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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadfan" data-source="post: 4694776" data-attributes="member: 40961">Ydars- The reason to focus on DMs is because yelling BE LESS DUMB at your players is a failure as a plan.  I'm the DM.  I can learn to communicate more effectively, provide more comprehensible clues, focus the game session in entertaining directions, and in general do a better job.  I can't wave a magic wand and make my players understand Basic Principles of Mountain Citadel Plumbing 101 well enough to make logical decisions based upon it.  I can, however, use things like foreshadowing, character knowledge, glossing over of unexciting details, and other techniques to make sure that my players know what they need to know to grasp what's going on. The teacher issue is actually very illustrative.  There's a certain drive to assign blame, and people who are blame-oriented want to blame lazy and inattentive students.  People who are solution-oriented tend to look around for the best lever available to them to fix the problem, and that tends to be teachers.  Because, as mentioned above, yelling BE LESS DUMB is not a plan.  Educating teachers about how to instill interest or work ethic in lazy and inattentive students, is.  Amongst the many factors that affect a student's achievement (the student, the student's parents, the student's classmates, the student's teachers), ONLY ONE is actually in our control. So... how does that apply to the discussion? Lets assume that this guy's players are genuine morons.  Not only are they incapable of making even the simplest logical deducation, they don't even pay much attention to what he's saying.  They probably aren't, but lets assume. So what are his options? 1. Get new players.2. Run crappy gaming sessions because he refuses to learn to DM for inattentive morons.3. Learn to DM for inattentive morons. Even in this, the most extreme and ridiculous scenario, he's the one who's going to have to step up to the plate.  Because he can't wave a magic wand and make everyone less dumb.  The blame may lie with the players for being inattentive morons, but what good does that do anybody?</blockquote>

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