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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6212822" data-attributes="member: 17106">Isn't everything in the 3e PHB/DMG/etc. pretty far removed from that? I'm skeptical of this contention, but I don't know a ton about forty-year-old gaming philosophies one way or another, but I don't see that it really matters.The current version of Star Trek is no less divorced from Gene Roddenberry's vision (or the new BSG from the old one, or any of the numerous media properties that's been reinvented after a decades-long period of dormancy). There are traditionalists who aren't happy about this, but I don't see it as being a big deal.This thread has a 3e/3.5 tag on it; AFAIC other editions are tangentially relevant at best. What percentage of the people who play 3e even know the names of Gary Gygax, let alone Dave Arneson? I suspect many of my players don't. What's relevant to 3e players is what's in the 3e books.If anything, I would guess that the OD&D folks really hadn't thought about these issues much, played this novel game for a while, and empirically developed the rationale for the DM-driven game that came afterwards. After all, the primacy of the DM's vision is not an unprecedented postulate, it's a very logical way of constructing a game that derives from many other creative and recreational activities and has many strong points. I don't think the 3e DMG was written with this philosophy to pander to any group of gamers, I think it was written because the designers thought it was the best way to DM the game they'd created. And I've taken the apparently controversial position that they were right.Well, this is the quote:You appear to be positing "indie rpging" as a category that exists between two poles, one of them you define as being shared storytelling, the other unspecified.And for goodness sake, what I'm saying is that all these approaches are fine. What's not fine is twofold.One, saying that the rules of D&D 3e give a player the authority to dictate anything whatsoever to a DM. Clearly, they don't. "Final arbiter" is pretty unambiguous.Two, saying that whenever players in one's home game do dictate these kinds of things, and the outcome is undesirable, it's the rules' fault and indicates a need to fix something in the rules. Clearly, this is not the case.</blockquote>

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