Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 3477923" data-attributes="member: 2067">And this gets at Harrison's deeper point about the frightening psychology of people so invested in info-worship. Which, yeah, is over-stated to make a point, but is can be seen in the reality that many DMs would rather kick a few players out than change the world in response to what the group wanted.My world (my game) is sacred. You are not. Cleave to my world or go home.That's pretty much the exact same thing that writers who pump in too much worldbuilding are saying to their readers: I will tell you how it is, you will follow along, my world is sacred, read about it or you can't get to the fun adventure. I'm 90% positive that's a bad thing in literature, but probably only 40% likely to say that it's still an inherently bad thing in D&D. Cuz, after all, there's a lot of people who play D&D who are in it for the express purpose of info-worship, and a lot of them are DMs, so being a great clomping nerd about their world is a lot of fun for them, and most of the time, helps to shore up the game. It can still go horrirbly wrong, but it seems to do so significantly less in D&D than in literature.If I have to read a paragraph about elven tea ceremonies in a novel, I skip ahead (you know, like when I had skipped anything about Tom Bombadil or the Barrow Wights or that scene with Galadriel and the elves, or anything having to do with Aragorn's ancestry in LotR, because it didn't matter). If I read the same paragraph in a game book, I imagine the PC's being invited to an elven tea ceremony where they must successfully navigate a foreign culture's many pitfalls to avoid irking the elven king and provoking the entire elven armada to unleash their powerful magical doomsday device. However, I do think that the notion that good D&D games require hours or years of world prep needs to be crucified in short order. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> And that if no one is in the mood for a political game of cat and elf-mouse, the elven tea ceremony scene gets to be shelved in favor of something else. And that big blocks of irrelevant world history don't necessarily make a setting any better by themselves.</blockquote>

Verification