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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sword of Spirit" data-source="post: 6767504" data-attributes="member: 6677017">Aha! This is another statement that I'm glad came up. (I think I'm seeing some real progress in getting past some of the misconceptions through this thread.)Your statement makes a lot of sense. So I thought about it and figured out what I think is missing from the equation.Compare running a game to opening a restaurant. You can open a restaurant (say, a pizza place) that almost everyone will enjoy to some degree. Or you can open a French restaurant, or a barbeque place where everything on the menu is spicy, or some other restaurant that will simply delight some people, but others will have no interest in.So that's what my estimation is of what is actually going on in these scenarios. It's not a binary enjoy/don't enjoy thing. You've got six players (including DM). You could make a game where each of you is going to get about 3 units of enjoyment out of it. Or you could make a game where three of you (including the DM) are going to get 6 units of enjoyment out of it, one of you is going to get 3 units of enjoyment out of it, and the other two are either going to get only 1 or 2 units, or are going to abstain from playing it (allowing someone else who will get 3-6 units of enjoyment to take their place).I'm not sure why making a targeted game that some people (generally including the DM, although not necessarily so--sometimes one or two of the players can be really into an idea (6 units) where the DM has no strong feelings (3 units) and just runs it because "why not") will get a lot of enjoyment out of, while others might prefer to sit out is selfish in an objective sense. After all, the total units of enjoyment being created by that gaming experience are higher than the example experience that everyone enjoyed. It might seem unfortunate to the people who, at that particular time, didn't want to play in it. But the next game might be one that they are 6 units in on. Seems to me like having a lot of fun from a certain source (those gaming friends) half the time, while being able to pursue whatever other fun you want the rest of the time, is at least as good as having a moderate amount of fun with that gaming group all the time.If I knew that a player was going to do nothing but sit around being miserable if they weren't in my current game, I might think differently about it. But assuming that they have other options, I'm probably going to make a targeted game that I as the DM as really excited about, and then invite others who are really going to enjoy it, so we can have our unfathomably cool geek out experience that others won't even understand...rather than having a status quo fun experience that works for all of the people all of the time.Now, I'm a passionate and intense person, so that definitely is a matter of preference. But I don't see it as fundamentally selfish to cater to a smaller group that will derive great value from something rather than a larger group that will derive good value from it. I mean, we are talking about role-playing games, which are pretty much as a whole an example of that very phenomenon.</blockquote>

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