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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2247408" data-attributes="member: 4937">Believe me, I know exactly what you said, and the above clarification confirms it.  As long as we are giving advice on manners out, how about assuming that if a person disagrees with you, he probably has some considered reasons for doing so and isn't merely unable to read.   I'm 'shouting' not because I'm angry, but because I want to make it clear how emphatically I disagree.  If you prefer, I'll make the text bold and I apologize if it came off as a rant.   By way of an excuse, I've been on the internet since 1990 and back then making your text bold wasn't an option.   But, back on topic.The DM isn't equivalent to a referee.  That's precisely what I disagree with.  In a competitive game, say soccer, no one would accept a situation in which the referee was also the coach for the opposing team, was also (all) the players on the opposing team, and also got to liberally sprinkle the field with obstacles of his choosing prior to the game, and also got to to bring in 'ringers' to play for his team whenever he wanted to.  Yet this is precisely the situation that we have in D&D.  Not only is the DM the referee, but he sets the strategy for the NPC team, he chooses all the actions for all the members of the NPC team, he gets to set up the field how he likes, and he can choose to if he wants bring in Freddy Adu and Landon Donovan to play against the middle school club teams.   If D&D was in any way comparable to soccer, this situation would not in the least be acceptable.   In point of fact, the ability to change the rules is just one minor card in this referee's pocket, and he certainly doesn't need to pull it in order to screw the PC's over or run an unfair game.  The DM is the NPC's (at least to the same limited extent that the players are the PC's).  The NPC's exist solely in the mind of the DM (at least until he 'brings them to life' in this shared fantasy), and the PC's have no more ability over saying how the NPC's ought to be role played than the DM does over the PC's.  The competition between the NPC's and the PC's can't be equated to the competition between two teams on a soccer field, because the competition between the NPC's and the PC's is not a fair one.  For the game to work at all, the DM must be able to recognize that he's not competing with the PC's on behalf of the NPC's.  A DM that doesn't recognize this doesn't need to change the rules.  He could simply have all the 'circumstance bonuses' which the DM is given great latitude in applying fall on the side of the NPC's, choose NPC's that the PC's simply couldn't beat, and use his metagame knowledge about the PC's strengths and weaknesses to choose tactics on behalf of the NPC's knowing that the PC's do not have full metagame knowledge.   Where your argument falls apart completely IMO is that what you want to say (as far as I can gather) is that a good DM sticks to the rules as part of his lack of bias, but in fact sticking to the rules actually has nothing to do with a DM's bias for or against the PC's.   It's just that in your experience DM's that don't stick to the rules were (in your opinion and I've know reason to doubt you) motivated by bias.   You are understandably guilty of relating the two things, but in my experience biased DMing and sticking to the rules have nothing to do with each other.  Thus, I have a counterexample to the claim, "Sticking to the rules is related to lack of bias."  As I've just shown, a DM could be a hide bound rules lawyer and still treat PC's like props in his ego fulfilling fantasy.   The only extent that I actually agree with you is that I agree that if someone is a heavly biased DM he is probably also likely to be so bad at his job and so insecure that he is likely to change the rules on a whim when things don't go his way, but the limited case of the reverse (merely breaking or changing the rules midgame) is not an indication of the former.You could possibly argue that the DM is sometimes something like a referee, but the problem with that analogy (like just about any other analogy) is that its far too limited.  The DM is most like a referee when arbitrating disputes between players or player characters.  In such situations, a good DM sticks very closely to the referee model you are talking about because we actually have a situation that is something like having 'two teams' on the field.   But the DM wears alot more hats than that.  The DM is also something of a police officer (keeping players from cheating, not because that's unfair competition with the NPC's, but because its a form of unfair competition with the other players).   The DM is also something of a judge, interpreting the laws and coming up with a fair solution.  But the DM is also something of a legislator, creating new laws as the circumstances demand.   Simple analogies for what the DM does, or for what the process of playing an RPG is are always just going to cloud the issue rather than explain it.   That's why I prefer to avoid any sort of easy analogy and just talk about what is concrete and real.  Trying to understand everything in terms of an analogy leaves you arguing over the applicability of the analogy, the exact analogy in question, the character of the analogy itself rather than the character of the thing that the analogy substitutes for and so forth.</blockquote>

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