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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9268503" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Add another fifteen years and you'd still be coming up short. And no, I have lived in a moderately large city or a very large city for all of my life. I've never lived in anything even remotely like a "village," except for Boy Scout summer camp.Then...why did you argue???? What? Are you trolling me? I summarized what you said...and you disputed it with "I never typed that"...and then I went back to the words you DID type, and showed how they were related to what I said...and you agree now????I assure you, it's true!Despite living in one city of over 2 million people for most of my life, and another of almost 10 million for several years, and actively pursuing any online group I can find for quite a long time (before I gave up, I mean), I have never encountered this sort of player. That is correct. Given you seem to think they're everywhere, and I haven't encountered any, one option is that my experience is unusual. But I'm far from the only person who rarely encounters these folks. So the other possibility is...?Why not? I don't understand what the disconnect here is.See, you're doing that insulting thing again! So let me be as clear as I possibly can.<h2>I do not "roll out the red carpet for them." I do not "do as the players ask." I am not a slave of my players. I work with them. I don't work for them.</h2>Is that sufficiently clear?If you only consider two of them relevant, doesn't that mean that everything else doesn't matter? And if ONLY those two examples--one that is terrible (the thing you avoid), and one that is not (the thing you personally do)--it establishes pretty clearly that you only see the world of running games in that very black-and-white, terrible-or-correct way. Like...if you never talk about alternatives, even when others tell you there are some, why would people think you believe there are any?And what about players who don't blunder into them, who try to be cautious and thoughtful...and still find every trap is a death sentence? Because that was my experience of old-school play.And I promise you, I am NEITHER the "Casual Buddy DM" nor whatever your "Hard Fun" DM is. Of course, I don't really understand what "Hard Fun" even is. It's rather ironic, really, because you have a penchant for dismissing those you disagree with as using "word salad," but "Hard Fun" and "Nightmare Fuel" have been effectively a salad of words thus far.But that's uselessly nondescriptive. That's like having a moral code which is summarized as, "Do moral things." What ARE moral things??? WHY are they moral? If I have to choose between two incompatible moral things, which one do I choose?That's why "fun," as a generic goal, is pretty much pointless. It doesn't actually do anything. It doesn't tell you anything. It's literally just an instruction to be correct and avoid being incorrect. Of course we want to be correct and avoid being incorrect! How do you do that?You do that by finding out what specific things would be fun, and by demonstrating that things will be fun, if folks reciprocate, if they participate, if they care about things.The burden of proof lies on the person making the initial claim, not on the person rebutting that claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If you're going to make the strident and pretty dramatic claim that the vast majority of players are lazy idiots, you should probably back that up with a poll. You don't get to spin that around and say, "Well unless YOU have a poll showing I'm wrong, then I must be right." That's not how discussion works. If Joe claims 50% of humans are naturally blonde, and Sally questions that claim, Joe cannot then argue, "Well, you didn't prove that it's not true, so it has to be true." Now, if Sally were instead to specifically make a counter-claim like, "Actually, only about 5% of humans are blonde," then Joe could most certainly ask for the survey data she used to make that claim!</blockquote>

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