Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Riley37" data-source="post: 7401306" data-attributes="member: 6786839">Those are, indeed, specific criticisms! So specific, that one can disagree with them on specific grounds, with examples from actual experience! At least they're not vague vapor.Some counter-observations:How much time I've spent, over the last twenty years, pondering a setting that I'm actually running, this year, for the first time, is *not my player's business*. I was not on their payroll during that time. If I chose to spend an accumulated total of 500 hours, over those ten years, writing notes on Setting Q, and now they demand that I should have instead spent only 100 of those hours writing those notes, and 300 hours preparing box-text, and 100 hours statting up monsters - too bad for them. They have no authority on how I spent *my* discretionary time before I even met them. Our time together at the table, is the only time they get to negotiate."[*]Worldbuilding and particularly game lore, becomes deeply entrenched and virtually impossible to change.  The Great Wheel and attending arguments is a perfect example of this.  New ideas become judged, not on their actual value, but on how well they toe the line with what came before."How the funk do my players, or you, know which elements of Setting Q are deeply entrenched? The map of the Afterlife which I spent hours drawing? They won't know unless one of the PCs dies, and even then, the PC won't know how much of that map they've explored, and how much more they could find if they spent ten sessions exploring it, unless that's what they actually want to do, as a party, for the next ten sessions.New ideas from whom? From the players? How the funk do you know that I won't shelve my 20 pages on What Dwarves Know About Metallurgy (And What They Got Wrong) if a player wants their PC to become the first dwarven smith to ever make high-grade steel? I might even handwave some transition, in which those 20 pages were the dwarven "De Re Metallica" in the previous generation, and then somehow they made exactly enough progress, during the PC's childhood, for the PC take that last breakthrough step to high-grade steel."Six page treatises on Elven Tea Ceremonies"I already posted about that GM who wrote six pages (or more) about Elven Heraldry. The one player (me) who was interested, got a copy of those six pages, and enjoyed them, and I designed a heraldic device for my PC's shield. No other player at the table spent ANY time on the topic. Their gaming experience was exactly the same experience that they would have had if those six pages never existed. The DM enjoyed writing it (once I wrote an elven sage PC), I enjoyed reading it and applying it to my character illustration, zero cost to anyone else. I call that Pareto-optimal. What's your beef?</blockquote>

Verification