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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7627427" data-attributes="member: 4937">lol.3e D20 is the best and worst of systems.  I can sympathize with both those that love and hate it, as I've certainly spent a lot of time hammering the system into shape. So this gets straight to the heart of it.  I'm not going to claim a DM that runs a railroad is the exact analogy for a player that is a rules lawyer, but as it is something else that is usually denigrated and with good reason, and because I think the motives of the two participants are often the same, let me talk about railroading a second.I've been very fortunate to never have a railroad DM but I've played with and talked with a lot of players that have.  The group I was with the longest as a player, had lost its long time DM just after I joined, and while they had been players in his game for years and enjoyed it, it was clear that they also had a good natured resentment (if you can imagine such a thing) toward the fact that he had DM PC's and pet NPC's and he railroaded them relentlessly and they never really had any agency.  They'd tell horror stories of his abuse with arbitrary and unfair rulings, and then laugh about it because what else could they do and there is still a sort of fun in that sort of thing.  But they would also tell the new less railroady DM later that he ran the best and most enjoyable game they ever played.The problem with a subjective standard like "pigs get fed, hogs get slaughtered" is that pigs and hogs are pretty much the same thing, and the farmer here can do whatever the heck that he pleases.  The farmer gets what he wants, and the pigs can't object.  When you say something like, "It's only when the player acts in an inequitable manner, attempting to break the game for their own benefit  that negative rulings have to be made.", my first thought is, "Why if you don't want players doing that, do you have rules that permit it?", and my second thought is, "Does this mean the entire game you play is basically, "Do what makes the farmer happy, least you be slaughtered?""   As a player, I don't want to be in a game where the only rule that matters is, "Mother may I?"  I tend to have as my meta-rule, "Run the game the way you would want it run if you were the player."   This is of course a very subjective self-centered rule as well, and maybe you are in fact running the game that you would want to be in if you were the player.   Certainly I know players on the boards that bristle at the very idea of railroading, but when I asked my group of players some 8 years ago what sort of game they wanted, they all basically said, "We want to be on rails.  We want you to have some epic story in mind, and we want to experience and discover it, and we don't want to spend much time trying to find the fun or make or own fun."I really don't like justifying the spirit of the game when it comes to rules.  That's a discussion for table social contracts and the like.  With respect to rules though, the claim that the perfect is the enemy of the good shouldn't be used as an excuse for having bad rules, and really I don't think you should have a rules set where the player is asked to not try too hard to succeed lest the DM's wrath be roused against him.   It creates a structure were the actual processes of play have basically nothing to do with the rules and everything to do with intimate knowledge of the judges personal biases - like knowing better than baking something peanut butter flavored for Paul Hollywood.</blockquote>

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