This is painting with a pretty broad brush. Everyone has to start somewhere, or can put in as much as they can (life can get in the way). Someone starting to DM should be encouraged not derided or mocked.
A Casual DM is not inexperienced or a new DM. They are a DM that does not care: at best they think of the RPG as "just so silly game to waste time".
What does "beyond cruel" mean? If I see that a DM is being actively malicious or is actively working against the fun of the players for their own amusement, I am not long for that table!
My table has a huge turnover rate for just this reason. I force players to show up on time. Play attention. Take notes.
And if the players do something that plausibly allows them to bypass those swamp encounters but the DM forces them through them anyway, that seems a good definition of railroading to me.
This is a big
metagaming issue. The players think for some reason they can do whatever they want, even personally attack the DM. Just as it says "player" on their sheet.
The DM puts time and effort into making a game world and encounters, and the players just sit there and say "haha, DM we just avoid everything. Looks like you wasted your time making all those encounters.
To see how bad it is, just think if the DM was to do it to the players. The players put a lot of time and effort into making dragonslaying characters, sit down for the game....and the DM says "hah the dragon avoids you, you wasted all that time making characters for nothing."
EXACTLY the same thing, right?
I just don't even bother to play with people who tell me that the improv a sandbox anymore. Honestly, at this point, if someone tells me how good they are at improv, it's just a massive red flag. The whole game is likely to be, "Whatever."
Agree
Certainly, quests weren't at the forefront of play until Tracy Hickman, but I think that that is a bit of an exaggeration plot or story was rare or some new innovation. GDQ was the original adventure path, and it has a story - fight your way through the minions to get to the powerful beings behind the giant's attacks. And you even see something like railroading in A3 and A4 where the intention is for the PCs to be inevitably captured and then have to break out of prison in the beginning of A4. Plus modules like U1 and UK1 very much are plot heavy and if not in their execution at least in their conception would stand up today.
I'm not saying it was not there at all, it just was not common.
The way to stop players disintegrating the expositing dying villian is to tell them “exposition incoming, do not interrupt”.
You can use words or wear a special hat.
This works fine if you want to break the game immersion or are playing "just a game". And most players would be very unhappy being told what to do. It is much better to have in-game reasons. The player can't open the door as it is lock, not because the DM told them "don't open the door".
You cant jerk proof a game.
Oh yes you can! I'm a grandmaster at it.
The nonjerky reason for cutting the bad guy’s speech short is that sometimes these speeches come with a ****-you last curse or spell Etc
Right, but you can't point to a theoretical as a reason to be a jerk and ruin the game.
