NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 8162068" data-attributes="member: 6801228">And this is where we start having problems. Goku can fit into Fantasy. In fact, he and the other Z-Fighters are a fantasy setting a lot of the time, having fought a minimum of at least three wizards and a four or five demons, probably more than that on both counts. Additionally, the Sun Soul monk seems to draw a lot of inspiration from that style of "martial character" A warforged in Low Fantasy? Maybe your player thinks Low Fantasy is Low Magic, and their warforged is entirely based upon clockwork and runs off science. If it isn't magic, it fits. But, these misunderstandings are going to lead to you getting upset that they are trying to "pull one over on you" instead of it quite literally being perfectly within line from their perspective. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This, exactly 1000%There is a tone and possibly an attitude I've been seeing a lot on these forums, and with certain youtube DnD celebrities, that the players are a problem the DM controls. And... that is just wrong to me. Fundamentally wrong. It is like saying that a Football team is a bunch of problems controlled by their coach so that they don't mess everything up, level of wrong. And part of this that I think we can control, even if we are only running at our own tables for our own friends and never interact with the wider community, is to start really adopting the idea that our players are valuable partners in the game. You know, I was just on a site where I write a game I've best been describing as "Twitch plays DnD", and I saw another poster doing an idea very similar to mine. So, I joined up. We ended up going variant human, and getting a feat. And Lucky was put on the list. Now, having some experience with the format, I urged people not to pick Lucky. It would be a massive pain in the butt to use, in what is basically closest to a play by post style with a timer. The DM told me not to worry, he had a solution for Lucky. He would just increase the difficulty of everything and make us burn our luck points early, so it wouldn't be a problem. Not only is this a problem (and thank the good lord they ended up taking my advice for moderately armored, which might make solo play as a Genie Warlock survivable) but since this person seemed to have this solution already in hand it implies to me that they had applied this to their IRL game table. Or had it applied to them. Which was not only to see the player's ability as a problem, but to use the levers of the game to invalidate the player's choice. Which, I feel like is only possible, because there is an idea in the community that players are a problem to be managed, not partners to be collaborated with. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Maybe because there are an awful lot of DMs who are approaching things in a way that is actively harmful to players.In my "Twitch plays DnD" type thing I am doing, early on I noticed something that stuck with me. Most of the players were absolutely floored when I would tell them that something was a bad idea, or when I would not bite their heads off for asking questions. I got legitimately praised for telling them "this is a dangerous course of action, as your character understands it" Why? Because a lot of other people on the site would pull near constant "Gotcha's". Everything was a trap, everything was designed to kill the player off as soon as possible, and if they voted for the wrong option, BAM, game over losers. And I've seen it in DnD too. How many dozens upon dozens of times have we seen in this thread "I run my game this way, and if you don't like it, there's the door"? And sure, maybe you are a perfectly fine DM with no major flaws. But not every DM is, and they give the same pitch, because the concept is "The DM decides what is okay to do, and the players listen." In fact, the "cardinal sin" of players seems to be questioning the DM. They can either quit the game or shut up and take it. Those are their options. Questioning or arguing with the DM is a sign of a bad player. So what happens to the player who sits down, with this mindset, that they can only nuclear option their game time, or just agree with the DM, and the DM is abrasive, rude, and hard to deal with... but not quite to the point that the player absolutely can't stand it. It is just enough of "not bad" that the player has to seriously consider, do I leave the game and roll the dice that the next DM isn't worse, or do I tough it out and try and have fun anyways. And again, I understand. It isn't your job to police bad DMs. It isn't my job to police bad DMs. It isn't Minigiant or Thomas Shey or Jeremy Crawford's job to police bad DMs. But, we can start seriously looking at the way we approach the game. We can ask ourselves, is there really any value in treating my players like they are disposable cogs that I can throw away whenever I don't like them? Is there any value in "Well, they can just DM themselves if they are so passionate about it" or "Well, they can just find a different DM then." I agree, not every DM is for every player, not every campaign is for every player, not every choice is for every player. But we spend so much time and energy talking about Bad Players, about how players speaking up is bad, about players with different ideas is bad, about how players who don't like an aspect of your game world are bad. And if you have a bad player, you punt them back out and grab the next cog to put in the machine. And you make sure the player knows this. If they don't like it, they can leave too, there are more players after all. You don't need them, they need you. And so people get turned off the hobby, people think that this is the only way it can work, that no other possible way of running the game could ever work. But they can work. This isn't the only way to approach things. And I don't want to leave players feeling like expressing their opinions is an offense that gets them expelled from the table. Because they can have awesome ideas, and I want to hear them. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Who said I want to play in a setting you built? That was the setting you offered, I never said I wanted it. And why is this "me" when the example was five of the six players. Not one player doing this, but most of them doing this.See, and this gets back into this. If it is a single player, they can either change their position or leave. But, if the entire group doesn't like your idea, you'll be more likely to leave and find a different group. So, the DM doesn't have the authority to override the group. They can't do anything they want. Their authority is not final. The only time it seems final, is when the majority of the group agrees with the DM.Exactly.For all this talk of the DM's "Absolute Authority" it only exists so long as the group agree with the DM, and if they have to use this supposed authority a lot, then the group is probably imploding. So, why is it so hard to take this to the next step, where the DM is more in the position of Rules Expert and Referee compared to being an Authority that must be obeyed? Why can't we treat DnD like we would treat a game of poker or a game of Catan? --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Cutting a lot of common agreements. I am also an avid board gamer, and I have run into a lot of board games with edge cases and weird interactions. Things that when translated to DnD, would "require" the input of a DM. But these games don't have a DM. And also, how does the group decide which variant of the board game to play? This is a similar situation to deciding the genre of a DnD game. We are being presented that it is the DMs sole right and sole responsibility to make that decision, but in a board game with multiple play modes, there is no DM to make that decision. So, how do we do it? By reaching a group consensus. So, why can't we do that for DnD? One reason seems to be that DMs are worried about being forced to run a game they hate. Which, that's fair, you shouldn't have to run a game you hate. But what about one that just isn't your favorite? What about one you have no idea if you will like or not? Why can't this group decision making work in DnD? The biggest reason given so far seems to be that if the DM is getting overruled, they are going to leave the game. Which seems odd, considering that the proposed other way is that the DM can freely override the player in almost anything. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------They can know the rules without having authority. They can run NPCs without having authority (after all, players run PCs with no authority) Don't see why engaging you with an interesting story requires authority. I mean, this seems like the assumption is that if you can't tell the players no, you can't do anything.</blockquote>

Verification