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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4060864" data-attributes="member: 4937">I can definately see how you'd think that.  In a nut shell, the missing peice of the puzzle you aren't seeing is 'player expectations'.  If you've been fortunate enough to have a single stable base of players for a long time, its probably not an issue for you.  I on the other hand have moved around alot so I pretty much have to find new players any time I want to start a campaign, because generally what ends a campaign is me moving away.  So, I've not had the luxury of always DMing in 'high trust environments' with long established friends and shared expectations.  If you have, then alot of what I say probably sounds like nonsense to you.One thing I've noticed the longer that 3E is out is that the younger players increasingly feel entitled to certain things.  In particular, they feel entitled to plan out there PC's future career down to the smallest details.  The believe that they have a right to take a certain PrC when they hit X level, to have a certain amount of money by Y level, and to buy item Z with that money when they can afford it.  It's kinda like a battle plan for them, and resembles to me more the sort of strategy guide you might read for a game like Civilization 4 or Diablo II than anything I associate with a PnP RPG.  If you try to tell them that this isn't going to be that sort of game, there initial response is to suggest that you are impinging on thier right to play the sort of character that they want to play.  That is to say, they believe they have a right to assign magic items to thier character using resources they have to right acquire as a result of play and hindering that is not only unfair but some how immoral and unethical for the DM.  They believe that you are breaking what they consider to be the rules.  Needless to say, this can create table conflict if your goal is among other things to not have everyone decked out like a Christmas tree and to have the sort of balance sorely lacking in the game as the splatbooks continued to roll out in later 3.X.  (Nevermind that I have to wonder about a players that not only write up thier character's past, but his future too.)  If it was just one player, I'd just chalk it up to hard core gamist rules lawyers like we've always had, but its been more than one player and its an attitude I've regularly encountered here at EnWorld.See, a game can and does create certain expectations of how to play and that is part of the games culture.  A game can contain in its text a description of the 'proper' way to play it.  And it seems to me with all of its talk from 4E about how certain things 'aren't fun' and thus have to go, talk which has invariably supported positions I associate with the 'new gamer', that the new edition is more or less explicitly going to say that the way I've played for 25 odd years is somehow 'not fun' and or 'badwrongfun'.  Explicitly putting magic items in the players price list would be an example of trending in that direction.  It's not that a high trust group of players couldn't agree to ignore this and play differently, its that the default assumption of the game is going to change radically.  It is going to effect the expectations of the player base.  I think it is going to result in 'I control summoned creatures as an extension of my will'/'I don't have to keep track of ammo because it isn't fun'/'Magic items can be bought at abstract supermarkets whenever we get to a town' being the default and expected way of playing.</blockquote>

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