Mistwell
Crusty Old Meatwad (he/him)
I think it's far too easy to shoot the messenger here. Traditional power structures are eroding because our society is changing. Authoritarian command and control leadership is no longer the norm. Decision making in businesses is becoming more distributed. 20 years ago people were also far more likely to take what their immediate supervisors told them at face value, and entertainment media were a much more passive pursuit.
You're saying a cooperative game invented in the 1960s and 1970s and frequently played by the hippie crowd moving away from wargaming, has changed to be more questioning of authority over time?
I disagree. The population of gamers is used to playing video games, board games, card games, and other games which have even more rigid rules structure than D&D. Even if you think society has changed that way (and I disagree it has - I think we question authority less now than we did in the 60s and 70s), the population of RPG players is right around where they always were.
If your players are trying to tell you that you're running your monsters "wrong", you need to have a frank discussion with them about how the DM makes these decisions, while the players make decisions for the characters, and that's how this game works. Rules lawyers as players have always existed, even back to OD&D, and they are helpful sometimes and harmful other times. If you have a rules lawyer who feels entitled to dictate that the rules override the DMs decisions, that player needs to be talked to (likely privately) about the line between player and DM in D&D.
And one major theme of D&D Next is giving power back to the DM, where it traditionally was in the TSR era of D&D. If that's something you don't like, it's possible D&D Next is not for you.
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