Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 6402385" data-attributes="member: 22779">There's been a common thread in this discussion that goes something like this:  "Players have so many options available, it's rather petty to complain about losing one option while you still have so many".  And, to be fair it's a reasonable idea.  If you have 50 options, is it really a big deal that you don't have 51?  Put like that it does seem rather petty for a player to complain about losing an option.But, there's a double standard here.  No matter how many options a player has, a DM has infinitely more.  The DM can do anything, play anything, change anything, declare anything about the game world at any point in time.  He can even blatantly contradict what came before, so long as he finds a way to resolve the contradiction - "A wizard/god/demon did it" usually works.  If the DM needs a Wish spell cast, then, poof, it's cast.  If the DM needs a particular thing to exist, or not exist, in the game world, there is pretty much nothing stopping him.So, if it's petty for a player to complain about not having that 51st option, what does that say about a DM who can't accept adding something to his game?Take the earlier example that was brought up of "No PC Tieflings".  Ok, fair enough.  Now, if the campaign is about the persecution of tieflings and it's a major element of the game, then it's pretty reasonable for the DM to tell the player no.  After all, saying yes means that the DM now has a bucket load of work to do and that's not fair.  But, presume for a moment that that's not the case.  The "No PC Tieflings" rule is more one to maintain a particular flavour that the DM happens to like.  Tieflings might feature here or there, but, they aren't the focus of the campaign.  In that case, changing, "Everyone hates tieflings and attacks them on sight" to "Everyone dislikes Tieflings and treats them as second class citizens and generally discriminates against them but doesn't kill them on sight" isn't exactly going to massively change the campaign.  It's a fairly minor point in the campaign and you're still getting the same broad picture - creatures with strong ties to demons/devils aren't particularly well liked in this world.  Now, that took me all of thirty seconds to change in the game world.  It's a case of modifying a small detail that likely wasn't going to feature in the campaign anyway (after all, with no PC tieflings, how often is "We kill tielfings on sight" actually going to come up in the game?)But, this is completely unreasonable for the player to expect?  See, this is where i get such a bad rap for being down on DM's.  To me, any DM who is that dogmatic about their setting isn't going to stop at character generation.  That same dogmatism is going to permeate the entire game.  I don't see how it can't.  If it's too much to expect that the DM will take thirty seconds to change his game world, when the rubber meets the road and the players start actually interacting with this setting, I have trouble believing that this same DM will blithely accept widespread changes to the setting as the PC's do their thing and start building their own kingdoms, founding religions, toppling governments, rewriting reality, generally all the things that higher level PC's do in any setting.  I just don't see it happening.</blockquote>

Verification