Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8926580" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Which is why I get so confused when people insist rhat it MUST be the DM putting their foot down. I didn't do that. I didn't make some kind of hard final judgment. Had the example player pushed back, we would have kept talking until we worked it out. We always do work it out, and find something both I and the player consider acceptable. I have never, not once, had to tell one of my players "well that's just what it is, if you don't like it you aren't obligated to keep playing." Nothing even remotely like it. I budged, in the hypothetical, giving the player something I didn't think the rules as such permitted, because they explained how it made sense, another player backed them up, and they recognized that a lesser version of their initial proposal would still do what they truly wanted. I just don't understand how that can be parsed as the DM laying down the law and telling people what to do; at every point, the player was the one directing the show, I (at absolute most) simply gave gentle nudges.People present D&D like it's a Hobbesian dictatorship: a place where you MUST have a single, absolute, unquestionable authority to keep the proles in check or everything will GUARANTEED descend into violent anarchy. That's why I push back so hard. I see it as being just as wrong about running games as Hobbes was about running states.I don't think it's a requirement for creativity. I just think it's so massively helpful for creativity that refusing to do so is a bit like refusing to refrigerate food for preservation purposes. Sure, you don't need to...most food can be eaten quickly enough without a fridge and our ancestors lived with nothing but iceboxes or cellars, or even no chilling of food at all (e.g. salting, pickling, canning, candying, etc.) But when refrigeration is cheap, plentiful, and incredibly useful, why wouldn't you use it?I find that creativity blooms everywhere when you take a highly collaborative approach, because collaboration adds prosocial rewards to being creative. Instead of it being a transgressive act, it becomes a socially affirming one: the creative player is strengthening the group, not exploiting it. This makes altruistic motives ("I want us all to have fun and succeed") point in the same direction as self-interested ones (whether they are outrightly selfish or more of the "enlightened self-interest" variety.) When self-interest and altruism can be aligned in this way, it is very worth doing, because then most people will feel motivated in similar directions despite not necessarily sharing the same reason for doing so. That is, they will work the same way even though they don't think the same way.I don't think they destroy creativity in the abstract, but I find that most people who actually enforce genre limitations (as opposed to actually persuading players that these limits are worthwhile) go too far. It isn't just (say) low fantasy: it's specifically a pseudo-medieval faux-European faux-Medieval schizotech "grim and gritty" Tolkienesque low fantasy where every game only offers the four oldest classes and (at best) the four oldest races(/species/whatever) and nothing else forever. That's incredibly specific and narrow, basically "English and German Folklore only, full stop, nothing else EVER," and I find that chafes rather hard on the kinds of creativity I want to explore.If this above model were, say, one of half a dozen common patterns widely used, then it wouldn't be as much of an issue; you could shop around. But it isn't. If someone is engaging in heavy genre enforcement, you've got easily two to one odds that it's this exactly, or this but even more restrictive (e.g. throw in "humanocentric" or "heavily restricted magic" or the like.) I don't blame people for having preferences, but there's very clearly a lack of alternatives under the "I am enforcing strong genre limitations" umbrella. It's hard not to feel like creativity is restricted when it seems like 90% of people saying they want genre limitations do (almost literally) exactly the same things and reject exactly the same set of ideas.Alright.</blockquote>

Verification