Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9844068" data-attributes="member: 8461">There's a vast world of difference between "it really does happen" and "it's a major problem that's been crying out for a solution for a long time now." That's worth remembering, because you seem to be trying to suggest that the former is the latter, despite the latter not being a thing at all (and even the former being a notable rarity).I'll start by saying that I don't think you've ever seen the rules encouraging GMs to do crappy things, just things which you interpret in that manner. That said, the solution for this is to have better advice rather than hard-coding in restrictions into the rules, which can't be enforced anyway and would only serve to make the problem of player entitlement (which is much more prevalent than jerk GMs) even worse.Ah, so now you're admitting that there are exceptions to what's lost, rather than up to and including your levels and magic items. Oh, and you're rather conveniently ignoring how the book also says that a single atonement spell fixes things.Or who decides if rocks fall, or what random encounter you run into, or any other a thousand other ways the GM runs things. Your problem isn't with divine spellcasters, in other words, but with the GM having the potential for being a jerk. Which is your prerogative to worry about, but doesn't seem to necessitate the radical solutions you seem to be in favor of.Notice the subtle-yet-inaccurate shading of my own position here, where you're wrongfully characterizing my position as "it never happens at all ever" despite that not being what I've said. It's things like this which make it hard to discuss this with you. Only Sith deal in absolutes.You're very clearly using that as an example of what you think is a much larger issue, which is why literally just cited another scenario ("the players are locked up and have their gear taken away") in the paragraph above this one. If you want to bring up divine spellcasters as an example of that issue, that's fine, but let's call it what it is: an example. We can discuss the underlying topic without necessarily having to use that specific example all the time.I think that's a rather poor analogy, since TTRPGs aren''t laws. Moreover, I don't think you can make laws, rules, or any other code of conduct that can enforce understanding and good behavior between people engaged in a recreational pastime. Advice, certainly, but some sort of rules constraints? That doesn't work in a game whose central premise is "anything can be attempted."Which doesn't work in the context of "someone might be an overbearing jerk." You are, from what I can tell, trying to apply principles of game balance to mitigating the negative aspects of human interaction, and that's not going to work. At best you can restrict ways of playing the game, but that's throwing the baby out with the bathwater.And yet you're citing 3.X as being unique in that regard, despite the fact that it wasn't. If anything, 3.X having a built-in remedy in the form of the atonement spell should be something that you hold up as a solution, rather than overlooking it the way you have.That's literally not what you said one post ago. <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="🤦‍♂️" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f926-2642.png" title="Man facepalming    :man_facepalming:" data-shortname=":man_facepalming:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" />Which is an argument for better advice being given, absolutely. I've been saying that for a while now myself. It's not an argument for trying to write more-stringent rules in an attempt to enforce the social contract.The word you're looking for is "referee" and it goes back to the heart of this hobby. If you don't want to play a game with a referee, then you certainly don't have to--there are a lot of referee-free games out there!--but that you can have bad referees doesn't invalidate the entire concept, nor does it mean that they have to be straitjacketed.And also people who enforce them, and who make final decisions based on their own interpretations of the application of those rules. In other words, you're describing the very thing that you're decrying here as a good thing. Which is sort of the point, since it goes to show that you can't bind the referee with a set of rules when they're the ones nominally charged with enforcing them.Except that players can already call out jerk GMs. I'm honestly not sure why you seem to think that being able to point to a specific passage will somehow act as a panacea to this, as though it would somehow become some sort of trump card by which to curtail jerk behavior. It wouldn't; even if you could hard-code that sort of thing into everything, that same bad behavior would manifest elsewhere. You can't fix bad habits, poor attitudes, and personality problems with a line in the rules. Moreover, it's absolutely not worth attempting to do so, because it punishes literally everyone else for what a handful of bad people might do, while empowering bad players by the legion, which are already a more pervasive problem.I accept your apology.Nope, not even close. This is the era of player entitlement, and it deserves to be called out when it happens.</blockquote>

Verification