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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 9480089" data-attributes="member: 6801228">That has nothing to do with my point. You can't sell a campaign. You can sell a setting, or a series of adventurers, but to sell a campaign, you would need to sell the players that make the campaign happen.I don't do this, and I don't think it is good long-term. Because you are insisting on people engaging in the game your way, with no real regard to how they may want to engage with the game. Maybe the player isn't seeking immersion, so you insisting on it isn't helpful for them.There are three ways to raise children. You can let them do anything they want, you can discipline them, or you can beat them bloody for everything they do. Does that feel like an accurate and complete description of how to raise a child? Why would we accept that that is an accurate and complete way to discuss this then? See, you keep making an assumption that I think needs examined. You keep assuming a single player comes to you the DM and pitches an idea to you in secret, that you then become the sole arbiter of whether or not it should be included. But that is not the only way to handle things. I had a DM for a game, it was set in a modern post-apocalypse caused by magic becoming real (a concept I love). During that game, the DM had a strong desire to make Neo-Nazi's the enemy. He researched them quite a bit, included small details and it was a consistent theme. Then, during one of our battles against an enemy force, we were facing gnolls. And the DM put out into the narrative that the Gnolls were born evil, could only be evil, and the only way to deal with them was to genocide them. Which drew us all up short, because... that's Nazi stuff, and the enemy are Nazis. We paused the game. We started discussing how we could handle gnolls. He realized the issue pretty quickly. Not that it ruined the world to have unrepentantly evil gnolls, the world logic could handle that just fine, but he hadn't considered the dissonance in the themes. And he agreed it was a problem. And we didn't solve this by sitting back and waiting for him to solve it for us. We didn't solve it by only one person presenting an idea for his approval. We solved it by the entire table talking it out and presenting ideas and discussing them. You consistently present the idea that a single player will come to you, offering an idea, and that you alone must be the guardian of the world's integrity. But... the players care about the world's integrity too. And the idea I've tried getting across is that this approach is not the only way. The player could bring the idea to the entire table. The entire table could discuss it and see if it fits into the world. And maybe it impacts something you have planned in secret... but you can just say that, and even offer to change that secret thing if they really like this new idea well enough. It is a fourth approach. And one that can possibly work. I know because I've seen it work.</blockquote>

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