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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TwinBahamut" data-source="post: 5971462" data-attributes="member: 32536">First off, I'll say that I'm probably one of the most spoiler-averse people you will ever meet. I despise knowing the endings to books or shows or whatever. I despise even knowing what happens in the first episodes of a show before watching it. I prefer to go into stories as blind as possible.Of course, that has nothing to do with D&D, which is why your analogy fails at the most fundamental level.D&D is not a book or movie or whatever. D&D is not a story. D&D is an act of cooperative storytelling. It isn't even possible to know the ending to a D&D campaign ahead of time, because that ending won't even exist until the players have played through it. The story is being created by the players and DM, and is something that can and does change dramatically from moment to moment. I don't think the DM should even attempt to write an ending ahead of time, since all that does is detract away from the entire point of the game.The real point behind my comments isn't about "knowing the ending", it's about having everyone at the table agree to the basic premise of the game. "The world is doomed and you're all going to die if you don't save it" isn't the ending, it is the basic premise of the story. This isn't something you keep hidden as a big mystery, it's something you make crystal clear in the very first scene of the game. This is really a very basic principle of storytelling...Indeed, this really is more comparable to knowing whether the book you are going to be sitting down to read is a murder mystery or a romantic comedy. This isn't the ending of the book that must be kept a total mystery, the is the basic concept that should be clearly laid out on the back of the book so people will know what the book is even about. You don't want people to walk into a movie expecting to watch a peaceful romantic drama and then turn the whole thing into a graphically violent horror film filled with protracted torture scenes without warning. You want people to walk into such a movie knowing that the horror is lurking behind the facade of the peaceful drama and that it isn't a movie for people who don't like gruesome horror.You comments are particularly silly if you consider the fact that, unlike a book or movie, the DM can change his or her mind about the ending of the story at any time. If the players are enjoying a totally different kind of game, the DM is completely free to just drop the entire world-destruction plot and pretend it never existed. On the other hand, if the DM insists on destroying the world, the players are hard-pressed to ignore it. This means that any DM who does insist on such a thing is pretty much just doing so to be a jerk and ruin everyone else's fun. The "mystery" or "ending" should never be so sacred that a DM should sacrifice everyone's good time or ability to choose their own path.</blockquote>

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