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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7759320" data-attributes="member: 42582">If I call your GMing technique lazy, yes that would be insulting. You're not a professional, you don't hold yourself out as one, and we are communicating in the context of a friendly message board discussion.The same would be true if I said that your golfing is lazy.But a commentator who criticises a professional sportsperson as having lazy technique isn't being insulting. The context is very different, and professionals who aspire to perform well are expected to suck it up. The same is true for musicisans (performers and campaigners). I've read reviews of concerts, or of albums, that criticise the performers for being lazy or phoning it in or resting on past laurels or simply reworking their old material rather than trying something new or different or exciting. Those reviews may be fair or unfair, sound or unsound; but they're not insults.When I get criticisms of my pubished work, or rejections of work I would like to publish, that's not insulting (though of course sometimes it stings). That's part and parcel of putting my work out there as an instance (or a would-be instance) of scholarship.And Mearls as a professional RPG designer is in the same boat. Criticism of his work isn't insulting him. (Of course it's not complimenting him either. But not every remark about someone's work has to be either compliment or insult.)</blockquote>