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

[AlViking]

I'm pretty sure that every table has had at least one of those people. But the thing is, you (generic you) may not recognize that behavior as not OK, or may have said "relax, it's just a game." Or you may have just learned to live with it ("missing stairs") because that's easier and less uncomfortable than kicking someone out of the group.

Not any that I recall and that includes comments of "it's just a game". Definitely not in the 21st century. My wife and I have been playing together for decades, she wouldn't let it slide.

Like, a while ago, I had a fairly disruptive player. I asked him if he wanted to play in the game; he said yes. At the end of many sessions, I would ask for suggestions and if anyone had any criticisms. I worked to give his character things to do based on his background and stated character goals. Believe me, I tried. Dude just liked to be lolrandom in ways that were actively disruptive and even dangerous to the party (in the sense of knowingly and deliberately baiting the BBEG), and all in ways that should have been OOC with his character's established personality, background, and alignment; and he would often vocally refuse to engage with the story (I mentioned him before as the guy who said "wave goodbye to the nice little plot hook"). It was making the game seriously unfun for me, and made me feel like a bad GM because I felt that he must be acting this way because I wasn't good enough to hold his attention.

He was out-of-game friends (or at least close acquaintances) with other members of the group, so what would happen if I told him to stop? Would the other players side with me or get upset if I asked him to stop or leave? Were they bothered by his antics? If I told him to stop, would he do so or just get angry? Was I simply overreacting? (This was ages ago so I honestly can't remember if any of them said anything to me about it.) So... I put up with it. What else could I do? And I breathed a heavy sigh of relief when he decided to go play in a completely different game far, far away. I like to think that nowadays I'd be able to tell him to stop, but I wouldn't be able to them.

So think about that. This sort of thing--obnoxious player vs. fearful player--is not unique to my group. Almost certainly this happens all the time. Bad players and GMs don't have to be "high on the narcissist scale." They just have to be kinda jerks, and there are a lot of jerks out there.

The guy we had a while back that refused to cooperate with the group didn't repeat the bad behavior after it was pointed out to them by the DM and, yes, he was told that if he wanted to continue to play he had to change his behavior.

 

[Cadence]

IThe analogies to things such as ability scores, movie ratings and sports statistics are fundamentally flawed. The first two are obviously works of fiction, not human beings. While the latter is a collection of objective performance metrics. Metrics with quantifiable outcomes.

I would posit that perpetuating or encouraging the idea that there is some construct "intelligence" that meaningfully encompasses lots of things - and that different humanish looking things have different typical values of it is not great. Even if they have decided that some of the formerly humanoid things aren't anymore.

A ranking of DMs as bad or good simply lacks all of these. We are not judging the creative works they offered. We are not judging performance based upon objective statistics. No, we are categorizing them based solely on subjective opinions. Opinions that we know are meaningless.

Like with restaurants (or chefs)?

An individual can judge a DM to be "bad" after playing with them. That is not my objection here. My objection is to communal ratings based on subjective and nebulous criteria. And to doing so in a way that simply deems humans as not being worth playing with. We become the arbiters of the hobby. The secretive cabal that decides who gets to play.

I don't think I had gotten as far as imagining it being actually applied - perhaps as a scale in an old dragon magazine or just a debate about what would go into it.

I will also note that merely classifying as bad vs. good is also a rating/ranking system. Just not a very fine grained one and so has similar difficulties. (And I am certainly fine with ditching the good/bad classifying upstream).

It is gatekeeping. And it's gatekeeping done by people who largely never played with the person, using metrics no one agrees on.

I am now wondering how many threads on here would either be banished or would become more pleasant of this thoughtfulness were applied in general.

 

[Deset Gled]

How do you define "bad" then? I define bad as "below average". If you're on the left side of the bell curve, that means you need to improve to be "average". Thus, at this moment, you are bad at whatever that bell curve is measuring.

The short answer is that in statistics you would apply a range to what "normal" means based on a number of factors including acceptable values, data limitations, expected sampling errors, etc. Then you would need to determine the standard deviation of scores, and calculate the percentage of "below normal" based on that (assuming a gaussian distribution).

In the interest of laziness on my part, I will point you to this previous post of mine explaining why only ~25% of the population is of "below average" intelligence.

Post in thread 'What do you use Chat GPT for?'

Dec 19, 2024

50% of all people have less than average IQ - this is a statistical fact
This means half of all people in the world, half of the people you know, half of all people you will ever meet, have low iq, if 'low iq' can be compared with 'average iq' and 'high iq'
This is NOT an insult. This is simply how life is. It is existentialism.

Fortunately, this is incorrect. Almost every IQ classification considers a score of approximately 90-110 to be "average", and most have a standard deviation of 15. Which means that, when using a normal Gaussian distribution (which is built into...

• Deset Gled

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[Cadence]

That is literally the definition of bad.

I have to agree with @AlViking here that being slightly below average at something is not any definition of bad I have encountered, whether in sports or education or psychometrics. For example, having a requirement that half of all employees at a firm get a "bad" performance evaluation (or making it where half need to get a "good" one) seems silly. Similar logic applies in other cases. Must half the movies in the theater be not worth seeing and half the available players for a game be bad?

(Tangentially and pedantically,, the 49% being below it is median, not average. It is possible to have well over, or well under 50% of the observations be below the average. One of our former governors was great at mixing and matching mean and medians from slightly different time frames to misled his audience).

 

[Maxperson]

Case in point.

How can something be "not bad" when they are literally bad at something?

Poor. Not bad. They are poor at the game, not a bad person. Bad DMs are jerks who abuse their authority. Short of that, you aren't a bad DM. You're a poor DM who will improve. Or maybe you were decent to good right out of the gate.

 

[kermit4karate]

Sure, but I've never seen any evidence that other narrative games would be more to my liking (I've enjoyed playing Monster of the Week, but would never run it, for example, and Marvel Heroic annoyed the heck out of me too), so I've declined doing a deep dive into the playstyle.

Me too. It feels like folks are grandstanding and showing off, and I don't like the pressure of trying to create so much on the spot from whole cloth. I want my RPGs to recharge my batteries, not drain them.

Being a D&D DM is much easier for me because I've almost always prepared my key assets ahead of time.

 

[Cadence]

ROTFLMAO.

ANyone on the "downward slope" of the bell curve (at least the side that is literally not as good as average) is somehow not "bad"? I really don't think you understand what a bell curve is.

I think the biggest misconception people have about the bell curve is thinking that here is any particular reason for most things to follow it.

iQ can (because the model can force it to because it is a latent variable), things that are sums or averages of many independent things and (insert various possible conditions) tend to, and so do things from the correct random number generator.

But IQ won't if the population in question now doesn't match the one the exam was calibrated on, or if they choose to specify the shape of the item response function in advance. Income and human weight are skewed right and not normal. Human height of adults in given area is generally bimodal and not normal. If a disease has done some culling then would the bottom part of the constitution distribution be missing? etc .. <insert rant on ridiculous quotes some economists make and Chebychev's inequality>

Side note: The 10 Deutsch Mark bill used to have Gauss, the normal curve, and its formula on it!

Side note two: Two other misconceptions perpetuated by some intro level stat books are (1) that a histogram is a good choice for judging normality and (2) that n=30 has anything to do with a sample size being big enough for the central limit theorem to start kicking in well.

Side note three: Many advanced stats books could probably point out more that normality is often assumed because it makes the math doable and that too few people bother checking if it does approximately hold.