D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[EzekielRaiden]

You keep using the word "demand" like it's applicable or something. It's not. The DMG gives DMs that power whether they demand it or not. There's nothing to demand.

I could not give two feces whether any DMG says or ever said that. You can keep quoting it all you like. It's completely irrelevant to me and I will not respond to your quotation of it beyond this post.

 

[Maxperson]

I have. Only once, but I have. Normally I'm aware enough to forestall this. But I've seen it. And I know 100% for certain other people see it too.

It's not this "so rare it essentially never happens" thing you keep claiming it is.

Once in your entire life is "so rare it essentially never happens." You've encountered it once in the decades(?) that you've been playing. I've encountered it 0 times in the decades that I've been playing. Others here have been saying they have never encountered it at all in the decades they've been playing.

That's really, really, really rare.

 

[Maxperson]

I could not give two feces whether any DMG says or ever said that. You can keep quoting it all you like. It's completely irrelevant to me and I will not respond to your quotation of it beyond this post.

If you ignore the fact that is the basis of what you are complaining about in order to misattribute it to other things, your complaint will be flawed to the point of not meaning anything.

(the chef prepares the marinara sauce for some spaghetti)
Kid: Ugh. This sauce is horrible. Anyone who likes spaghetti is an awful person for making sauce like this.
Mom: The people ordering the spaghetti didn't make that sauce. Further, there are other sauces you can use for spaghetti, so it's not even spaghetti that's the problem.
Kid: That's irrelevant! People who like spaghetti are awful.

Where things come from and what they actually mean are important, and if you ignore them, you can't really be correct in your argument.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I've played in and run a lot of games where the GM has control over everything in the world except the PCs. I've never had the GM describe any of them the way you just did here. And oddly enough, I've also enjoyed nearly all of those games.

Now why exactly would I want the DM to behave differently than they have been in games I've enjoyed?

Then why do they need "absolute power"????

That's what absolute power is! That's what nailing everything down IS! There is no contribution from players except their actions, and every single one of those actions can and will be vetoed at any time for any reason or no reason at all.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Once in your entire life is "so rare it essentially never happens." You've encountered it once in the decades(?) that you've been playing. I've encountered it 0 times in the decades that I've been playing. Others here have been saying they have never encountered it at all in the decades they've been playing.

That's really, really, really rare.

It's one out of about...25? campaigns I've played in.

I'd say that's nowhere near "really, really, really rare".

Especially when I actively avoid ever joining any campaign which has even the tiniest whiff of possibly being such.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

No one said it was free, did they. There are consequences to any choice anyone makes.

They certainly act like that cost is functionally zero for players, while pretending that it's some ENORMOUS social cost for the GM.

In my experience, these parameters are almost precisely reversed. The person with power pays almost no cost for the stuff they do. The people without it pay dearly.

 

[Umbran]

I fail to understand why these invisible things are distinct. They're all social contract, and in my experience, they're never meaningfully separated from one another.

The separation becomes obvious when you think about how the game exists within a real world - and the contract of the table does not apply to those not at the table. There's about 8 billion people to whom it does not apply. It only becomes valid to those who have agreed to play.

Like, if I'm playing at our FLGS, and our table had an agreement that players rotated duty to bring snacks, we can't make people in the store shopping for jigsaw puzzles do it. They aren't in the game.

Do something crappy in a TTRPG game you're playing with some people you also play an MMO game with? Hurt feelings are going to carry over and the costs will guaranteed metastasize beyond the specific activity where they occurred. Social behavior isn't neatly siloed off into clean separate things. Everything affects everything else. It's one of the (many) reasons I find offloading everything into the social contract so utterly exhausting.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Please explain to me how I've misrepresented you. That's how I read your statement.

Well, let's see.

I explained a thing which is lost by having the GM sew up every single detail of the world before the players ever arrive, an aspect of player agency.

I specified that there really is a value--flexibility, discoverability, authenticity to the IRL cultural experience of pre-modern civilizations--to having a world where, within a certain boundary things are well-defined, probably quite a large boundary, but beyond that boundary, it becomes "HIC SVNT DRACONES", terra incognita. Not only does this add more similarity to what was in fact true (of medieval culture, naturally) in our real world, it ensures that the GM has an important tool for addressing problems that might come up: the freedom to build (not just randomly conjure up, but actually invest effort to create) new elements of the world.

This is something genuinely valuable, even by the lens of verisimilitude, in addition to benefits on perpendicular axes of useful GMing tools and other things.

None of this has anything to do with forcing GMs to do anything. Instead, it is about keeping options open. To write this off as being, ah,it's literally just petulantly demanding the GM give you all your toys...is extremely frustrating, and a gross misrepresentation.

I legitimately tried to present to you something I thought you would find valuable.

 

[bloodtide]

This isn't productive, and it sure as hell isn't positive. @The Firebird, this is precisely the sort of thing you said wasn't being said in this thread. Is this, and my foregoing post, evidence for you?

You said all games get value by having unknown things, I'm just giving the other side.

I was referring to the descriptions you have given, multiple times, that you have so precisely nailed down the physiological, sociopolitical, economic, geographical, and ecological characteristics of your campaign world that there literally isn't any place you have not already fully pre-defined. Many of them, as I understand it, are places the PCs have never received any information about whatsoever, but you already know every detail there is to know about them, other than perhaps individual specific names of minor government functionaries or the like.

I'm this type of DM. Things "nearby" are all made by me...as DM. There are not spots of "oh the town of Berryfalls is just a mile north, but no one not even the DM knows what is there".

Though game style wise I never allow players to make up anything other then meaningless fluff in my games.

I'm a DM that pre determines all, if you need to point to an example.

That's what absolute power is! That's what nailing everything down IS! There is no contribution from players except their actions, and every single one of those actions can and will be vetoed at any time for any reason or no reason at all.

This is a normal, traditional RPG.

I would tell a player that wants to be all creative and have power to GM their own game.

 

[Maxperson]

Then why do they need "absolute power"????

That's what absolute power is!

You have failed to even begin to prove that, where I and everyone else have demonstrated to you that it isn't that at all.

Absolute power =/= using it constantly to overrun everything everyone else at the table might want.

That's what nailing everything down IS!

Nobody in history has done that in an RPG. It's impossible. Even the Forgotten Realms which has by far the most information nailed down of any published setting has less than 1% of the setting nailed down.

There is no contribution from players except their actions, and every single one of those actions can and will be vetoed at any time for any reason or no reason at all.

That would be false even if it were possible to nail down a setting. New things can be invented by PCs. Just because it hasn't been done, doesn't mean it can't be. And the bolded just isn't true of any DM I've ever seen, and by your own admission only once by you. It's simply not a thing that happens enough to even worry about.