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What is the worst piece of DM advice people give that you see commonly spread?
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<blockquote data-quote="GrahamWills" data-source="post: 9000854" data-attributes="member: 75787"><p><strong>"What is the worst piece of DM advice people give that you see commonly spread?"</strong></p><p>The mathematician in me has to break this statement down a bit to formalize the parts.</p><p></p><p><em>worst</em>: What are outcomes that are seen as bad? This could be causing emotional harm to actual players, but I think the general tenor would be that bad advice makes the game less fun to experience, and so the worst advice is the one that causes the most loss of fun. A bit wishy-washy, but essentially I'm taking fun as the metric and we want to consider advice that minimizes it.</p><p></p><p><em>advice people give</em>: For the sake of simplicity, so we can all argue on the same footing, 'people' is best defined as "within enworld". We could broaden it, but let's assume the "DM advising" perfect population is roughly similar to our.</p><p></p><p><em>commonly spread</em>: We can imagine terrible GM advice like "physically murder your players" that minimize fun, but this qualifier introduces a weighting factor -- we need to weight the advice badness by how often it is suggested.</p><p></p><p>So worst advice = MIN ( Badness(advice) x Frequency(advice) )</p><p></p><p>-------</p><p></p><p>With this is mind, I'd like to suggest "The GM should not make plans" as the worst advice. This advice is given in essentially every thread on enworld. It is the third suggestion in this thread, for example! So its frequency is close enough to 100%. It's not the worst advice in the world -- but it seems people are about 50-50 on how well it works for them. So about half the time, it's not good advice. Now that's not as bad as many bad ideas, but the frequency of this statement is so high, I can't think of anything else that is worse.</p><p></p><p><strong>So, my contender is "The GM should not make plans" with a weighted badness of 50%</strong>.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="GrahamWills, post: 9000854, member: 75787"] [B]"What is the worst piece of DM advice people give that you see commonly spread?"[/B] The mathematician in me has to break this statement down a bit to formalize the parts. [I]worst[/I]: What are outcomes that are seen as bad? This could be causing emotional harm to actual players, but I think the general tenor would be that bad advice makes the game less fun to experience, and so the worst advice is the one that causes the most loss of fun. A bit wishy-washy, but essentially I'm taking fun as the metric and we want to consider advice that minimizes it. [I]advice people give[/I]: For the sake of simplicity, so we can all argue on the same footing, 'people' is best defined as "within enworld". We could broaden it, but let's assume the "DM advising" perfect population is roughly similar to our. [I]commonly spread[/I]: We can imagine terrible GM advice like "physically murder your players" that minimize fun, but this qualifier introduces a weighting factor -- we need to weight the advice badness by how often it is suggested. So worst advice = MIN ( Badness(advice) x Frequency(advice) ) ------- With this is mind, I'd like to suggest "The GM should not make plans" as the worst advice. This advice is given in essentially every thread on enworld. It is the third suggestion in this thread, for example! So its frequency is close enough to 100%. It's not the worst advice in the world -- but it seems people are about 50-50 on how well it works for them. So about half the time, it's not good advice. Now that's not as bad as many bad ideas, but the frequency of this statement is so high, I can't think of anything else that is worse. [B]So, my contender is "The GM should not make plans" with a weighted badness of 50%[/B]. [/QUOTE]
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