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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6199795" data-attributes="member: 42582">Because different people have different experiences.Back at Post 182, I suggested that the reason some people experience balance problems and that others don't is because of difference in playstyle, including differences in GMing techniques.For a couple of pages there seemed to be some degree of agreement with this, but then the dynamic took a turn that from my point of view is curious: namely, a number of those who don't have balance issues started posting that those who do have balance issues are playing the game wrong, and in particular are using the wrong GMing techniques. There has also been a subtheme of suggesting that those who have balance issues are also not using different GMing techniques. (It's not clear to me how, at one and the same time, a GM can both be using the wrong techniques and using the same techniques as the person diagnosing error, but this is a pattern I have noticed on more than one of these threads.)Most of my contributions to the thread since then have been to try and explain that there really are different playstyles, including different GMing techniques, that can produce different play experiences. I also have been trying to point out that some of those difference in technique and experience date back before 4e, and indeed before 3E, and indeed before 2nd ed AD&D, and aren't wildly deviant ways of playing the game. The D&D community has always been highly plural.I agree with all this. I see it as pretty consistent with what I said back in post 182.I prefer to discuss than argue.But my experience on these boards over the past 5 or so years is that there is a recurring tendency for certain playstyles to be treated dismissively by a not-insignificant number of posters - using such words and phrases as "gamist", "gamey", "muchkin", "powergamer", "video-gamey", "player entitlement" or just "entitled", "tyranny of fun", "why do you even need a GM?", "rollplaying not roleplayin", and on this thread "inept" and "incompetent" and "cookie-cutter" and "deviating from the norms of the game".I don't see why one particular group of posters, whose playstyle I have no reason to think is the majority (nor even necessarily the single most prominent), should get to define what counts as proper D&D play on a board that is one of the biggest D&D boards around. And even if take one particular iteration of the game, I don't see that either.From my point of view, the position that many posters seems to have arrived at on this thread - namely, that 3E/PF relies for balance upon a high degree of GM oversight of resolution and framing of situations, having regard not just to thematic concerns but to features like relative mechanical capabilities of different characters and the GM's desires as to the sequence in which certain outcomes will occur - as confirming what I said back in post 182. Yet it continues to be presented, by some posters at least, as if those who are not interested in those techniques are just playing wrong. (It is also asserted, though, by at least some of those posters, that 3E/PF is a very flexible RPG. If it requires such a distinctive approach to GMing to work, I'm not sure where exactly its flexibility is meant to reside.)While the plurality of the D&D playing base continues to be unrecognised by or an target of hostility for some posters, we will have debate as well as discussion.</blockquote>

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