That isn't a simple question. Let me try an allegory; would you houserule a board game in the middle of play if a player wasn't enjoying the experience?
Generally speaking, I would answer no. I might not play that game again with them or at all, I might be open to a proposed change after enough plays that I really felt like I understood the design intent if I find some other merit there, and in some cases I'd be open to stopping play altogether (though not all, I routinely play games with player elimination or losing board states that expect all players to continue until the end point). Experiencing the game as-is is the point of the activity, and everyone came to do that; everyone there has chosen to risk their having a bad time to have this specific time.
House-ruling a board game (other than Monopoly, which is chronically house-ruled in unproductive ways) is pretty rare. Further, a board game is--perhaps--a few hours' entertainment or lack thereof. It's trivial to not play it again with that person.
If you're the GM of a D&D game, you're usually gonna be in it for the long haul. That's an enormous disanalogy, because having a sucky time with one board game is almost always a single night's problem--often much less, as you can just stop playing that game and
immediately switch to playing some other game. Not so with a TTRPG; they're long-haul games in most cases. Or at least that's what I would expect for most of the games run by folks in this thread.
You're trying to set up a hierarchy of things that are important to play, and arguing the player's attachment to this character item or beat is necessarily more important than whatever consistency might put it at stake, and that just isn't a universal value.
It was a declared value in something Micah had explicitly described as his "platonic ideal" of simulation:
This is my Platonic Ideal of play (by which I mean, what I strive for as a DM but will never truly reach).
This in response to
@clearstream posting a link to Sam Sorensen's "
New Simulationism" manifesto, which explicitly says as its final point:
10. Players come before the fictional world.
In all senses, the people you play with are more important than the game. Your play community is the foundation of play. Nothing matters more.
It's hard to understand how these stances square up with one another. We are now seeing that, no, there are things that matter more, like maintaining the purest feeling of verisimilitude. That's a pretty damn big change.
And no, I don't agree that
I am setting a hierarchy of play. I am asking why,
given what Micah has said about something that
does define a hierarchy of play where "nothing matters more" than the people at the table, he is now saying that the hierarchy of play
does not say that "nothing matters more" than the people at the table.
Further, I'll note that I specifically set out a case that would be perfectly cromulent: the player
willingly electing to put the thing they're invested in into danger, risking that element. If they've knowingly done that, all bets are off. They have given their consent to its possible destruction. This is for things where they
have not done that.
Ideally everyone signing up a game in the first place shares the same set of values and is willing to make some sacrifices to achieve whatever verisimilitude is at stake if that's necessary. I really don't see a problem with setting that request outside of negotiation; that feels much like how I don't really like hidden movement games and generally opt not to play them, and if I do decide to play one, I don't feel entitled to complain about the structure.
There's no moral imperative to compromise here, if both parties aren't interested. We could just do something else.
The problem is that this is happening
after the game has started. The player has already been invested. It's already clear what things about the character make them happy, make them interested in playing. You're correct that the ideal is that everyone knows exactly what everyone else wants and expects in advance, and all of those things are completely in alignment, and none of them change along the way. I find that in the vast majority of cases, that ideal is not met, and thus different people have different ideas of what is or isn't reasonable in a given context, disagree about what the group can/should (try to) achieve, and what is or isn't "fair game". The closer something gets to being the foundation of a particular player's investment or connection, the more extreme a risk it is to just destroy that thing dispassionately.