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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6756208" data-attributes="member: 4937">This is very good stuff.In practice, I think you do see many DMs acting not as impartial referees, but passing judgment on the players and using their power as DMs to arrange for the world to punish players for not adhering to the 'correct' philosophy whatever that may turn out to be.   Thus, you find DMs that gleefully punish players for being good or evil, depending on how they think the player ought to act.Right now I'm dealing with the problem of having players that seem to have come from tables where if you tried to be good, honest, compassionate, merciful, or so forth the universe perversely and invariably arranged itself to punish you for that.  So for example, invariably if you cut a mook some slack, despite having just demonstrated to the mook how completely outclassed he was and despite acting honorably toward the mook, instead of say deciding he's never going to mess with these PC's again, the mook would invariably try to wreck vengeance on the merciful player and make his life hell.  So I have players trying to inform other players what they think the metagame is by saying things like, "Kill the prisoners.  If we let them live, they'll just come back with more levels as a reoccurring villain." or "What are you doing?  Don't ever tell an NPC the truth, that just gives the DM an excuse to have someone betray you."  And so on and so forth, where the gist of the logic is always, "The only way to survive is to be absolutely ruthless."And it's not me that their ultimately talking about here, because none of that has actually happened in my game, and even if it did occasionally happen it would certainly not be the invariable consequence but something very rare and specific to the circumstance.</blockquote>

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