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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5765136" data-attributes="member: 2067">Y'know, there was a similar situation in the last 4e game I played. I was a swordmage, who <3's her sword (as every good swordmage should), but the DM had an encounter-with-the-guards-at-the-gate that ordered us to surrender our weapons.Well, WHAT THE FRIG.We tried a few things to get around it (ultimately, the bit of a swordmage's swordbond where they can restore it from a shard helped out), but it took some active metagaming to get there. The DM was trying to gently guide us to the planned encounter, and my character was in danger of sitting it out because of a part of her design. It wasn't until I realized that the DM was flustered not having me around that I, as a player, said, "Oh. Well, let's fix this, since I don't want to sit it out."So, really, the problem with the fighter not willing to show their face was a problem in player communication. It sounds like a cool hook, and an interesting complication, but not an un-solvable problem. The DM needs to volunteer solutions that don't violate the player's character (like bribery, intimidation, forged papers, an on-the-spot conversion, whatever), and the player needs to be willing to try these, in order to get on with the game. People work together to have fun. The character doesn't NEED to sit outside like a punished dog for daring to have a creative character hook. That doesn't mean that exploring endless passageways isn't fun. That just means your DM was paying too much attention to things that the group didn't care about.But the quote doesn't say, "You can feel free to gloss over the details your group doesn't care about" (even if that might be what it was intended to say). It says that trekking through endless passages is not fun, period. It implies that trekking through endless passages, or talking to guards, is something that every group everywhere in the history of D&D will always find tedious and un-interesting, so every DM should skip it, and get on to "the fun" (which is presumably a skill challenge or a minis skirmish encounter).It is clearly, obviously, gobsmackingly wrong to say that.I don't doubt that the intent was to explicitly tell DMs that they don't have to bother with things that their group is uninterested in (which can be useful advice!). But for whatever reason, it doesn't actually say that. So the "problem" that folks have with that quote (and at least one other infamous Wyatt quote) is what it actually says, the concrete substance of which it is made, the actual words that make up the thoughts conveyed on the page.There are basically two options you can fall into. Either the quote is horribly written. OR the quote is actively trying to dissuade people from RP and exploration by claiming that no one actually has fun with these things. Either of those is fairly firm grounds to have a "problem" with the quote. Now, you might not share that problem. You might not take issue with a single badly written paragraph in the DMG (every DMG ever has probably had loads of these!). Or you might agree that RP and exploration are boring and that you want to get on to the orc killin' ASAP. Which is all fine and good and dandy. AFAICT, no one thinks you are WRONG to be OK with it.Clearly, though, some people think that most everyone should be OK with it. Thus, this thread. Because some people are not OK with it, and those people are not insane aliens from an outer dimension, or pre-teens with a hate-on. Those people are intelligent, reasonable, well-educated, peers, who have good reasons for thinking the way they do, even if you personally disagree. I mean, sometimes these threads can seem like I'm entering a room full of people under the influence of some sort of mild autism or sociopathy (or, as they are more commonly known, People On The Internet). Yes, other people have different feelings from you. No, your feelings are not the only feelings that anyone should have about this. It is not this hard for most folks to understand that some people don't like some things that you love, and that you don't like some things that other people love, and that doesn't mean that anyone is wrong. It just means that people are different, and that's actually awesome.No one is wrong to have a problem with this quote. No one is wrong NOT to have a problem with this quote. I myself fall into the "Well, that's a horribly written piece of advice, and it's unfortunate that it's there, but whatever, the DMG is a lousy tool for learning the game, anyway," camp. I guess I feel we can all get a lot farther in life if we assume the person on the other side of the intertubes is actually a reasonable human being instead of assuming that they're an extremist goofball with an axe to grind. Not that some folks aren't extremist goofballs with an axe to grind, just that those folks existing doesn't automatically invalidate everything anyone says in criticism or support of something. Anyway, babbling now.</blockquote>

Verification