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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9818580" data-attributes="member: 6790260">A wood fire "works every week" (indeed, any time) for cooking and baking, and humans used wood fires for literally thousands of years to do their cooking. I strongly suspect that you would not prefer that all the cooked food you eat be prepared using exclusively wood fire, without temperature control, without modern understanding of chemistry and cooking times. Yet at some point, someone would have been able to make the exact same argument to you now: Wood fires work every day for cooking, why do we need stoves and ovens and all this fancy-shmancy bull$#!%?The simple answer is that something can work, and yet things can still be better. You shouldn't replace something solely because it is old. That's chronological snobbery, and I'm right there with you in thinking that chronological snobbery is foolish nonsense. But you also shouldn't cling to things solely because they're familiar and functional.Perhaps, perhaps not. There was a thread a few years back on here, where someone realized that, even though what they had been doing was "working" in the sense that a game was being played, it was not working in the sense that it was producing outcomes they did not want. But how can you know whether something is producing outcomes you don't want, if you never reflect on what you're doing and why? And how can you have any awareness of what is possible, if you never look outside of the very first thing you ever did?As I said in a previous post, albeit in different words: If your argument boils down to "you can be a good GM even without ever playing other systems", well, that exact same argument applies to having extensive experience with a single system. You can be a good GM from the very first second you start GMing, without any prior experience at all, let alone decades' worth. So if the simple fact that it can be done without breadth of experience means that breadth is totally irrelevant and even harmful to suggest for others to seek out, then that exact same argument tells us that depth is also totally irrelevant and even harmful to suggest for others to seek out.And if "you can be a good GM even with no experience at all" doesn't mean that depth of experience is irrelevant, then the exact same logic indicates that "you can be a good GM even with experience of only one system" doesn't mean that breadth is irrelevant either.Being a good GM is a function of many inputs. Two of those inputs are depth and breadth of experience. Ceteris paribus, if I have two GMs of otherwise equivalent ability, where one has 25 years of experience exclusively with one and only one system, and the other has 20 years of experience with that one system and 5 years of experience spread across (say) six other systems? I don't see the slightest problem in saying that the latter GM is going to be better at a variety of skills useful for GMing: creativity especially in the space of developing new rules content (e.g., new spells, new treasure), flexibility in adjudication, preparation for unexpected interactions, patience for dealing with seeming conflicts, ability to adapt to changing circumstances, etc. That the second GM would be somewhat better at these things says nothing whatever about whether the first GM is good or bad with them. Again, ceteris paribus, I would think both GMs would be pretty good--assuming you were playing the one system they have 20+ years experience with--but the latter would be slightly better. Say, if we were ranking the two of them on scales 1-100, bigger = better, then I'd expect (say) mid to high 80s for the first GM and low to mid 90s for the second. A small but meaningful difference--nothing more. Could other factors overshadow it? Sure, probably; that a factor could be overshadowed doesn't make it irrelevant, otherwise childhood nutrition would be irrelevant for height because DNA matters, and we all know that childhood nutrition definitely matters.</blockquote>

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