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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3233121" data-attributes="member: 4937">That pretty much describes exactly my experience as well.  The biggest change between players reared on 1st edition, and the players whose only experience is 3rd edition is that 3rd edition players tend to see the role of the DM as primarily servant to the players.  Third edition players believe that by agreeing to play the game with the DM, the DM is bound by a social contract to play with exactly those rules as written in the published books and that if thier is any disagreement, then they have recourse first to the books and then to negotiation with the DM.   The general culture is that the DM should feel grateful that someone is willing to play with him, and that the DM is not the authority, the published material is.First edition players are more likely to see the DM as 'god' and that by agreeing to play in the DM's game, you are agreeing to abide by his rules whatever they may be.  Young players are often utterly taken aback when I explain that I started playing without knowing the rules, that I played with several DM's who never explained what the rules of the game as they were playing it were, that the 1st edition DMG claimed that combat resolution rules were the exclusive domain of the DM and thus a DM was rather in his right not to tell anyone what mechanics he was using to adjudicate anything, and that in one case I played through a D&D module in which at no point did I know exactly what my remaining hitpoints were because the DM considered that numbers consistuted 'game information' which represented something which the players should not know because the characters themselves could not know more than that they were severely or lightly injured, fatigued or still fit to fight, or whatever.  The general culture was that you should feel grateful that the DM was willing to let you play, and that the DM was the authority and the published material was only guidelines.You can imagine that I've occassionally had conflicts with young players over thier expectation of what them sitting down at my table means, and what I imagine them sitting down at my table means.I don't know entirely how to explain this shift.  Partly it stems from a less explicit granting of authority to the DM.  A 1st edition DM could always counter 'book worship', by pointing to passages in the book that explicitly granted him more authority than the book.   Partly it seems to stem from the very quality of the rules themselves, which demand less tinkering than that 1st edition rules and which offer the illusion of covering every circumstance and covering it well (something that was never true of 1st edition).  Partly I think it comes from CRPG experience, in which the computer as game master is a mere slave to its rules set and this is the experience young gamers demand from thier pen and paper games.   Partly I think it comes from 3rd editions focus on player options, leading to situation in which players seem to think that the purpose of the game is to obtain some end goal of a 'perfect' build of some sort (which feeds back into my point about CRPG's).   In any event, you are completely correct to note the shift in player expectations.  One thing that has really struck me in this thread though is the popularity of Monte Cook, who arguably produces material with a very strong 1st edition feel.  His style of encounter design strikes me as very neo-Gygaxian.  For example, while we've been focusing on 'Forgotten Temple of Thardizun', his 'Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil' provides recreations of EXACTLY the same scenarios described by the original poster - cold not preventable even by magic, darkness not illuminatable except by special items, etc.   If you read over Monte's works, you'll find that he above all currently popular designers is more prone to 'cheating' as it has been defined in this thread (against my arguments, since I don't consider that to be cheating at all).  Monte is a very 'anti-austere' designer, to use another term invented for the thread.  He does things not in the rules as written all the time.</blockquote>

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