Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="ruleslawyer" data-source="post: 3965541" data-attributes="member: 1757">I don't allow interruption of the game for rules discussions except under highly limited circumstances, and that's been my stance for years. If I screw over the players by misinterpreting or ignoring a rule, I make it up later. If the players steal a march on me via a rules mistake, more power to them.By playing with people who aren't obnoxious, which is, I think, part of what shilsen was referring to at the start of this thread. I started playing D&D as part of hanging out with my friends, and that's been the way of it for the entire 27-odd years I've been playing; my current game marks the first time that I've played with people whom I didn't know before getting together to game, and we're all friends by now after about a year and a half of play. For me, playing D&D (like playing videogames or music, or dining out/drinking out/going to the movies) is a fundamentally social experience. I try not to undertake any of those experience in anything other than a high trust environment.All of which doesn't mitigate my enthusiasm for rules, which is based largely on a single precept:Rules are good because they enable meaningful choices.Freeform collective storytelling is fun, but it's not my idea of a game. The largest part of the fun of playing a game, to my mind, lies in having the ability to make a choice, the tension over the (un)wisdom of that choice, and seeing the consequences of that choice play out. (The remaining part is essentially the role of luck, of course, and the Vegas-like element of palpitating over that critical die roll.) As to trust, I'll echo what Doug McCrae said about the DM-player power imbalance, and add that as a DM, I've been happy to have rules to keep *myself* honest. It's easier for me to run an NPC using RAW than to wing it, because it allows me to focus on narration and world-building and not worry about calibrating a free-form challenge to hit that sweet spot of being tough without overwhelming.</blockquote>

Verification