I don't think that you necessarily encourage unreasonable behaviour where it wouldn't already occur. But you are making the decision that you're willing to play with unreasonable people, and placing what I believe is misplaced faith in the ability of rules to mitigate unreasonableness.
Other people can make their own decisions but, for me, I simply choose not to play with unreasonable people -- and if that meant I didn't get to play at all, it would still be an easy choice.
I think that the situation is far from being that simple. If you look at the last several posts on this tangent they largely focus on the
singular root cause of
teenagers &
under with some flavor of what multiple posters have dubbed poor/undeveloped social skills as the entire spectrum of problem players. That's absolutely true &
one source of problem players where rules don't really solve much, but it's not the only source. When I was still
running AL regularly I would see those types occasionally, but they tended to be self correcting problems that got crushed under the weight of mass
"dude that's not ok"
with very little in the way of players leaving it to the gm while nope'ing out of the whole interaction.
The much more common type of problem player is the player who has the reasonably developed social skills but shows up with the wrong social contract. Those players believe they are acting reasonably & they would be if d&d were using the social contract for A or B below
- A: FPS/mmo/moba/etc video game where "play to win me against everyone else" PvP/PvDM is totally normal & even somewhat encouraged
- B: if d&d were a a freeform roleplay thing☆ where "Well MyYyYyYyYYyyyy ChArAcTeR..." type statements are somewhat expected to almost be the ultimate trump card for weaving in ways that make GM fiat & worldbuilding capabilities look positively restrained. Take the tortle thread or this reaction to an unprompted question of how I'd handle a hypothetical player proposing story goals/character arc/etc crashing into what is effectively a more detailed "I normally run eberron & none of that fits the setting but here's the reaction for discussion".
That second set of problem players does not generally ever trigger the sort of mass "dude that's not ok" that the undeveloped social skills crowd does & they have the social skills to ensure that no single PvDMchoice/action/story
declaration they make at the table can
singularly do so, but the game rulea very much impact them. The "dude that's not ok" peer pressure cannon doesn't really point at this group because there's usually only the GM who needs to track or be affected by the cumulative impact of players operating under a slightly different social contract. With most of the group not really tracking it unless the GM creates a problem by being overly restrictive & stopping the game for the slightest maybe-line crossing it becomes very easy for players with largely unaffected PCs to completely tune out any disagreement between that player & the GM or to get roped in on if that singular action/choice/story declaration
could be reasonable in isolation just to break a stalemate between two people who are both certain they are backed by both social contract & rules.
☆ It's the best nonspecific example of a roleplaying community I can think of that doesn't call out any particular community or subgroup of roleplayers.
@AlViking different definition most likely. It's a sliding scale & the tools that once handled/mitigated innocently misunderstandings from that second group above in the background were largely removed from 5e. This whole tangent started after I simply mentioned "
In the past there was usually some degree of another player pushing back because they want the treasure/gear/whatever offered to cover things their PC needs, but it becomes real easy to play the railroad card real fast when nobody else has a reason to stand in its way."
