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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8813387" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Perhaps.I believe most GMs are well-meaning. The problem is, "well-meaning" and $5 will get you a cup of coffee.You can mean well, but have...really really mistaken ideas about what constitutes good/wise GMing. IMO, this is the camp of many "adversarial" GMs. They do what they do because they genuinely believe it makes the game better, up to and including a variation on that Oprah Winfrey meme, "you get a ban and you get a ban and EVERYONE gets a ban" (meaning, repeatedly banning anything "new" that the players like but the GM finds gauche/annoying/weird/etc.) Or the tragically common failure to understand iterative probability, most typically demonstrated by the "keep rolling stealth every round/action for as long as you are hiding" error. Many, many DMs, even very experienced ones who want to run good games, commit this error.The problem with the "you cannot use rules to fix malicious behavior" retort is that it assumes that the one and only cause of bad results is malice. This is incorrect. In fact, I would argue that malice actually represents only a very small portion of the "GM did something that negatively affected the game" space. Conversely, simple ignorance, bullheaded insistence, erroneous beliefs, misplaced confidence, and out-of-context expectations are all both quite easy to have or demonstrate purely by accident, and can each occur with no malice whatsoever, indeed, with a genuine belief that one is doing only good/needful things with only the best of intentions.It is under that context that I consider it to be unwise to include things like the cypher limit, the (apparently excised in the Revised edition) admonition to change the setting any time the players think they've learned anything about the past, and the "XP is for both permanent and temporary benefits" rules. I don't expect a conniving jerk. I expect people to do things harmful to the game despite a genuine and earnest desire to pursue what they believe to be the best possible experience.The problem is, for a variety of reasons, it is very difficult to develop good intuitions about the effects one's choices will have on the resulting quality of the game experience, and even more difficult to overcome personal biases and received wisdom. I would know. I've been there. Not as a GM, thankfully, but as a player. I had some real deep-seated misconceptions about what made games good, what constituted effective design, and what was best practice. It took a shocking revelation and some pretty significant soul-searching to realize just how far off the mark I was.Take, for example, the widespread insistence that PCs and NPCs should use identical rules. This is not some bizarro-world belief that has no justification or reason to it. On the surface, it is not merely reasonable, but seems eminently practical and even unequivocally positive. But in practice, it is extremely unwise game design, because NPCs (especially monsters) and PCs are fundamentally designed to do extremely different things and to have very, very different impact on the play experience. Many, many folks complain about how hard it is to run high-level 3e or PF...and one of the biggest contributors to that is the fact that NPCs are effectively "PCs but possibly more complicated."</blockquote>

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