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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9101441" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I find it genuinely baffling that this is apparently what "high trust" is supposed to mean. Because it is always used, as far as I can tell, to refer to places where the GM is given absolute, unquestioned and unquestionable authority. The GM will intrude on whatever they wish to intrude upon, and the players will simply accept this. In other words, it is called "high trust," but the descriptors of the environments you just spoke of sound to me like a "low-trust" situation: There is a central authority that can, and will, do anything and everything it likes, and you will put up with that--or you will leave. These so-called "high-trust" games are in fact the ones that have low player agency.So...I don't see how the term has appeal. Because the description seems completely backwards to the application. The only similarity I can see is the claim that "low-trust" organizations "often have detailed rules that the employee must follow instead of using their best judgment." And if that is where the similarity lies, it seems rather disingenuous to call it an issue of trust when it is actually an issue of whether the rules are detailed or not.It would be really nice if literally anyone talked more about this bi-directionality of trust then. Because in the vast majority of cases, I see OSR-style GMs as some of the least-trusting GMs around. Players are at best unwise and foolish, reduced to childish caricatures in need of minding by the gracious parental GM; all too often, they are instead painted as actively antagonistic and needing to be corrected lest they ruin everything. And that's far from the worst characterization I've seen.If it is, then the bi-directionality has already been stripped out well in advance. Which is a pretty serious problem.You have forgotten one of the other critical issues: if so much is placed on the shoulders of a single person, the game should thus go out of its way to help that person as much as can be done within budget and publication limits. That there should be...oh, I don't know, some kind of guide that would provide really good instruction, well-tested tools, and other forms of advice/aid/etc. to smooth the road as much as the designers can.Unfortunately, 5e has its DMG instead. Which does basically none of those things.If the players are not invested in playing, why are they playing? I'm serious here. Why do something if you don't actually want to do it?No. It is, and has been (with known exceptions) designing for its legacy market. The two are frequently not the same.If they were designing for the mass market, something like dragonborn would have been included in the 2e PHB. Because dragons have mass-market appeal. They always have, since time immemorial. They're literally globally popular.Just...I don't see it. Why do something, if you don't actually want to do it? Even OSR games quite clearly expect players to be active and invested. I've read several of them. Some even have rather harsh things to say about players who aren't invested. I don't see how what you've said actually connects to the "practical" here--the actual games written and played.I mean, you're rarely completely wrong <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" /></blockquote>

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