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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 6315972" data-attributes="member: 177">I wasn't trying to call it good or bad.  The point is that it's origin and construction stand against the idea that the old school GM and players don't tend to antagonistic roles. I don't know if we need a different term, so much as we have to be on the same page as what we are talking about here.You want caution and thoughtful play. You can be thoughtful and cautious without pixel-bitching.  Pixel-bitching isn't about "caution and thoughtfulness".  The term comes from 8-bit video games, where the player had to click on a specific pixel in order to find the thing that allowed them to progress.  In RPG terms, it is about having one, and only one solution to a given problem, puzzle or issue, or requiring players to explicitly state actions down to inane levels of detail - beyond caution and thoughtfulness, and off into paranoia and pedantry.Pixel-bitching gets old.  I don't mind it being a loaded term - when I use it, I *intend* the negative connotation.  The connotation is part of the point.  I think Ruin Explorer covered that well.  By extension, D&D-esque traps should exist in our real world, and by and large, they don't.  No, Dungeons are full of traps because Gygax and company thought traps were keen.  And, by making it about you, personally, you seem to have missed the point, I'm afraid. I never said it *needs* to arise.  I said it *tends* to arise.  You, and your individual groups, are not the question here.  And, "Well, it doesn't happen to *me*, so we can discount it as a concern," is a pretty myopic way to go about discussing the matter.  If you're all perfect, that's great, go have a ball.  But we still have the rest of the world to consider.Any home campaign playstyle that is about "testing", will have the tendency to breed antagonistic play, because the player will ask, "testing against what?" and the answer becomes, "against the GM".  Playing monsters (or any adventure elements) "straight" is not a defense in home campaign play - because the GM is responsible for their placement!  The GM is still the one who creates the test, and the one who adjudicates it, so ultimately it is the player's runtime thinking against the GM's thinking.  Still GM vs Player.  Nobody likes to lose, or fail a test, and that includes players.  Then flip the coin - if the players win easily, that reflects on the GM, as his or her test was weak sauce.  Either way, emotions and ego can get involved.  This is not automatic, but is a quite natural development, based on very typical human behavior.  Any time that having things go well is predicated on humans not acting like humans, you are asking for trouble.  This is all avoided in actual tournament play, where the GM didn't create or choose the adventure, and the players are being tested ultimately against other players.  It is the adoption of tournament-style structures (and many, if not most, of the old school modules are tournament adventures adapted for sale) that tends to start the issue.See the other notes. Metagaming is/was a cornerstone of a lot of old-school play.  If testing the players, rather than the characters, is the goal, the players will want to brig their system mastery (and mastery of the GM's thought processes as well) to the table - and "system mastery" is the epitome of metagaming.   If testing the characters is really the goal, many of the old-school tropes that are soluble via system mastery should be abandoned for other challenges. If testing is not a goal, we can thoroughly restructure the approach into something very much not old-school.</blockquote>

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