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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7167796" data-attributes="member: 996">Still Resting comfortably in the Room with us, while we pointedly Ignore it. That's certainly not how I read shoak1's points.  It looks to me like the emphasis is on structuring DM input in a consistent way:  it comes at the beginning of the play process, mostly all done by the time everyone sits down and starts gaming.  It's a perfectly legitimate style and hardly unknown - its just no more the super-majority style he thinks it is than the way you play or I play is (though the way I DM, I'm quite confident, even if it is not the way most 5e DMs run, /should/ be, because it just works better for 5e than anything else!  so there).  Shoak1's approach strongly supports a sense of fairness, process-sim verisimilitude, the 'CaW' style, and probably works for some players' "immersion" (that being such a subjective factor it can be used in support of or against anything, but what the hell, might as well dip that poisoned well myself at this point). Not what you and the few people arguing with him are used to, anyway. While rules lawyers often reduce the fun for all involved, it's not necessarily their intent or motivation.  It depends on how they channel their proclivities.  The rules lawyer who dominates play with an overpowered/over-versatile/over-involved PC is certainly out to secure his own enjoyment at the cost of others' in a zero-sum model of fun.  But one that's arguing the case of his fellow players, as well, may intend to contribute to the success of the group, particularly if he views the game as a challenge to the players, rather than a challenge to or story about the characters.  There are even rules-lawyers who bring their expertise to bear on behalf of the system, itself, striving for fairness and consistency - ethical, even noble, but taken too far, can stifle fun on both sides of the screen. Most other RPGs, too.  5e  "the game" in question, (and TSR-era D&D in general) doesn't just welcome DM improvisation 'in the fiction,' it /requires/ DM "improv" - in the form of exercising judgement on the fly to make rulings - to function.Though, really, a DM can bank a lot of such improv as prep - fixed DCs for every task the players might think of in the coming scenario, for instance. All RPGs are.  And not because the DM improvises in the moment, nor because the rules require frequent manual adjustment by the DM to keep purring along.  RPGs are theoretically, 'infinite games,' that is, the reward for success in play is to continue playing.  Practically, time constraints prevent them being literally infinite, and D&D has often had a top level you don't go past, and play often becomes untennable before then, anyway - the published 5e D&D adventures, for instance, top out around 15th.Shoak1 is not turning D&D into a board game, he's just playing it in a style that front-loads the DM's contribution and emphasizes tactical challenge as the measure of success that allows continued play in what is still an RPG and notional an 'infinite game,' and, yes, in that he is probably somewhat hampered by the unstructured nature of 5e's resolution system - one of many ways in which 5e still has room to strive towards its 'big tent' goal.   Nonsense.  It is quite consistent with playing a game, and RPGs are games.   Then don't imply he's playing a boardgame rather than an RPG, because that is flat-out telling him he's doing it wrong. Heh, I I suppose a lot of folks believe life does have a Referee - and they really don't want to go to the penalty box after the game. Because most games are simpler than RPGs and/or have less riding on them than formal competitions and/or are finite games that don't need new material constantly generated for play.Even then, even the simplest most casual games (like Monopoly) can have house rules and players can resolve issues that come up in play, acting as a referee by consensus.    Because most gamers don't like having someone decide things for them - they like to play in a predetermined world and BEAT IT.  So it confounds me that you cant see why some people would want to minimize the referee's role in D and D, interjecting themselves in between player cause and effect.  I GET that you like the DM to do so - I REALLY REALLY do.....But I'm really baffled that you don't see how it runs counter to the way most of us gamers think.  OK, now I want to play in your game.  Y'know, to gather data, not because it sounds awesome or anything...  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Yes, D&D started as a follow-on to a slightly innovative wargame called Chainmail, crossed with a now-all-but-forgotten boardgame called Wilderness Survival (whence we get the classic 'hexcrawl').  It's now recognized as the first RPG.  It didn't change from a wargame to an RPG, though, it's still a small-scale wargame, just a small-scale wargame in which you RP your 1:1 figure.  Drawing a line between the Game (with or without 'board' in front of it) and the RP of RPG does the hobby a disservice.   That it's even theoretically possible to have an RPG without a GM points to it not being such a fundamental difference, afterall.  Games that are in no way RPGs have referees, too.  It's a common trait of an RPG to have a GM, but not because it's a defining trait, but because RPGs tend to be wildly complex compared to boardgames, and because, even with that complexity, it's hard to design a robust enough system that covers the full scope implied by most RPGs - so most of them /need/ a GM just to keep them from crashing & burning. And, there /are/ cooperative boardgames in which you play as a group, 'against the game.'   And, for that matter, RPGs (at least, their systems) can be played competitively - old-school 'skilled play' had a definite competitive as well as cooperative aspect, old-school 'tournaments' were competitive by design, 3.x/PF can be played as a system-mastery competition (derided as 'winning at chargen'), and modern PvP is competitive. Ding!  Yep, a notionally 'infinite' game.  That's a big difference.The other, of course, is role assumption - playing the role as well as the game, I mean, it's in the name, 'roleplaying game.'   No role? not roleplaying.  No game? not roleplaying.  The biggest misconception in the broader RPG community is not just that you can have one without the other, but that you somehow can't combine them, when that's the very essence of what an RPG is:  both RPing & Gaming.  That's the false dichotomy of the Roll vs Role debate, that's the false, er, trichotomy (that really sounds some sort of surgery) of GNS, that's every forumite expressing disbelief that someone else plays differently than them and insisting that they are representative of 'most' gamers, and roping off 'RPG' around their little style.</blockquote>

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