NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8993444" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Because it would be useful. It would tell us skills, knowledge, and actions that are generally worth pursuing--DMing is not such a special-snowflake utterly-unique performance that there cannot be commonalities. It would help alleviate common mistakes that many inexperienced DMs run into, by explaining how and why those mistakes can occur and what one can do to prevent them, or address them if they've already happened. It would let us concentrate the wisdom of past DMs into productive instruction, as is the case with any body of technical understanding (be it art, science, or practice.)Why else would you want to know examples of good and bad results in a particular activity?And yet we recognize poor technique from excellent technique: we recognize that Leonardo da Vinci had greater skill than a five-year-old child has, even though we do not disparage the five-year-old child for not having that skill. (Indeed, we celebrate their efforts, or at least we should, while also pushing them to improve, which can only happen if it is possible to distinguish grades of performance.) We recognize that cuisine is doubly subjective, subjective for the chef and subjective for the diner, and yet we also recognize (at times, with significant financial rewards!) that some chefs are better-skilled and other chefs are worse-skilled. We do, in fact, develop both formal and informal ways of evaluating the food we eat.It would seem the problem you're having here is, you think my request is about the content of the work, the meaning of the words, the flavor of the food, the depiction on the canvas. That's trivially not even possible to critique. But the structure of the poem ("you're writing a sonnet, but the meter is wrong"), the preparation of the dish ("if this is sushi, it's not supposed to be cooked"), the method of the painting ("you're going for realism, but the shadows don't match one another on the subject's face")--in other words, the technique which expresses the content--can be, and in general will be judged by those who experience it.There is no such thing as bad cuisine. But there is such a thing as bad sushi, a bad implementation of a specific goal in food preparation. Surely, then, we recognize that while there cannot be an inherently bad campaign concept--e.g., the rather unorthodox example you mentioned cannot be "good" or "bad," it simply is--there can be bad ways to implement that concept.I could not possibly care less what campaign content a DM might wish to implement. I care a great deal, however, about actually teaching people how to implement whatever content strikes their fancy in an effective, productive way. Because DMing is inherently a difficult thing already. Making it any more difficult than it needs to be is bad for the game in a multitude of ways.</blockquote>

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