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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GSHamster" data-source="post: 4972087" data-attributes="member: 20187">As with Cadfan, this matches my experiences and observations.  I have two explanations:1. We get tired of losing all the time. In a gritty world, the DM gets to win sometimes.  I know D&D doesn't have a formal winning or losing, but in actual practice the relationship is sometimes adversarial. A DM can't obviously win by throwing dragons at a level 1 party, he has to win within the confines and expectations of the game.  A gritty game or world allows the DM to come closer to winning than in a more normal game, and that is attractive, even if we don't like to admit it.2. There is a "knowledge" mismatch between players and DMs.  Since a DM knows everything, there is a temptation to gravitate towards complex plots, to keep the game interesting for the DM. Simplistic, straight-forward plots can be very boring for a DM.  However, I've found that the players actually see or understand much less than the DM thinks they do, so they prefer to keep things simple so that they can actually grasp the whole.It's like the story of the blind philosophers examining the elephant. The DM is not blind, so she immediately sees the elephant, and isn't very surprised.  So maybe she spices things up by making the elephant some sort of demon tiger/elephant crossbreed.  The players are blind, and trying to figure out what the creature is by touch.  They're far more likely to guess that the animal is a regular elephant than some wacky abomination that they've never heard of.</blockquote>

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