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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9844033" data-attributes="member: 8461">Haha, nope! Spell selection isn't anywhere near that much, and it's hard to countenance any suggestion that it is.My point is that your point about how GMs will apparently screw with a PC's sheet willy-nilly comes across as difficult to take seriously. Particularly since you seem to be indicating that GMs will do that on a whim while simultaneously suggesting that divine spellcasters are more vulnerable to that. It comes across as your having a problem with GMs in general rather than anything else.Show me where it says that players "aren't allowed to say no" or that they lose "all of their abilities, completely."And here we begin to see the problem, so let's start at the beginning: your understanding is flawed. Literally, figuratively, and otherwise. Because even if we leave aside the fact that a divine character can't have things such as levels or magic items simply removed (which you literally just wrote you think they can, so you can't cite me for indicating things which aren't divine powers), you're also making the deliberate choice to look at this only in terms of potential abuse. That's where you're coming from, and it's what colors all of your points on this topic.Again, we'll leave aside the technical flaws in your argument (i.e. you do still have class features, since you don't lose things like weapon and armor proficiencies) and skip straight to the heart of the matter: that you're looking at this in the worst possible interpretation imaginable, with no understanding that if someone is looking to act like a jerk, then they're going to do so no matter what the books say. This is therefore hard to take seriously as an argument, simply because it's so beyond the bounds of the particulars being discussed.  After all, you can't cite any passages that says that "talking back to your deity" is a "gross violation" of the tenets of your faith; this is entirely your looking at that in the most catastrophic way you can, which is a lot of baggage to bring to the table.Again, we have to overlook your being fast and loose with the details here (as if there was something particularly unusual about 3.X compared to its predecessors) and instead focus on your wild assumptions about the role of the GM. "All power, no responsibility"? That's not something that can be countenanced with a straight face, because the GM is literally all about responsibility. I honestly can't imagine how you'd come to the conclusion that there's no responsibility involved in what you're describing. It's baffling.<img src="https://media4.giphy.com/media/4OJFCEeGzYGs0/200.gif" alt="Err GIF" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />And unless you can cite some enforcement mechanisms for those rules, they're pointless in any kind of practical context. You seem to think that being able to point at the book and say "Aha! You've broken the rules!" is somehow going to bring the "tyrannical GM" that you're so scared of to heel. But what it comes down to is the social contract, no more and no less. This is just player-entitlement, disguised under a thin covering of being aggrieved. The idea that the GM actually holds you accountable for what you do isn't tyranny, and doesn't become so even if you wave the mostly-imaginary threat of overbearing GMs. There's a reason why this so-called "problem" has yet to sink D&D's viability as a game or popularity among other games of its ilk. "Have a referee" isn't a foolish assumption. What is a foolish assumption is that the rules can forcibly compel someone to not only stop being a jerk, but keep their behavior contained over the course of a campaign.We already have those defenses, and they're not found in a book. You can't write rules that stop someone from behaving badly, or which mandate talking things out, let alone create understanding or personal insight. And yet you can't seem to cite any instances of how those rules are enforced, or explain why their absence hasn't someone driven a stake through D&D's heart. The answer to that, of course, is that this is one of so many problems which are comparatively rare in real life, but which people seem to love wringing their hands about on the Internet. Which is why I'm glad that no one has tried to write into the rules some formulation of "the PCs must never be impeded in anything that they attempt" the way you seem to want.No, it's apparently only D&D where people pretend that jerk GMs are a regular feature of the community, and which players are left to helplessly suffer under because there's nothing in the rulebooks that they can point to in order to make those GMs stop. Literally, you're the one positing that this is a horrible problem, and then turning around and berating the game for not offering a solution. All while ignoring how almost everyone else seems to be just fine with how things are going.</blockquote>

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