumptions in the guidelines the game group plays).A lot of these unintended and negative consequences depend on how players and GMs approach the guidelines. A lot of game groups will have no problem putting them in proper context - but you can expect the internet will be rife with people complaining about how they're playing out in their own campaigns. That's the way people are - complainers are more likely to air their grievances than people who aren't having a problem. And soon, that becomes the bulk of WotC's feedback, and guess what they start responding to?I think this is why certain types of guidelines have gotten a bad rap over the years. The guidelines in the 1e DMG may have been fairly vague, they may have not been that explicitly helpful, but they also didn't set a lot of strongly held expectation or assumptions either. The much more detailed guidelines in 3e, from my experience observing years of internet interactions and messageboards, set many more detailed expectations and generated many more complaints - of failure of the guidelines, of failure of GMs to live up to them, of failure of the game system. In the end, I'm not sure the game was well-served by going into that level of detail.</blockquote>

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