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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 5636717" data-attributes="member: 22424">A lot of it is down to a loss of trust - there genuinely were a lot of DMs out there who abused the power that the system gave them, to the detriment of the group as a whole. By moving a lot of that power to the player's side, WotC have gone some way towards 'protecting' the players from those bad DMs.Another factor is that much of the mystique associated with the DM is gone. The days when the rules were mostly found in the DMG are long gone (and rightly so). As the players get a greater understanding of the nuts and bolts of the game (and especially as the game engine becomes more formalised, so there's less need for extensive house rules), there has inevitably been something of a shift.And, bluntly, some of it was a deliberate ploy by WotC to sell books. They realised early on that there were many more players than DMs, so that was the bigger market. But if the DM had carte blanche to disallow anything from the game, this would discourage purchases. So, they did a certain amount of work inculcating an attitude that the DM should let the player bring in the latest supplement, that the player should be able to expect to play a Shardmind, and that the DM would make it work. The ultimate manifestation of this, of course, is "everything is core".Ultimately, though, it only goes so far. The DM is still necessary, unless you're just going to run pre-gen adventures in a truly robotic manner. The DM still has the mandate to create the setting and the adventures, and to throw absurdly over-powered encounters at the PCs if that is his wont. Ultimately, there still has to be trust between the players and the DM, or the group has real problems.</blockquote>

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