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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercutio01" data-source="post: 5766632" data-attributes="member: 37277">It is a nit. It's one line in one book out of a line of dozens. The design intent is something I can understand harping on, but one line? That's like the very definition of a nit.And now we get to the crux...it's just your opinion, dude. That's it. It's not some universal standard that you can ascribe to everyone. I happen to think it's excellent newbie advice. If you sat down with a first grader and told them to read "Lord of the Rings" you'd be rightfully laughed the hell out of the room. You start with the basics.Only new DMs? No. Primarily new DMs? Abso-freaking-lutely. Just as every PHB and DMG in every edition had significant space devoted to basics for new players/DMs. Also, I don't think the whole DMG is written to any one individual reader. But I do think specific bits are targeted at specific types of gamers and levels of experience. And that's exactly what we are talking about--one, single specific piece of advice in a 200 page book which is clearly aimed at some piece of the audience that is obviously not you.How often to you interact with entry-level practitioners of any type of art? I teach college composition. If I started off with "advanced" writing techniques like targeted fragments, hyperbole, allusion, etc, and ignored the fundamentals like capitalization, punctuation, subject-verb agreement, and misspelling, I'd be greeted with nothing but unholy messes of papers and letters that attempted to be words and sentences and failed completely. I view this bit of advice from Wyatt to be something similar. That whole paragraph really boils down to, "Keep it fun," which seems insanely elementary and ridiculously unnecessary. But I have to spend a whole class on "They're, There, Their" and basic subject-verb number agreement (let's not even mention tense-shifting), things that also seem insanely elementary (literally, actually, as those things are supposedly taught in elementary schools) and ridiculously unnecessary.The point is that some people do need to be told to skip the boring needless encounter. Not all guard encounters are such, and not everyone needs that level of advice, but there are more than a few who do. I'd argue even some long-time players/GMs need such advice, as I've played with my share of them, too.</blockquote>

Verification