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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 4599152" data-attributes="member: 2205">Of course, naturally.For some reason I find that this thread constantly baits me to try and defend ludicrous positions that I've never taken.  I've said repeatedly that I can understand the concept of station squatting, and I certainly admit to its theoretical and probable reality somewhere out there in the gaming world.  Why do you assume that I haven't done that?Of course the DM has to enjoy the game too.  But if the only way he can enjoy the game is to run it in a manner that the players don't find fun, then we're at a bit of an impasse, aren't we?  The solution is, apparently, according to this thread, to blame the players for this state of affairs.  I'm merely saying that before you do that, you sure as heck better talk to your players and make sure you understand what it is that they're doing rather than assuming that your <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> don't stink.  There have been plenty of times as a GM that I thought everything was going great and I found out that stuff I was doing wasn't going over well at all.  I now assume, first, that I can do something different to improve the game rather than immediately assume that if something's wrong it's the players fault.  By doing so, I've found lots of opportunities to be a better GM.Granted, sometimes with a little investigation, I decide that what they expect from the game just isn't reasonable, or it won't work for me, or whatever, and so I don't change.  But that doesn't happen very often.  Usually if players are refusing to engage in my campaign, it's a safe bet that the campaign and me are at fault, not them.  And I can't tell you how many times as a player I've been seriously underwhelmed by the adventure presented to me, and seriously ticked off by the fact that how I responded to it was arbitrarily curtailed by the GM because he had in his mind how the game was going to go, and far be it from the lowly players to try something else!This is another one of those "it doesn't matter how many times you repeat it; it still isn't true" kinda things.  D&D isn't about anything; or rather, it's about whatever the players and DM jointly decide to make any given campaign about.I feel a lot more comfortable judging his hooks than I do judging his players, lacking firsthand experience of his gaming group.  Not only does my own experience both as a player and a GM corroborate that approach, but I don't like to be too judgemental of actual people that I haven't met and don't really know anything about if I can help it.And yet, the very premise of this thread is that we make precisely that judgement.My posts have been an extended excercise in "I disbelieve the illusion."  To really make things perfect, the thread needs to somehow be Melkored and the bakery player needs to show up and weigh in with his point of view here.  Then we really will truly have the entitled DM whining about his players, and then not getting the sympathy he wants from people in general experience.  I think it's been quite a while since that's happened, but I don't read all that many threads anymore, so I may have missed several really notorious ones for all I know.The next one-shot I run will be built precisely around the premise of the PCs as a bunch of ne'er-do-well bakers.EDIT: As an aside, I'm pretty flabbergasted that the call of "act maturely; talk to your players, work it out out of game" advice crowd is being cat-called as if we're some kind of unreasonable fringe group here in place of "they're doing it wrong, clearly you need to whip these players into shape" advice crowd.  Here; I had always thought that the gamer social skills stereotype was largely misplaced.</blockquote>

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