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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9651331" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Er...no.Firstly, every DM has many, many players--usually five times as many, at least. The odds that a given DM will encounter a bad player are much higher than that any player will encounter a bad DM. Like, if we consider both groups to be 90% amazing and only 10% poor-or-worse, then any given player would need to go through 6-7 distinct games to even have a 50% chance of getting a poor-or-worse DM. By comparison, a GM only needs 6-7 distinct players to have better-than-even odds of running into a poor-or-worse player, meaning a single campaign could easily do the trick! Given most campaigns last at least a couple months, and usually rather longer, a player could go years between bad GMs. A GM running multiple pickup games could run into multiple bad players every year.Second, and more important to this specific bit? The chronic DM shortage means no bad DM will actually suffer from lack of players. Like...ever. They can just keep shopping around, and new players will still appear. The one and only way to achieve what you're talking about is to exclusively work in a tight-knit public gaming community, e.g. an FLGS situation or library or the like specifically where the gamers there actively engage with one another on the regular, where word-of-mouth reputation will eventually drive out the bad apples. Any other situation--even an FLGS, but one where most games are totally disconnected from each other and nobody really communicates between/across groups--reputation cannot achieve the result you speak of, and thus the same bad DM will keep cycling back in. If the well of players dries up there, they'll look elsehwere, or go online, where there are nigh-infinite hordes of players desperate to get a DM/GM/ST/etc. of some kind.What about slightly harmful DMs? DMs with one or two nasty habits, but otherwise good people? DMs who are absolutely phenomenal at 9 out of 10 things, but they do nothing by halves, so the 10th thing is painfully, aggressively bad? What about DMs that genuinely mean well, but have built up bad beliefs about what they "have" to do in order to make a game good? What about DMs who sincerely believe that their player-antagonistic behavior is actually good, and would stop if they ever were given evidence that their behavior is actually bad?Because that's the problem with offloading EVERYTHING to the social contract. It's not the absolute dirt-worst scum of the earth folks. Those rarely get to the point of even being able to cause trouble, because they screw up so badly so quickly.It's the people who are mostly good but with a few really really bad points, or the people who fully sincerely mean well but do bad things thinking they're good things, or the people who believe they have to do some things they think are bad in order to get the best result, or the people who are just kinda below-average without being so bad as to raise any red flags (what one might call yellow flags everywhere, but not a single red). Those are the people the social contract struggles mightily to deal with--and which rules are in fact quite helpful to assist with. Because those people are all the kind that, intentionally or not, do some bad stuff behind the black box, which the social contract simply can't deal with. The very fact that it IS black-boxed IS what makes the social contract struggle so badly to deal with it.Dragging that into the light IS what helps us address those issues. And I've learned, much more keenly than I would like, that the one thing the social contract resists more than anything else is dragging stuff into the light that would "lower the mood" or "disrupt" things or "make mountains out of molehillls" when it's really more like mountains getting passed off as molehills.</blockquote>

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