Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mort" data-source="post: 7438564" data-attributes="member: 762">This is an odd one for me. I want the DM to know the rules - inside and out if possible. but I don't want to the DM to be paralyzed by them.Too many DMs I've seen are so afraid of making the "wrong" ruling or opening some kind of can of worms allowing players to suddenly walk all over the rules that their default answer to anything non-standard (or even many standard things) is  either a flat "no" or (frankly even worse) to get into a prolonged discussion (with rulebooks out, browsing the web etc.) on why the action should/should not be allowed.The flat (often knee-jerk) "no" is irritating because it stifles player creativity and discourages trying stuff in the future. Note I'm not talking about on its face absurd stuff. i'm talking about a player wanting to swing on a chandelier and the DM saying "no you'll auto-fail" because the player isn't trained in acrobatics.The "Stop everything for prolonged discussion":The DM doesn't want to rule "incorrectly" so engages in a session stopping discussion on the issue. Nothing wrong with a quick rules check or quick back and forth, but anything more is terrible. As an example: Wagons catch on fire and the PCs want to put the fire out. The PC wizard has a spell that digs a hole in dirt or sand (a lot of which is present, and the spell mentions the dirt is thrown about) and wants to use that to douse the fire. The DM instead of a quick ruling or a "no" goes the "convince me" route and takes an hour of actual time between argument, rules look up, etc. That's a HUGE amount of time for a 4 hour session! I suppose this is actually a cross of rules knowledge and adaptability- the ideal is for a DM that knows the rules, applies them in a fair manner but also is adaptable enough to roll with the large amount of situations players tend to come up with.</blockquote>

Verification