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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Scurvy_Platypus" data-source="post: 3963332" data-attributes="member: 43283">Honestly? Yup.This is a bit more complicated, for me at least. I play rpgs for a lot of reasons, and one of those is social. So even if I'm not really a fan of a particular person's style of running a game (in other words I've got less trust of 'em) I'm likely to still play if I like the people involved in the game.If I've got no connection to the people (like what happens every time I move and have to start over) then I honestly don't have a choice. I either have to take a chance or go without playing. I do believe that no rpg play is better than _bad_ play, but when starting out fresh there's a certain amount of "sucking it up" that has to be done.Overall, I prefer a higher trust environment and if I can't find/establish it, I will walk away from a game. I absolutely refuse flat out to play long-term in a low trust environment. I know there's some people out there that love playing rpgs so much that they'll put up with almost anything in order to keep playing, but I'm not one of 'em.My personal observation over the past 20 years suggests that a lot of games (like D&D 3.x for example) rely on the rules much more frequently these days, in part because of the low-trust issue. In low trust games, a player (or GM) can always fall back and say, "No, that's B.S. We agreed to play this game, and this is how the rules work. We never said anything about houserules."I'm not going to pass any kind of value judgement on it, I'm simply noting that the overall tone and way of relying on the rules has shifted compared to what I used to see. I won't speculate why either.To a certain extent, the game system is being substitued in place of a group working out amongst themseleves how they're going to do things. If you look at it from a slightly different perspective, it can tell you a bit about the "style" of the people involved.By which I mean, many of the small press games these days are lighter on the rules. Not just things like tactical movement and whether a die should be rolled for scatter if a grenade toss misses, but things like "combat, arguing with somebody else, running a race...these are all 'conflict situations' and resolved the same way." Rules-lighter games inherently rely on higher trust environments.For example, plenty of people like to jump up and down and scream about how "unbalanced" games like Rifts or BESM 2nd Ed are. They'll lovingly detail how broken the system is, how easy it is to munchkin, blah blah blah. They either completely ignore, or actively argue _againt_ the fact that the game has a certain expectation of trust. "If a person wanted to they could..." is the usual refrain. Well yeah, a person _could_, but that's only a problem if all the people in the game let it be a problem.Which is where that whole thing with "rules lawyers" pops up. The problem with them isn't  that someone is skilled in the rules, the problem is that the expectation is that the rules have _replaced_ the option to negotiate and accept/refuse an option in the game based on what people are willing to accept.Some people _really_ like rules systems that imply a low trust environment (like D&D) not because they're complete rat bastards, but because they really like the pure "game" aspect.It's at this point that things start getting really muddled, and flames like to erupt on the internet. The reason is because people _do_ play rpgs for different reasons, so you've got personal reasons to play rpgs mixing in with different rule systems which carry a bit of an implicit expectation about why people are there playing the game in the first place.D&D for example implies a lower trust environment, as well as wanting to be able to engage in tactical/tournement play. Now, you can have people houserule it out, and toss all sorts of stuff, and plenty of folks do. But their reasons for doing so run up against other people's reasons for playing the game, and _some_ people really like and want those rules in place, explicitly because it does act in part as a limiter on player/DM action.I think by and large though, most people aren't really interested in (and don't give much if any thought) to the assumptions behind the game rules and so forth. They just want to sit down and play a game, and it's just easier to play some games than others. Why it is, and why some games are more satisfying than others is just something that people can't be bothered with figuring out.</blockquote>

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