When I sit at a DM's table, I do so at the Dm's pleasure - he is the host, and I'm to be a good guest in his 'house'.
If you trust the DM this isn't an issue, because you have faith in their ability to make sense if thing.
Problems arise when you don't trust the DM to play fair or lack faith in their ability to make sense of things.
In the first case, rules that allow the trusted DM to tell stories they want without being shackled by the rules leads to a better experience. When the DM is having fun it's infectious. In the latter case, bad DMs can be held in check by rules, but they'll find a way (accidentally or on purpose) to impact the fun.
I'm not sure it's even a trust issue.
I'm 100% sure it's not a trust issue. Nor is it an issue of "good manners", as Celebrim assets.
Not everyone plays RPGs so that the GM can tell them a good story. Not everyone regards the game as belonging solely, or principally, to the GM. For some, story, backstory, campaign world etc is secondary to game play. For others,
they want to contribute in a significant way to the telling of the story.
When the focus of the game is on game play, then there needs to be some way of mediating possible competing moves. When the focus of the game is on story contributions, then there need to be some way of mediating possible competing contributions. This is one thing that rules can do. For them to do this, they have to have some content that is independent of the GM's conception of them, given that for them to do this they have to bind the GM as well as the players.
Both Hussar's examples (plate armour, and manticores) concern background elements. I think the scope for conflict comes up most often in relation to action resolution. For instance, can a powerful epic-tier fighter leap 50' from a flying carpet onto a flying slaad lord? This question came up in my most recent 4e session. We didn't answer it by considering what makes sense to me (the GM) or to the player of the fighter. We resolved it using the jumping rules.
my players honestly don't care about the rules much.
I don't think it's nearly as much of an outlier you think it is.
So the advice for GMs who have players who don't care much about the rules is "Don't sweat the rules." Do we need a flowchart for that?
There are plenty of RPGers who do care about the rules, even when they are not GMing. Not because they are bad players (whatever exactly that means) but because they are there to
play a game or they are there to
impact the story, even when the GM didn't expect/want the story to go that way. For these players, the rules are the system for mediating different desires/expectations, and competing moves, at the table.
Among serious players of sporting games, or board games, not just the referee cares about the rules. And there can be such a thing as good or bad rules adjudications. RPGs can be like this too.
That's really nitpicking though. I don't think either of you are really wrong. The important thing is the overall point. That being, "If a rule at first doesn't seem to make sense, evaluate it in the context of other similar rules and the intent of the design. If it still doesn't make sense, do what you want with it and don't let it stop your gaming."
I agree with [MENTION=6693417]Authweight[/MENTION]. This is not very helpful advice.
It doesn't give any advice on how to decide if something "makes sense" (eg to whom? using what criteria? etc - consider the billion arguments over the past 6 years on Come and Get It as "martial mind control" vs CaGI as a tool for modelling martial skill within the relatively abstract D&D resolution framework).
And it doesn't give advice on how to "do what you want". Of course everyone wants a great game. But standards for "great game" differ. And the connection between GM techniques, rules and outcomes is not always obvious.
And yet, as kids in the early 80s, we didn't know what the hell we were doing and we had a blast. Perhaps we should just let people have fun without trying to quantify how "right" they are or aren't.
Maybe the game you played as a kid in the 80s was ultra-awesome, but my best guess is that I, today, would find that a game not worth playing in.
I know that is true of my own early campaigns. I enjoyed a lot of stuff as a kid that wouldn't appeal to me now. Tastes change. In particular, most adults have more sophisticated tastes than most kids, and so a game has to offer a little bit more (and, perhaps, a little bit different) to be worth playing.
No player should ever be arguing you're using a monster in the "wrong" terrain. This is a good example of "no arguing at the table, leave it to after the session" type thing. I mean come on now, players shouldn't ever be bringing up that sort of information.
And here we have a prime example of "badwrongfun" - Hussar points to an actual play experience that shows that what makes sense isn't always cut-and-dried, and we get told that it was only a problem because the player was bad.
I don't know anything more about the player than what Hussar has told me. But what if the player was playing a ranger with a favoured enemy (it sounds like it was a 2nd ed game) and had deliberately chosen the forest journey rather than the desert journey because s/he knew that his/her PC's favoured enemy is (per the Monster Manual) common in forest? There can be other cases, too, where the players choose a strategy based on terrain (eg "The only dangerous flier we would expect in a forest is a Green Dragon, and we have our scroll of poison gas protection") and then suddenly the GM has a manticore show up!
Players make all sorts of assumptions about game and world backstory. When the GM violates those assumptions, conflict at the table can result. In my view, telling the player s/he is a dick isn't the best technique for resolving that conflict.
in the case of the manticore, it's not a case of the DM being wrong or nerfing the player.
Without context I don't see how we can tell. What plans had the player made? What sort of character was the player playing? What investment did the player have, as part of his/her game experience, in following received D&D lore?
There are ways in which a player could contest the manticore encounter which suggest bad faith or a lack of sporting behaviour (eg the player suddenly realises the party isn't equipped to deal with flying ranged attackers, and so tries to negate the encounter via a metagame strategy). There are ways in which the player contesting the manticore encounter is
all about good faith and investment in the game - I've sketched some of them above.
because metagaming with out of character knowledge is generally considered bad form at best?
heck, if I know I'm gaming with someone who wants to memorize everything in the book and apply it when their character would never have such knowledge, I will change things up on purpose.
no one likes a rules lawyer who sucks the fun out of the game. "Products of your imagination" for a reason
Look, more prescriptions of how other people should play!
"Products of the Imagination". Whose? The guy who imagines manticores as desert dwellers? If not, why not?
As for metagaming, who knows what class and level and background this character had. For all you know it was a 10th level druid or ranger!
Because he wasn't the one running the game and has no way of knowing that what he memorized has any bearing on the campaign that is currently happening.
Why does the player have no way of knowing this? Do 10th level druids know nothing of the natural world that they live in?
Part of playing an RPG, for me at least, is internalising an awareness of the shared fiction. In D&D, orcs are (generally) baddies, or at least (like Gygaxian half-orcs), "rude, crude, crass and generally obnoxious". Dragons are colour-coded by terrain and breath weapon. And, for this player at least, manticores live in deserts.
If a GM does what Weis and Hickman did in one of the Dragonlance books, and has the guards attack my PC with their hauberks (I assume they meant "halberds"), I am going to give a quizical look - and moreso when my PC starts suffering slashing rather than bludgeoning damage!If the GM is departing from received lore, I prefer this to come out through means other than throw-away decisions about random encounters. If the GM tells me we see a group of orcish soldiers up ahead, and I (and the rest of the players) plan how we can ambush them rather than take them down face-to-face, and we succeed, I will be pretty unhappy if the GM then tells us that we all lose a level for violating our alignments, or has us arrested and imprisoned at the next town for breaching the peace, etc etc. For me that would count as bad GMing.
Who am I to judge that, for someone else, it is not the manners and morals of orcs but the favoured terrain of the manticore?
Obviously it was important enough to the guy that he memorized what terrains manticores live in. If one of my players was obsessed enough to learn that kind of detail, why wouldn't I want to respect his feelings
100% this!
In order for the game to work at all, player expectation and GM expectation of what comes out of these rules intersections must be fairly congruent with extreme regularity. When this doesn't happen <snippage> It becomes akin to a real person physically moving through our world suddenly having their proprioception and/or spatial awareness upended. Expect a loss of confidence and faith in their senses, their mind's orientation toward all things, and their subsequent movements based on the combination of the two.
This is why I find that the "strong GMing" approach is terrific for a game like Cthulhu, where part of the play experience generally involves undergoing (vicariously) your PC's loss of sanity, but not so good for heroic action-style games, where part of the play experience generally involves experiencing (vicariously) the ability of the PC to stamp his/her will upon the world, in the model of Conan, Aragorn, Superman, Indiana Jones, etc.
heheheh. [Seliousry though, nice chart. 
