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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8937491" data-attributes="member: 6790260">This is a tricky thing. Because it's both ridiculously easy to become patronizing, and yet entirely possible to actually not know your own taste, speaking from firsthand experience. I know I've cited the development of extra chunky spaghetti sauce in the past. That came from literally a third of the American public genuinely preferring extra chunky sauce and never, even once, mentioning it because they simply didn't know; they weren't aware of the possibility, or didn't think they would actually like it. Perspective usually requires diverse experiences, and I don't think I am saying anything especially controversial by saying that D&D players can be very attached to a single system, often the first system they were exposed to as a player.That said, I don't want to downplay the severity of the first issue. I recognize how serious a problem that is, "oh, you just don't know what you want." That's awful! It's very close to an issue I have with certain approaches to running games (where the person running the game takes the stance of "I know what you will find fun better than you do"), so I understand why this is a huge, huge issue. "Oh, you just don't know any better" is a d!@k move in any debate, and should not be tolerated.I just think there is still some merit, some of the time, in saying, "It's useful to try things you don't know you'll like, both to help you understand why you do like what you like, and to get a chance to discover something you didn't know you would like." Which is the longer, more nuanced form of this idea--not making blanket statements about others failing to know themselves, but recognizing that what a person knows about their own taste is partly a function of what they've been exposed to, and thus that it is often useful to seek out novel experiences in order to better understand one's own taste.</blockquote>

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