The games I've been playing in are great. Perfection is unobtainable and honestly not worth chasing.Find better DMs or run the game you want to run yourself.
Nope. In general, I don't really rank things. I have some movies I like more than others, but that's about it.Do you not have a list of 10 perfect movies floating around in your head? I do. Most people I mention that to have said similar. Maybe not 10, but five at least. Note here that simply because I think they're perfect I'm making no claim that they're objectively perfect, only that they're perfect in my eyes.
And again, for a lot of us, there's no "market" to speak of. The compromises required in a sustained committed relationship are very different then the compromises required to swipe right on Tinder, to extend the metaphor a bit.Again, it's a DM's market. When I have to choose between not playing anything or playing something I'm not that interested in, I might change my tune. So far, there's no shortage of players interested in the game I'm running, so it's not an issue. I'll burn that bridge when I come to it. (Yes, that's intentional.)
Honestly, I don't really think the division exists solely between killer DMs and entitled players. I know plenty of players (myself included) who beg the DM to not pull punches when it comes to lethality, and plenty of DMs who are extremely reluctant to kill PCs.Not really. I've ran a pretty lengthy M&M campaign myself and death just isn't a thing in that game (damage is non-lethal by default). I'm just really amused how the "killer DM" has become a stigma in the D&D community as o late.
And these are all much lower prep than D&D with much lighter rulesets and I'm not surprised the ratios are vastly higher.
Yeah, honestly, I find PC death to be much more of a hassle as DM than as a player. I always have more ideas for PCs than I have time to actually play, so if my character bites it, no problem, I'll whip up a new one. But as DM, if I've been crafting adventure plots around that PC, that all just went out the window.Honestly, I don't really think the division exists solely between killer DMs and entitled players. I know plenty of players (myself included) who beg the DM to not pull punches when it comes to lethality, and plenty of DMs who are extremely reluctant to kill PCs.
I disagree that high lethality got "a lot of people" to leave the hobby. A few, perhaps.Okay, so that's a discussion for you and your players. That shouldn't stop me and mine from playing the way we like or force new players into the older system when that's one thing that got a lot of people to leave the game and hobby.
I'm not sure it's a mischaracterization, though.And it doesn't justify mischaracterizing it as having the players reject 'losing'.
I've been in some non-gaming organizations that in theory operated using this model. I say in theory because the in-practice quickly turned into a morass of passive-aggressiveness and backbiting, leading to the organizations shedding members as fast as they acquired them, and eventually imploding.Just musing on the idea of how the group decides what is happening, I think a lot of the problem here is that many people in the West, especially in the US, are just not familiar with the concept of consensus as a way of making decisions, partly because it's so rarely modelled here.
People are very familiar with strict hierarchies and dictatorial models, with limited decision-makers or just one, and there's a temptation to see things that way. People are very familiar with democracies (whether one-person one-vote or otherwise), and if you reject dictatorship there's a further temptation to see that as the model, and then of course some people reject it as "unfair" or whatever.
Consensus is an alternative to voting or having a single leader, where you work together to agree a mutually acceptable outcome. It's used by some organisations. There are versions where people can be overruled, but there are also versions where they cannot. I think, informally, as I said, most groups do work this way, but if you wanted to understand a formal structure that could be used, there's some details here and lots on the internet:
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Consensus decision-making - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
I'd particularly say the Quaker method is worth looking at (not for religious reasons obviously, just they have a pretty good way of working it - so long as you're not looking for snap decisions, but deciding what/how to run absolutely doesn't need to be snap).
From personal experience, yes.Is the power fantasy gamer who never wants there to be any risk of any kind of loss a player type that actually exists?
IME they do until the campaign ends or they are asked to leave, whichever comes first; unless they leave sooner in a hissy fit when bad things do happen to their PCs. Whether they stay engaged in the hobby after that I've no idea.If they do, do they stay engaged in the hobby?
If I'm a fellow player, I can grin and bear it or I can do something about it, depending on the character I'm playing at the time.What if someone is playing a character you personally find really annoying?