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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9539289" data-attributes="member: 6790260">This would mean I would basically never play D&D, because, as I said, in my experience it's nearly all of them. As in, of the dozens of DMs I've had over the years, excluding the ones running 4e, perhaps three or four WOULD have allowed it, and all the rest guaranteed would not. They'd either just straight-up say no, or they'd "allow" it except only in a way that is totally neutered.Because every creative open-ended use a DM allows is a future headache they sign up for. So they shut down 99.9% of creative options, and the 0.1% they allow through are so saddled with limitations and problems it's just not worth it. Hence my complaints about Intimidate, since the vast majority of DMs see it as "the Persuasion skill that makes targets hate you forever and, if they get the chance, actively try to hurt you later."Open-ended stuff is only great in theory. I find that the practice is nowhere near as awesome as you say, because so many DMs are so adamantly against actual creative thinking. Anything genuinely creative derails their DMing, and is thus a problem to be eliminated, not an awesome thing to support. This is yet another reason why I have such a dim view of DMs who talk so much about "absolute power" and the importance of their "vision" and their apparent need to railroad and fudge and illusionism-ify their world etc., etc., etc.--because each and every one of those things is yet another tool to prevent creative players from ever derailing their games, from ever doing anything actually outside the box.And then so many DMs wonder why their players never take risks, always prefer guaranteed options, fall into reliable tried-and-true SOPs, and reject creative fun actions in favor of boring reliable ones. Can't tell you how many times I've seen a thread or a Reddit post or a tweet or a Youtube comment or whatever else where someone says, in various different phrases, "Why are my players always such murder-hobos who never do anything fun or creative?! It's maddening!" But almost invariably, when when you actually dig in and find out how they run their games....they run them in ways that hammer home that emotional investment is for suckers, that no good deed goes unpunished, that mercy will guaranteed 100% always be exploited, that creativity and out-of-the-box thinking gets at best gently no-saled and at worst violently stamped out, etc. And if you try to tell them that, they either get defensive ("You don't know how my group runs!") or hostile.Many, many DMs claim they support creativity. Very few of those who claim to do so actually do support creativity. Some of them it's because they're just hypocrites, claiming they're in favor of something they aren't, whether they realize it or not. Some of them, it's because they've got a lot of internalized "lessons" about how you "should" DM that prevent them from actually achieving the goals they want to achieve. Some, their definition of "creativity" is...more than a little deficient.</blockquote>

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