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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6320768" data-attributes="member: 2067">Yeah, I wasn't fond of that bit of slightly passive-aggressive BadWrongFun-ing."Oh, no, if you want to be BORED, go right ahead and play however you want, by all means, we aren't gonna STOP you from having a lousy game night if you MUST."Not that I really blame Mearls, it was just a bit of off-the-cuffery in the moment. I'm reasonably confident that's not the tone he was intending, and I don't want to read too much into this offhand little statement. He clearly didn't have time to quite examine what was going on with the "error" that folks maybe pointed out, and that's fine. But it's not a shining moment, because it basically implies that there's ways to play that the design team basically regards as low-quality, dull experiences. And if your goal is to make a big tent and cast a wide net, that's not an implication you wanna give out a lot of. I think these are two different things that you've conflated.First, we have rules that allow folks to play the way they want to play rather than being tightly codified. The rules don't say that you can trip oozes or give you a codified wealth-by-level guidelines. They're wisely silent on a lot of issues. DMs are trusted to figure it out for themselves and the mechanics don't break whatever you do. Second, we have rules that don't work as intended in the way they are written. If Magic Missile was more powerful than Fireball, but we insulted people who decided to pick just cast Magic Missile ("Oh, that's just such a BORING spell"), that doesn't suddenly make the issue one of playstyle differences. Yeah, some people won't cast Magic Missile for whatever playstyle reason, and that's fine. And maybe some folks won't even have these spells in their game and whatever. But if someone wants to cast fireball, and finds that it's weaker than magic missile, and notes that this doesn't seem right, the response shouldn't be "Well, that's a table issue, folks who aren't trying to wreck the game don't cast Magic Missile."These two things are not the same things and conflating the two can lead to the old fallacy of "A good group has no problems with the rules, so your group must just not be very good!" rather than the more honest "The ruleset's got some issues, nothing's perfect, if it's a big deal, lets fix it." I think we need rules that create the experiences we want. We can't solely rely on DMs creating those experiences. A good DM can run a good game of the most horrible RPG out there, and that's not the RPG being open to individual playstyle variance, that's a good DM being a good DM and overwriting the bits of the RPG that suck and making the experience enjoyable for everyone. That good DMing can't be counted on everywhere all the time and in every instance, so I don't think we should accept "it's not a problem for a good group!" when looking at rules issues, because that's always true. No rule is ever a problem for a good group. It doesn't make it a good rule.</blockquote>

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