Selfish playstyles and other newer issues with the game

[Mishihari Lord]

Reading my own post above, I realize now that a lot of that advice is the similar to the advice I give and get at work. I've manged people in business for almost as long as I've been a DM. Who knows, maybe those aspiring to be a better DM should pick up a business people management book? Being good at an RPG may help you in your career!

I'm with you on this. People are people, management is management, and leadership is leadership, whatever the venue. I've gotten more mileage from my MBA outside of work than in, and the skills I learned as a teenage DM have certainly contributed to my professional success.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Monty Python and other pop culture references?

The last 5 minutes are impossible to account for.

 

[Lanefan]

I do a session 0, where the characters are discussed before gameplay, and not just in mechanical terms. Expectations are given (eg in my current campaign, all PCs are evil, but usually it's the opposite. They're usually told they're all friends who trust each other at the beginning. I've had a campaign or two fall apart because the PCs were total strangers at the beginning and after a few sessions still refused to trust each other). If someone is refusing to play a cooperative game, then they're not playing a character in the cooperative game.

Hmm.

Completely different than my approach, which pretty much boils down to "play what you want and let the gods (or dice) sort 'em out". Then again, party infighting is an accepted part of the game around here...sometimes characters get along, sometimes they don't, and due to deaths and retirements and so forth the party makeup is always slowly evolving and thus the internal dynamics are always in flux. It's a mature group of players, though, who all know each other well.

In fact, the best campaign-start scenario I've yet come up with essentially threw a random group of neophyte adventurers together and sent them on a mission as a tryout for recruitment into a famous adventuring company. (in Pathfinder it'd be the Pathfinder Society, but this wasn't PF) Oddly enough, of the three major campaigns I've started this group had the least infighting over the first half-dozen adventures or so.

Lan-"I have a longsword +2 wizardslayer, purchased as a deterrent after party wizards fried me with one too many area-effect spells"-efan

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

I saw that 30 years ago, and I see it today. I don't think it's a change.

Agreed.

*Nothing* has changed.

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

Reading my own post above, I realize now that a lot of that advice is the similar to the advice I give and get at work. I've manged people in business for almost as long as I've been a DM. Who knows, maybe those aspiring to be a better DM should pick up a business people management book? Being good at an RPG may help you in your career!

I noticed that my DMing improved markedly once I moved into management.

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

I'm with you on this. People are people, management is management, and leadership is leadership, whatever the venue. I've gotten more mileage from my MBA outside of work than in, and the skills I learned as a teenage DM have certainly contributed to my professional success.

I think the difficulty of making sense of Gygax's attempts to write coherently in the AD&D rule books is the ideal foundation on which to build a mastery of, inter alia, contract law.