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<blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9476140" data-attributes="member: 6877472">While there's merit to trying to build rules to make it very clear what the intent is, ie, what players are intended to be able to expect, be it Wealth By Level or Xp Per Session or &quot;fair encounters&quot; or &quot;expected downtime&quot; and so on and so forth, the big issue is that a DM who wants to ignore any guidelines and do whatever they please is going to do so regardless of your good intent.If you really want to cure &quot;Bad DM syndrome&quot;, you do that via education.&nbsp; You lay out in the DMG to prospective DM's the things that can lead to bad blood between them and their play group.&nbsp; A good example of this is from the old Spoony Experiment where Spoony explained that he had an amazing campaign where an NPC stole from the party and much of the campaign was predicated on &quot;getting revenge&quot; on the NPC, who the players rightfully despises.&nbsp; But then he closes with &quot;you can only do this once&quot;.&nbsp; The first time the players are robbed gets them motivated, the second time runs the very good risk of getting them very very annoyed- not with the NPC, but with the DM personally!You can give examples of things that might build trust with your players as well, like maybe rolling openly, or having open discussion about adopting house rules and giving them a say in the matter.You can educate players in the PHB at the same time by saying &quot;these are things to look out for&quot; so that they can identify potentially bad DM's (or at the very least, DM's who are bad for them).&nbsp; This would help groups that have conflicting playstyles to go their separate ways without hostility, and potentially deprive the &quot;actually bad DM's&quot; of <s>victims</s> players to frustrate.And of course, foster discussions between players and DM's to sort out potential pitfalls and lead to happier games.But saying &quot;hey, here's this rule, consider it a black box because we don't trust anyone to tamper with it in a way that won't frustrate their players&quot;?&nbsp; Well some of the responses in this very thread showcase why that's not going to help anyone.&nbsp; Even an explanation as to why you should think twice about interfering with a player's Bastion would be a vast improvement.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="James Gasik, post: 9476140, member: 6877472"] While there's merit to trying to build rules to make it very clear what the intent is, ie, what players are intended to be able to expect, be it Wealth By Level or Xp Per Session or "fair encounters" or "expected downtime" and so on and so forth, the big issue is that a DM who wants to ignore any guidelines and do whatever they please is going to do so regardless of your good intent. If you really want to cure "Bad DM syndrome", you do that via education. You lay out in the DMG to prospective DM's the things that can lead to bad blood between them and their play group. A good example of this is from the old Spoony Experiment where Spoony explained that he had an amazing campaign where an NPC stole from the party and much of the campaign was predicated on "getting revenge" on the NPC, who the players rightfully despises. But then he closes with "you can only do this [B]once[/B]". The first time the players are robbed gets them motivated, the second time runs the very good risk of getting them very very annoyed- not with the NPC, but with the DM personally! You can give examples of things that might build trust with your players as well, like maybe rolling openly, or having open discussion about adopting house rules and giving them a say in the matter. You can educate players in the PHB at the same time by saying "these are things to look out for" so that they can identify potentially bad DM's (or at the very least, DM's who are bad for [B]them[/B]). This would help groups that have conflicting playstyles to go their separate ways without hostility, and potentially deprive the "actually bad DM's" of [S]victims[/S] players to frustrate. And of course, foster discussions between players and DM's to sort out potential pitfalls and lead to happier games. But saying "hey, here's this rule, consider it a black box because we don't trust anyone to tamper with it in a way that won't frustrate their players"? Well some of the responses in this very thread showcase why that's not going to help anyone. Even an explanation as to [B]why[/B] you should think twice about interfering with a player's Bastion would be a vast improvement. [/QUOTE]

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