Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9083956" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Then there should not be a game in the first place.If you don't trust the players and the players don't trust you, what you have is an exploitation machine, each side trying to subvert and conquer the other. How is that enjoyable? How is that a pleasing thing to spend your precious time upon?I would not tolerate such a thing if it was only for the hour, let alone a whole bloody summer!Really? Folks on here talk about it frequently. Illusionism frequently requires it, for example. "My way or the highway" GMing, aka "viking hat" GMing, proudly claims the right to exactly that.And it isn't better for the "reason" to be invented on the spot because the GM just doesn't like the thing involved. That one is particularly virulent, especially when it comes to harmless player preferences like race or class. As an unabashed fan of dragonborn, I can tell you right now, GMs casually invent reasons for why my preferences are badwrongfun all the time, and seem quite proud of having done so. Even WotC staff made jokes about doing so, though the blog post in question has been deleted in one of Wizards' many site changes.Indeed! And I assert far, far too many GMs spend an excess of their time looking for a reason to say no, rather than looking for a reason to say yes. I am a strident advocate for supporting earnest, good-faith player enthusiasm, and supporting that means looking for reasons to say yes. If you truly, genuinely cannot find one, cannot even find a compromise "yes, and...", "yes, but...", or "no, but..." solution, well, that's unfortunate but at least you tried. More importantly, if you did sincerely try, it should almost always be possible to reach at least a "no, but..." compromise, again presuming earnest, good-faith player enthusiasm, aka enthusiasm, which is neither exploitative, abusive, nor coercive.I don't see any difference between "finding a reason to say no" and "flipping through my 150-page binder of setting notes written 20 years ago to point to the passage that says no." Both involve no actual effort on the part of the GM to establish why the answer is no. Both, like poor Soviet's example above, involve saying no because it ensures the GM gets their way, not because saying no actually makes sense or follows naturally from the information available to the players. Note available to, not perfectly omnisciently known by. Player ignorance through failure to reasonably investigate is fine, player ignorance through failing to jump through 17 obscure hoops or memorize a 100-page setting book is not fine.</blockquote>

Verification