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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8163073" data-attributes="member: 6779196">Snipping most of the meta-discussion about the argument itself to focus on the points.See, I would say running the campaign in a different setting, or changing the premise of the campaign to focus on planar travel would be moving the line. If I pitched the campaign I did, in my setting, it’s because that’s what I want to run. Those are points I’m willing to compromise on. Changing the lore of my setting is not.Yes, I would rather not DM than change my setting’s lore. I put a lot of work into my setting, I don’t want to change it. I’ll run another setting if my setting doesn’t meet the group’s needs.Why do you not consider choosing to run a different setting that more closely aligns with the players’ needs “budging?” Why is it so important to you that a DM change their setting to suit the players’ desires?What’s the alternative to negotiating to a place the DM accepts? Running a game they don’t accept? I don’t think that’s a fair expectation. The DM shouldn’t be obligated to run a game they don’t want to, just as the players shouldn’t be obligated to play in a game they don’t want to.Again, what are the alternatives? The DM running a game they don’t accept? The player playing in a game they don’t accept? When two people reach an impasse, the options are either to find a mutually agreeable compromise, or to agree to disagree.Why would the DM run a game that doesn’t meet their desires?Why would the DM agree to something they don’t want to agree to?If the majority of the group is against the DM, the DM’s only recourse is to compromise or leave (which is really just another compromise, since presumably they want to run a game). If the table out-votes the DM, one way or another, the DM has to bend. They can bend by amending something about the world, the campaign, or the rules to meet the players’ desires, or they can bend by accepting that this isn’t the group for them. This mirrors the options a player has when the table out-votes them. The player can bend by amending something about their character concept, their character build, or their understanding of the rules, or they can bend by accepting that this isn’t the group for them. The only real difference is in the scope and scale of what the player controls vs. what the DM controls. By the way D&D is designed, the player has control over their own character, and the DM has control over everything else. This is why, as I say, the design of D&D almost necessitates a top-down power structure.Different people have different thresholds of tolerance for such things I suppose. Personally, I invite players to work with me if they want to play options that are outside the scope of what’s presented in the campaign pitch. For other DMs it’s a hard limit. As I’ve said, in any negotiation people have some things they’re willing to compromise on and some things they’re not. What those things are will vary from person to person and negotiation to negotiation. Maybe some folks on the extreme end aren’t willing to compromise on much of anything, and I probably wouldn’t want to play with them. But, that’s their prerogative, whether they are a DM or a player.That’s something I might be ok with, to a limited extent. It’s large-scale setting lore that I’m not willing to budge on. Small, local changes to suit the players’ interest? Yeah, that’s probably fine. I’m not going to sit down with the players and co-create the starting town or whatever, but if a player wants there to be like a monastery for their monk order in the town that I hadn’t planned for or whatever, sure. But I don’t play to build a world together with my players as I go. I play to have the players discover a world I’ve created for them to explore. (That’s also my preference as a player, by the way. I don’t want to invent setting details, I want to discover them.)No problem.</blockquote>

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