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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 6864269" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Interesting. I like the breakdown (though I wonder if there might be other axes to consider too?), and yeah, it covers that side of the argument nicely. Absolute latitude given to the GM is seen as almost a sacred and inalienable right, to be encouraged to the exclusion of all other factors. I, of course, fundamentally disagree, and feel that moderating the other two categories (giving good, reliable instruction and controlling overhead where possible) is well worth the occasional compromise in latitude.Yeah, I definitely see shades of this in a lot of stuff. Threads about "what would you ban" almost always show a sharp (and, as I said before, almost "gleeful"-sounding) rejection of anything newer than early 3e, for example. And this......seems to pretty clearly demonstrate the "No True Scotsman DM" side, which is sad because I had hoped that that was more hyperbole than fact. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" />I dunno about you, but I never saw anything like "outright hostility" to a DM choosing to curate options in 4e. There was an expectation that any such choices would make sense by some rubric or other, sure, but that's a far cry from what you describe. Purely "arbitrary" removal of options, e.g. "I don't like dragonborn, so you can't play them for any reason" would probably not go over well, but "This is a world where dragons are feral, monstrous beings, devoid of any of the nobility, intelligence, and magic they would have in a normal D&D world--so the dragonborn never existed in the first place" sounds perfectly cromulent to me.As for 5e, it seems to me to be exactly the inverse of what you speak of: DMs outrightly, outspokenly, and (so it seems to me) gleefully scorning player interest in anything outside the Enshrined Traditional Milieu. In reading posts here on ENWorld, there seems to be a consistent attitude of aversion to any form of thematic "novelty" (for lack of a better word). The "Exotic Races" thread was a solid demonstration of it. As I said there, "We're assuming every fantasy world is perfectly cookie-cutter, UNLESS the DM decides to go kuh-raaaaaay-zee and fly straight off the rails with...GNOMES! [...] We have the freedom to create ANY world we imagine--so of course every world we imagine is exactly the gorram same. How stultifyingly dull our hobby becomes! So much for awesome ideas like Iomandra!"Given the direct hostility to my own tastes, and being told, "Sorry, the stuff you like clearly failed, if you don't like it--hard cheese!"...it's very, very hard for me to consider 5e a "big tent."I agree that "fails to overtly cater to every individual preference" doesn't prevent a thing from being "big tent." But people saying, and I quote (emphasis added):That? That is *not* "biggest tent ever" attitudes. That's not even "moderately large tent that can try to accommodate." That's, "I am altering the deal, pray I don’t alter it any further."</blockquote>

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