Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8675459" data-attributes="member: 6790260">To be honest, without hearing it from an unbiased source, I cannot really comment on this. Perhaps they are being perniciously bad. Perhaps your biases are blinding you to valid criticisms. I literally cannot say either way, though I will say having a "Hard Fun Three Second Rule" does not actually sound very fun to me, and in fact sounds like a great way to ruin a game experience for me pretty thoroughly. I like to think carefully about my choices, so if I'm given a hard limit of three seconds to decide, yeah, that's....going to drive me away.I think, at the very start, you should try to stop thinking of them as hostile players, because that will keep you in a defensive mindset: you are structuring this as needing to defend yourself against being attacked by players who are being rude, petty, insulting, petulant, etc. Instead, I recommend you think of it as, "How can I work with my players to address their concerns?" This emphasizes that the solution is one of building consensus, not of browbeating unruly players until they <s>meekly accept whatever you decide to do without question or complaint</s> agree to your terms.Howso? Consistency of theme and tone are extremely important in essentially all creative media. Throwing in a random comic relief raygun-toting alien into a grim and gritty Game of Thrones-style low-fantasy game, for example, is going to be jarring and weird, and will likely get major criticism from players who were really on board for a grim and gritty GoT-style low-fantasy game.That, for me, is absolutely an important limitation. DMs need to provide a consistent theme and tone, or they need to build up to and justify shifts in those things so that it feels warranted and reasonable. Otherwise, the DM is effectively asking me to agree to whatever possible game they might like running, regardless of my tastes or interests, and I'm just...not here for that.I run Dungeon World, which doesn't have "detailed" statblocks. It still has some kind of statblock, though. And I expect myself to adhere to those rules. I refuse to accept that DMs not only can but should dynamically alter statblocks on the fly without justification. I have doubly emphasized "without justification" for a reason, it is EXTREMELY important. I am not opposed to changing a statblock. I am opposed to changing a statblock arbitrarily, without permitting the players to learn from the change. One of the most common cited examples of statblock modification is to extend a fight that has ended too early, or to "fix" a fight that was not meant to be too strong but ended up being so. But there is a far superior way to address these things, while still making changes: make the change something the player characters can potentially learn about and respond to.Then I would find that highly unsatisfying. It means that my tactics within the combat are irrelevant, because the numbers will be whatever you think is interesting. And it means my strategies outside combat (e.g. the resources I have invested, the care I have put into building my character, what things I have chosen to conserve vs. expend, etc.) are irrelevant. I neither learn nor grow by fighting these things; I neither succeed nor fail, unless it is by your choice. That would bother me a lot, and make me question why I'm even playing. If the world has no proverbial "substance" to it, then I'm just dancing to the DM's tune. That's not very interesting to me.I don't expect you to have statblocks prepared for every possible enemy. I wing a variety of things myself as DM. That's what monster manuals and quick-generation tools are for: to make it easy to quickly generate a creature that actually has statistics. With the Internet, and searchable databases, and automated monster/encounter generators, etc., etc., it is now easier than ever to be an "improv" DM who uses actual monsters, as opposed to "I just make numbers up every round I need them."I absolutely would complain about this, yes. You have the power to justify these things. Don't just claim they're there. Give your players enough respect to actually explain why you're altering the situation, and the possibility (perhaps in the future) of preventing such changes, or exploiting them for their own benefit.It sounds to me like you have an extremely cavalier attitude about running a world, such that you feel you are entitled to rewrite anything and everything--the very reality itself--should it please you. I don't find that a very interesting game concept to play with. In fact, it sounds to me like something very frustrating, where creatures we fight are quantum blobs of "whatever the DM feels like today" and encounters succeed or fail not because of anything the players do, but because you have decided what the "interesting" outcomes will be and ensure they happen by hook or by crook.So...yeah I can't say I blame your so-called "hostile" players for criticizing this. You've demonstrated you don't really care about the world being something that exists, and you seem to have very little respect for your players, seeing them as an audience for the world you have "absolute" control over, rather than as co-participants in a shared play space where everyone's voice matters (even if the DM's voice is usually final.)</blockquote>

Verification