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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2239974" data-attributes="member: 4937">You keep saying that, but it actually doesn't mean a darn thing because its so unspecific that it could mean anything.  There is not a universal implied social contract about the D&D rules no matter how much you want there to be one.Everyone on this board agrees that when someone says, "I'm running a D&D game.", that it almost certainly includes the implication that its a D&D game plus a bunch of house rules because everyone here admits that they've housed ruled D&D to death on at least one occasion, but I doubt anyone who did that ever thought twice about saying that they were playing D&D.   Certainly any player who has played D&D for any period of time has the implicit understanding that their will probably be house rules.  When some one asks you, "Have you ever played D&D?", do you answer "No." just because you had extensive house rules?Secondly, as I continue to point out, if a player has no knowledge of the rules then he certainly has know expectations about what those rules should be.  So, if someone who has no knowledge of the D&D rules plays a game he believes to be D&D, but which in fact is completely unbeknownst to him has been house ruled to the point that it is actually GURPS (which is an ubsurd strawman, but never mind that), then no implied social contract has been broken.   The players isn't expecting a particular rules set, he's only expecting to be entertained.   Later, when he plays GURPS, he might go, "Hey, this is alot like D&D", or latter when he plays D&D with another DM he might go, "I remember shields being alot more effective than this.", but he's probably not going to be pissed at the first DM if he had a good time playing.Thirdly, even if there were a universial implied social contract that playing D&D involves something like the D&D rules, there is plenty of evidence in this thread that a great many D&D players believe that playing D&D means abiding by rule 0 and that they believe rule 0 to be part of the implied social contract.   If that is the case, then a player simply can't waltz into a D&D game and have any expectation that his understanding about a particular rule should be able to overrule anything that the DM says.  Has it ever freakin' occurred to you that many of the DM's hold with rule 0 not because they are arrogant Stalinist megalomaniacs, but because when they first learned the game as players rule 0 applied, and they were taught both by the DM and the older players that they were to respect the DM decisions?</blockquote>

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