D&D General The Monsters Know What They're Doing ... Are Unsure on 5e24

[saviirkad]

No doubt that could be a fun way of doing things, but should that be the standard for ALL warlocks, probably not.

With Cleric's I don't mind it so much because most gods have multiple domains, and even an off brand domain could work as a you serve your god in a unique way. The subclasses here are how you serve your god and not which god you serve. With Warlocks & Sorcerers the subclasses don't have that kind of distinction.

To be clear, I was talking about one way someone could interpret the lore to represent. Neither I nor the printed lore present it as a standard of any kind.

 

[SableWyvern]

I feel there was more of the "before their time" DMs than people think. I only recall one bad then.

But the "killer" DMs certainly got/get a lot more publicity.

Yeah, this idea that in the dark old days GMs tended to be bad and understanding how to run a good game is some kind of new discovery (previously the domain of some rare, special few) is a pretty crazy assertion to me. I'm perfectly happy to believe someone who tells me that they had bad experiences in some particular period of time, but I dispute any claim along the lines of, "that's just how it was back then, but now we know better."

People have always been able to identify GMs who are bad, or who run games that don't suit their style, just as they've always been able to identify good GMs and GMs who run games in a style they enjoy. It might be the case that when people were young they were less capable of noticing or properly articulating these things, but I doubt very much that is any less the case today, either.

 

[Mecheon]

I definitely remember arguments about “killer DMs” in the Forum column of Dragon magazine, but never met any in real life. I believe that the very small size and relative isolation of my teenage AD&D groups actually curbed antisocial behavior by both players and DMs, as everyone implicitly understood that there was nowhere else to go.

I am not really used to the idea of players contributing to the setting lore, but many DMs complain that players do not engage with their homebrew campaign worlds very much, so maybe this is a good way to get those players more invested.

Not just Dragon, but if you read a lot of older RPGs from the time there's a lot of "The DM's word is LAW! Murder your player's characters for questioning you!" at the time which.... Implies a lot about some play communities. Sure, not everyone, but between Dragon and books it was clearly a stereotype at the time

non-zero as in one, Dragonbane, or were you thinking of something else?

Others. Plus the system neutral ducks out there