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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9826953" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Ah, thought this was the name of some person IRL.As for the overall claim, as stated, I wasn't alive when D&D first got started, so I cannot know from personal experience. I'm limited to what I can find, see, or read, so I used them. I have given the textual citations where the books themselves tell GMs to be passive-aggressive, and I didn't even touch on all the other areas, things like giving out treasure, which include all the really crappy and even mean cursed items, nor going into the monster design, where Gygax went out of his way to create monsters that would screw over his players in ways they almost certainly could not ever have predicted.Can anyone even dispute the fact that Gygax created, supported, and advocated for these kind of things? And if they were present and advocated for in the books themselves, including both as GM advice and as rules constructions (e.g. the aforementioned cursed items and "screw you" monsters), is there any way to argue that this would not have been a fairly common thing? I'm not saying it was the majority (I have been very clear I don't think it could have been), but I am saying it was common enough that most people who played in multiple campaigns would have run into more than one GM of this kind.Because if every GM runs, say, three groups with a total of fifteen distinct players, and every player plays in three games every year, then if even 10% of GMs are like that, on your first round 10% of players get got, and then 10% of the remainder get got, etc. By the end of year 4, more than a third (34.4%) of players have had a bad GM. By the end of year seven, it's over half. This is, of course, a ridiculous and unreal turnover rate and such, but it illustrates how even a small proportion of bad actors can have an outsized impact if they can, for lack of a better term, propagate outward.Which means we don't have two questions, we have four:Were GMs like this a known phenomenon?Were GMs like this a majority of GMs?Did a majority of players see this behavior?Did players see this behavior a majority of the time?And I think the straightforward answer to the first and third questions is "hell yes", and the second and fourth is "absolutely not". But between those two points, we have the question of whether it was considered representative or not. And that is much harder to gauge, because it is a further layer abstracted. It's not whether such games were actually a majority, it's not whether players actually experienced it very often, it's whether it was social knowledge that such games happened often.</blockquote>

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