fbmf wrote:At my real world table, we play very similarly to the way Frank and Lago are advocating.
Yeah...
similarly. Of course you really should specify exactly what you mean because they are rambling rather all over the place and throwing out some crazy scenarios.
But similarly would be fine. The severe problem with their scenarios, at least as you were replying to is their utter inflexibility in game. Their outright denial that a group can or should adapt and that if they dare to, well, you saw the shit Frank was claiming.
To out line the big deal...
When we bring in new people, we make the "campaign charter" clear (see Lago's suggestion).
Yeah. That thing. Which I do. Which infact I said I do before Lago suddenly demanded it be the ONLY way to do things. Which I feel is pretty fucking crazy, considering I'm doing a decidedly optional thing there than many DON'T.
But anyway there are two problems with this.
1) It is imperfect.
If you, like me, have actually DONE this. Then I know, that you, like me, have encountered situations
in play where players have gone, "Wait, was that in the charter? Oh I missed that? What's going on here isntt this usually done like this?".
People don't always remember it all. Or notice it all. People are imperfect. Even GMs are imperfect, not everything that matters will be stuck on your little house rules/charter hand out document or worse, remembered for your little impromptu house rules/charter intro speech every time.
We BOTH know that if you actually do this then there have been situations where IN PLAY you had to re-affirm, add to, clarify, remind, even sometimes for the first time partly describe to people of aspects of the charter or house rules or whatever.
Lago and Frank are railing against your ability to do that. Claiming that you can never IN GAME change a rule EVER. Even in the explicitly worst possible scenarios. As such a deeply black and white piece of totalitarian bullshit it is pretty obvious why that is such a stupid thing to say.
Because I can sit here with the very reasonable position of "You shouldn't change/clarify any rules/charters in game play... except in super extreme situations when you really really need to" and have their position be obviously extremist and impractical blow hard bullshit by comparison.
2) Not everyone does that
Everyone HAS expectations, a charter, and house rules. And I certainly promote mine as up front as possible.
But not every game has time, like one off events and such. And not every OTHER GM will even realize they should do that.
Doesn't matter though. Expectations are still there, charter is still there, house rules are still there, and most of all if something super bad turns up and theres a TPK then the problems that causes are still there
and you need to deal with them somehow.
Turning a blind eye and saying "ah screw it this newb DM we have didnt do a charter a year back when he was still learning so fuck it TPK for the win!" isn't really an acceptable response.
Your way of gaming is fine. So is ours.
Actually I suspect our ways of gaming are just about exactly identical. It's just unlike Lago's odd fantasy about NEVER showing flexibility... I'm honest about how I do things.
Are you SURE you do things the way he is describing? Or perhaps when you are actually honest about it the "similar" way you do things is actually... well the way I do things...