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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Imban" data-source="post: 4946561" data-attributes="member: 29206">Yeah, this just reminds me that a lot of us have entirely different game worlds. By the narration that I tend to use, most of my players' characters can shrug off repeated greatsword blows to the neck - not because they're lucky or skilled, they're just that bad and thus they only got beaten up a bit by it. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />To be fair, these sort of arguments don't come up very often at my table, because generally we don't disagree that much about what's possible. The one person who's really given to it is a big 4e fan, and he tends to skip justification and go straight to "Is it immune? No? Then I knocked it prone." Which... well, that's really annoying, because I'm the GM and he can get stuffed. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" />Geez, if you're going to declare an action patently impossible, you should at least let the player pick a different one. Assumedly his character would know that what he's doing was never, ever going to succeed and not have done it, is my reasoning... but beyond that, it's just not polite to make people lose turns over rules arguments. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f631.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":eek:" title="Eek!    :eek:"  data-smilie="9"data-shortname=":eek:" />I approach DMing as more a referee than a facilitator. For instance, I think it's totally legitimate to have the consequences for attempting to climb a wall be either that you can (and do) or can't (and don't) and far prefer just saying "yes" or "no" to "yes, but...", but at the end of the day I only sit down to play or run a game because it's fun, and assume the same is true for everyone in my group.So yeah, I subscribe to a lot of theories that tend to lead to tyrannical DMing but also to "no gaming is better than bad gaming", which in my experience acts as a pretty strong counter to terrible game masters. I don't think there's anything wrong with saying that any number of races can't be played in your campaign world, but if I really want to play one that isn't allowed, I'm just going to tell you this and then not play in your campaign. Which has an obvious effect - if you make a campaign pitch nobody likes, it doesn't get run.</blockquote>

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