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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8925244" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I have never met someone so stubborn that they would actually behave this way, and if they did, they would quickly be asked to leave the table and never come back. Standing one's ground and seeking benefit for oneself are perfectly good and healthy things. Being so stubborn that you literally refuse to let the game happen unless and until you get exactly what you want? Unacceptable. I wouldn't want to play checkers with a person like that. That sort of behavior is unbelievably rude, rude to the point of ruining friendships.It is human nature to try to improve one's position or lot, yes. That is NOT the same thing as stamping your feet and refusing to let anything happen because you haven't gotten your way. Nor is it the same as intentionally and aggressively trying to pervert a shared social activity, especially when you know that doing so is disrespectful, hurtful, and counterproductive...which "grind every session to a complete halt because every single objection will take hours to resolve" absolutely is all three of those things.By whom? You make this assertion as though it is a universal truth but it emphatically is not. D&D books have been explicitly saying otherwise for decades, and Dungeon World is no different.Firstly: why? There are no prizes. Nobody gets rewarded for being "best on the team." Screwing over your teammates by, for example, wasting hours of their time every single night so you can secure every advantage, or intentionally and aggressively flouting decorum and respect for your fellow players, is a pretty $#!+-awful way to behave under any circumstances. To do so solely to "win" at a cooperative game is beyond the pale. I'm dead serious when I say if someone treated my game that way it would be grounds for ending a friendship.Secondly, there's nothing automatic about any of that. There are sports teams where everyone on the team genuinely just wants to succeed, and they don't care about position. Professional teams are of course not likely to do that because they're being paid in part based on relative performance in many cases. Even then it's not some kind of guarantee of ravenous hunger for position, and there are other kinds of sports teams besides professional ones...and I would think non-professional sports would be a better comparison given D&D doesn't keep score and the players are not paid!What? No. Absolutely not. The player does not have a duty to cheat and swindle and coerce and abuse unless the referee stops them. That's not just ludicrous, it's straight up logically suspect. Whence does this duty arise? You are committing an is-ought fallacy: there are rules, so you ought to exploit them. This does not hold.Since I reject the claim as both factually untrue and logically invalid, this is not established.See above.They sure as hell do from where I'm standing!The "job" (if one can call it that...) of a player is to play. It is up to them to decide why they play. Winning is only one possible goal, and you can't win D&D. (Or most TTRPGs.) It's not how the games are designed. You can "win" individual conflicts, but that's not the same thing at all, and conflating that with a more generic "winning" condition will lead to all sorts of problems.Absolutely the hell not. Again, you are conjuring up some bizarre duty to cheat. Where does this duty arise? Why does the player, who is responsible for choosing their motives for play, get a pass for being an abusive, coercive, destructive influence?How does it not? You are literally saying players should intentionally break the rules! That's literally CHEATING.It's also on the players to be respectful of other human beings, their preferences and feelings, and the group as a whole. As is the case with all social activities.Because the thing you are talking about is NOT just a person being a person. It is a person being callous and even cruel to others solely to gain a personal advantage (read: abusive), manipulating and/or deceiving others in order to gain personal advantage (deceptive), knowingly and intentionally breaking actually explicit rules they claimed to abide by (cheating), prioritizing personal satisfaction or benefit to the total exclusion of the satisfaction and benefit of others (selfish), prioritizing personal power even when it requires morally dubious actions (power hungry), and openly and knowingly flouting decorum and social norms purely for personal benefit (rude.)I used all of these terms very intentionally and specifically. Doing the things you described at my table would be incredibly offensive, to the point that if the person was lucky we would have an extremely serious talk outside of game and they would get one chance to apologize, make a plan for reform, and follow through thereon. If that chance were rejected or they failed to actually reform? Gone. And likely taking whatever friendship we had with it. That is how horrifically offensive I find the behavior you're describing. I've got no time for users and abusers. I choose to associate with people who can actually treat others with kindness, respect, and support, regardless of the social activities we join.Okay that is...a weird definition of "break" in context, but fair enough I guess.But like...why? Why make things grind to a halt when you could instead avoid it? Why not seek compromise or mutual agreement?It...doesn't though. I have never once had to "argue" with my players. They are polite, respectful, attentive, and positive basically all of the time. They know that as long as they approach a discussion in good faith, seeking an outcome that is in some way reasonable, I will do whatever I can to make that outcome actually come to pass. It might not take the form they originally intended, but they know I will do my level best to meet the spirit of their goals even if I can't (or am unwilling to) make the letter happen. And with the power of God and anime on my side, there is little I cannot do! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" />Do you seriously get into heated arguments with your players? Why? Why would you tolerate that from anyone? Just stop playing with them if they're going to be so rude!But...why? I'm legitimately baffled here. You can only learn what a person is truly seeking by asking them. If they are able to answer, you can then look for ways that they can get what they want, or something sufficiently like what they want, without forcing something you as DM are opposed to or uncomfortable with.For example, I once had a player who wanted to dabble in necromancy in a game. The setting (same as my current setting) is highly antagonistic toward necromancy--as in, if the character were discovered to practice necromancy, they would be effectively excommunicated from all civilized society. I don't personally have any beef with necromancy but that was part of the setting and I didn't see any way around it. So I asked questions, dug deeper, tried to figure out why they were going for this. After a bit of dancing around the topic, it became clear that the player was concerned because the wording of the ability they were replacing implied that I as GM could screw them over with their elemental creature, so they were switching to something that didn't have any text implying the GM could do that. I promised that I would never use those rules in that way, even offering to rewrite the text a little to close the unfortunate loophole, but the player in question opted to do something else instead so the question was moot.My players frequently surprise me with unexpected or novel approaches to things. I have almost never had to simply refuse. Indeed, I have almost always found ways to make even high-powered requests both reasonable and highly constructive, improving the game experience for everyone, not just the person who asked. Part of why I have so few issues is that my players are respectful, refusing to stoop to abuse or coercion. They bring their earnest requests to me, and I return the favor by genuinely striving to implement them.Oh, sure, people who don't realize some aspect of their behavior is a problem are much more common. I would never argue otherwise. The issue I have is the assertion of intentionality.Okay so...what do you mean by "push the envelope"? Because as it stands I already embrace player creativity and off-the-wall ideas pretty heavily. To push the envelope even further than "if you work with me I will do everything I can to make things you're sincerely enthusiastic about happen," well... you'd need to be doing something for reasons other than sincere enthusiasm. You would need to be trying to game the system, or trying to exploit my goodwill solely in order to exploit it and not because you have an idea that you just find too awesome not to pursue (or whatever else you find stirs your enthusiasm.) Like...you would have to want to be disruptive. Which is exactly my problem here.Anyone willing to meet me halfway will find I will go much more than halfway for them. Anyone trying to exploit my goodwill, or trying to twist the letter of the rules against the spirit thereof or otherwise abuse the system I have agreed to abide by, is liable to find themselves with an express ticket out the door. I will not be used.</blockquote>

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