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Feb 6, 2010 -- 7:43AM, KarmaInferno wrote:

You punish for actual infractions. Doing otherwise weakens your position of authority, and damages the trust and respect the player base has for you. This is not about "letting people get away with it". Punitive measures must always come from actual rules, not from arbitrary nebulous "intended" ones.

Care to tell me HOW we will punish players? Ultimately we can implement all the rules we want, but at some point all we are doing is punishing the honest players who don't need the rules in the first place and the casual player who don't even care about these corner cases but see a 100-page long document. Mind you, there is this rule about not being a jerk at the table and that rule applies to a supprisingly amount of things some of you demand a specific rule for.

As for the rustmonster issue, what arbitrary punishment? All we are saying that using the rustmonster to generate wealth is against the spirit of the rules. You are not helping this campaign if you do abuse the rule for the reasons cited by the other globals. People talk about social punishment, but that is no different from how most players around here react to those "jerk"-situations (people stop playing with you). Nobody mentioned anything about campaign wide punishment.

Feb 8, 2010 -- 4:07AM, Madfox11 wrote:

If the power-gamer player* wants a challenge to have fun that is as much their own responsibility as that of the DM, authors and campaign management.

To me this points to the root of many if not all problems we find ourselves debating. 

For a group of people (hopefully a vocal minority, yes I cherish my naivety) there seems to be no sense of shared responsibility anymore. It has been replaced by a sense of consumerism and entitlement where the expectation, nay demand, is to be taken care of and pampered in any way possible. Anything wrong, broken or not fully how they want it must be fixed by the DM, the Campaign management or WOTC. And it must not only be fixed, they will tell you HOW it should be fixed.

Honestly, it is getting old. If there is anything to be fixed I feel that is it. 

* - change to replace power-gamer with player is mine.

Feb 7, 2010 -- 1:25PM, -Aribeth- wrote:

To put one more log in the fire, I do hope that you all realize that this issue of MYREs and Rust Monsters is only the tip of the iceberg which I personally call the "Perfect Storm of Brokeness".  I personally believe in the future that there will be more situations like this because as LFR matures and accepts every single bit of support material that WOTC puts out, there will be components benign individually but when combined become another storm of brokeness.

In all my years of playing and DMing, one thing always rings true:  Never underestimate the resourcefulness and ingenuity of the player.

Leadership and communication are your friends, being naive that player behavior will 100% be honorable though while well intentioned, is a path to the abyss.

Thank you for making my point for me.  Let me walk you through how I see this issue working, based on my experience working on 3 different Organized Play campaigns over the last 10 years, and as a player and DM in countless home campaigns since about 1978.

To the best of my knowledge, LFR and other Organized Play offering exist to provide content to players and give those players a reason--and more importantly an avenue--to play the game and buy product.  Chris Tulach, who is the Organized Play Content Manager on the RPG side of WotC, every year has to justify to the higher up who approve the budget and the programs he oversees.  Part of that justification involves nice shiny charts that show how many players are playing Organized Play content.  Then that information gets displayed in various ways: brand new players, returning players, players who play x number of times a year, etc. 

From what limited information I gleaned over the last 10 years, and this is my own opinion, there were three major obstacles to getting and keeping players in the previous Organized Play campaigns: getting enough DMs to run games, offering too much content that was unavailable to all players, and producing a vast amount of rules and paperwork that acted as a barrier to entry.  With LFR, WotC attempted to remove as many of those barriers as possible.

And I think it is safe to say that it has been an overwhelming success.  The play numbers, which WotC seemed to be happy with in previous campaigns, grew even more.   I heard countless players saying that the barriers that kept them from playing previous campaign--be it paperwork or too many rules or whatever--were no longer there.  Most of the relief and happiness at the new direction of LFR was tied to moving the "DMing duties" from the campaign staff to the people actually running the games at the table: empowering the DMs to make changes to the adventure to make a better play experience, giving DMs the ability to create their own adventures to help create a more organic campaign experience, let the DM decide how unclear rules items will work at their tables, etc.

For literally 99.9% of the LFR players, this is exactly what they want.  They want to have the ability to take a pre-existing adventure and some very basic campaign rules, and they want to have a D&D game for 4 hours without a lot of overhead.  If problems come up at the table, they want to be able to handle those problems at the table without the need to refer to page 127 of the "Guide to how D&D should be played in LFR."  It is that 0.1% who, for whatever reason, cannot take part in an enjoyable game without turning the session into a prolonged rules debate.  So they clamor for the campaign staff to make a ruling on just this one thing.  And then just this one other thing.  And then this other thing.  (By the way, the campaign staff does not "accept" every bit of rules that WotC puts out.  The word "accept" implies there is a choice.  What is, is.)  Of course, those 0.1% really don't want an answer most of the time.  They just want to move the argument from the table to the forums because the argument is the hobby for them.  :-)

If any sort of case-by-case rules explication ever happened in the campaign, then all of the gains that have been made by LFR in reducing overhead and eliminating barriers to entry get reversed.  Now new players not only need to learn the D&D rules, but they need to learn 10 pages, 50 pages, and then 150 pages of extra stuff.  We have seen it happen in other campaigns.  It isn't pretty, and it ends up choking a campaign.  If there is really a path to the abyss for a campaign, that is the route to take.  And trying to call making more rules "communication" is not fair, because it is the opposite of what communication is supposed to do.

No one is naive enough to expect all players to do the right thing.  The question is, do you drive 1000 people away from the campaign with extra rules to handle something that a few people are doing willfully doing wrong.  The rules lawyers--and by that I mean the type of people who come to these forums to argue that "asking permission" is not the same thing as "gaining permission"--are like parasites on a healthy organism.  The campaign staff could try to eliminate them by killing off other parts of the organism, and by doing so lose players.  The problem is that these parasites never stop.  The more rules you make, the more they have to feed on.

If you are running or playing in a home campaign with 7 people, and 1 person is being an argumentative jerk, the first step is indeed to communicate with the problem player.  However, if that person continues to be a jerk, I think most reasonable people would say to jettison the 1 player so that the game isn't ruined for the other 6 people.  LFR should be no different.  The campaign staff should not ruin the game and drive away hundreds of potential players by heaping on restrictions and making thousands of extra words of required reading just to deal with a few people: a few people who would just take those thousands of extra words and just find a way to be jerks about those anyway.

Feb 8, 2010 -- 6:40AM, smerwin29 wrote:

If any sort of case-by-case rules explication ever happened in the campaign, then all of the gains that have been made by LFR in reducing overhead and eliminating barriers to entry get reversed.  Now new players not only need to learn the D&D rules, but they need to learn 10 pages, 50 pages, and then 150 pages of extra stuff.  We have seen it happen in other campaigns.  It isn't pretty, and it ends up choking a campaign.

Which is why the "correct" response to the specific issue of  Rust Monsters isn't a Rust Monster rule.  But that doesn't mean that clarifiying the treasure bundle rules ("treasure bundles are the only allowed way to obtain magic items above your level", "treasure bundles are the only way to increase your character's net worth") wouldn't still be a good idea.

(I agree, keeping the word count down is crucial)

And I disagree that informal communication is a bad idea... You can't require customers to keep up with some message board to play, but that doesn't mean there can't be additional engagement for customers that want it.