Ladybird
RIV
- Joined
- Aug 13, 2017
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I don't feel it's necessarily always a case of "bad GM" (Although there are bad GM's out there), more "GM hasn't been taught that this is a bad thing to do"; there's a lack of good tablecraft advice out there.Well, yeah, no rules system, or lack thereof, is going to fix plying with a crappy GM. Although I think there's generally some big warning signs that a GM is going to be antagonistic or deliberately unfair to the players before the game even begins if you know what to look for.
Personally I feel PbtA games do their GM advice very well with Agenda / Always Say / Principles / GM Moves concepts and explicit explanations as to why things are the way they are; to show GM's how to run this game and cope with how it differs from other games, but where's the line between "practical advice" and "training wheels for the GM"?
Yes. D&D wants to be both very specific and also a very generic toolkit, and those are two things you can't have together - it leads to situations like this.This problem and this entire class of problems are especially prominent in D&D, because the rules say one thing-- very clearly-- but the majority of players and referees want them to say something else, because they want to be playing in a very different kind of setting than the one implied by what those rules say. And the problem is, a player can know the rules, but even knowing the referee isn't much of a guarantee of how they're going to make their ruling... especially when a lot of referees (not without reason) impose harsher house rules when they know the player is intentionally relying on dissonant rules for tactical benefit.
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