Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 8696847" data-attributes="member: 7026617">I don't think you're being dismissive, but it kind of comes across that since the other side is hostile to your preference here, you're not working to understand the lines they're drawingOf course they don't.  There are subjective elements in people's preference, so they aren't going to draw lines in exactly the same places and to quite the same degree of bright-line.But again, since this sort of thing doesn't bother you much, you're not going to see the lines they draw as make sense.  One person's trivial issue is extremely bothersome to another.But again, and I know I'm harping on this but its important, if your own tolerances are loose you're not going to draw many lines hard.  But other people's tolerances aren't so loose.  Now "always" language is usually problematic, but that's often because people overproject their own needs on others (or alternatively, don't but are sloppy about making it clear that they're only talking about games where they're involved).  That doesn't make the latter group isn't legitimate (the first group needs to get their act together a group) but just that they're not always as good at communicating it as they could be--but people who feel strongly about an approach and technique aren't always as motivated to make people who think they're a good idea understand them, because they're used to being blown off anyway.  This is all the more common if they're used to being in a minority in the hobby (I'm old enough that I just take it as a given that big parts of the hobby, especially the more you get toward the heavy Trad and specifically D&D (and super-specifically Old School) parts of the hobby are still tainted by the Divine Right of GMs, so the amount I bother to engage with them about is limited and I'm not always motivated to not get snarky there).I'm aware of that, and I don't necessarily disagree--but again, its not all about us.  At the very least its easy for it to get frustrating to people when they spend effort discussing a path and the path seems to not be relevant at all.  Sometimes it can matter in terms of descriptive issues, and sometimes that's enough, but it doesn't take too many repeats of that before someone can wonder why they're bothering to take time on something that's forgotten ten minutes later.The problem is players don't know what's significant or not most of the time.  Unless everyone's trained to know when you should give something attention and when its trivial by cues from the GM (and I'd suspect from your reaction above that you kind of avoid that) its very easy to fix a lot of attention on things that seem like they could be important, but really aren't.  I doubt you do this kind of gotcha, but there was a reason at one time you'd get people spend really tedious amounts of care searching dungeons, because no one knew what detail they needed to pay attention to, and what not (its one of the reason so many people say to avoid red herrings at all cost, because people often have a tendency to be afraid they're missing something important).This is kind of the issue with spending much time on choices that are, in the end, meaningless; people don't know the difference after a while and either just go with the first obvious choice, or whatever choice their buddy does.  It ends up destroying agency because there's too much noise in your decision making.Then its not a meaningless decision (or at least it doesn't have to be; research can be another thing that ends up just being one path in All Roads Lead to Rome but its at least not intrinsic to it).I don't think its meta-knowledge to know that your spell choices can very well matter.  As to the others--I'll tell you the truth, if the GM started asking me a lot of questions about my clothing because it "might" matter latter, I'd start to consider it pretty picayune and a waste of both our times.  There really are some things you can just make some assumptions about when the matter comes up.But that's effectively what most of them are doing.  Like I said, yeah, there's some hyperbole, and even more people overgeneralizing but the great truth is most of the time when you see "A GM should never do X" there's almost always an unstated "when anyone like me is involved".  (Sometimes the person, as I mention, is overgeneralizing and assumes there will always or usually be someone like them around, but, well, if you don't expect people to make assumptions about how common things are that may or may not be warranted, any RPG discussion outside of a very small and specific pool is always gonna be kind of frustrating, man.  I mean you've done it yourself "I've never seen this outside forum discussions".  So?  Maybe that's significant, maybe its selection bias.  In this case I suspect the number of people bothered by this sort of thing aren't huge, but that can't be but an assumption.  As I referred to earlier, this hobby had horrifically top-down GMing as the default for a number of years, with the assumption "That was how it was done" and I know good and well there were plenty of people who were bothered by that, just not enough to stop playing).I'm going to hit this again because I think you kind of stepped around it.  Please don't take that as an insult.In what way is the initial suggestion in this thread not "deception".  You didn't seem to like that term either, and honestly, it seems as close to a neutral term for it as is possible.(And again, lots of games are, at best, vague about what is "permitted" by GMs, and in some cases suggest things that are a social meltdown looking for a place to happen.  If 5e actively suggests deception as a default, that's disappointing, but it just demonstrates that game designers aren't immune to the issues we've talked about in our exchange when it comes to overgeneralizing).</blockquote>

Verification