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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Storm Raven" data-source="post: 3905395" data-attributes="member: 307">That was the outcome of most gaming groups. Including the original gaming group consisting of Gygax and his buddies. Arguing that during the design phase of the game they expected players to remain ignorant of the contents of the DMG simply ignores the fact that they didn't play the game that way at all.Trained? You mean you couldn't buy your own DMG and start a campaign until someone gave you the go ahead? I must have missed that requirement.Of course, it seems to me that your experience on this score is atypical given the responses on this thread and the poll concerning rotating DMs. And that still doesn't cover the fact that there were multiple DMs in your group, even if you had to go through some sort of weird apprenticeship system first. That means that you had, at some point, people who had read the DMG playing as players in a campaign. Does that mean that they were unable to have fun?I think there are two big problems with your argument in this paragraph. First, you seem to have mistaken the word "objective" for the word "subjective". Second, any DM who treated the game as "his" and not "his and the player's" usually (in my experience) ended up with a game that was solely his. As they had no players who were willing to play in his game. They all went to the next kids house, and he DMed a game that wasn't Calvinball.Calvinball is not a feature, it is a bug. In my experience, and from what I have read here, and in early issues of Dragon, most people got tired of the vague arbitrary system elements in a hurry and came up with tens, or even hundreds of pages of house rules to fill in the gaps. Some entire game systems sprang up from attempts to fill in these gaps (for example, Rolemaster). Playing "mother may I" simply seems to have not appealed to a lot of people.Actually, my experience is that the player feels annoyed. Apparently nothing concerning his character matters, not his ability scores, or his skills, or his equipment. He may as well not have a character, or spend any time worrying about what his character is like, because the DM will just make something up, and those things won't matter. The player, to a certain extent, may as well not be there. And probably would end up wondering why he is even bothering to make choices. Calvinball loses its allure quickly.I got tired of Calvinball in about 1981. Just about everyone I knew who gamed did too.</blockquote>

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