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it's true that there is no "correct" way to have fun, but Hasbro's entire TTRPG business model revolves around marketing D&D as a game for everyone™. But in reality, D&D is a game with very opinionated rules. Rules that were designed with a specific style of play in mind.

The only way for Hasbro to reconcile their marketing with their product is to convince people that the rules don't matter. But this leads to people playing games where the DM is doing all the work because the rules aren't helping.

I think the thing here is that photonegative-jade is pointing out a real problem but failing to articulate what's actually wrong with it by framing it in terms of "playing d&d incorrectly".

The problem with the way D&D is marketed and sold as THE ttrpg for everyone™ that can do anything™ (despite actually being a game with very opinionated rules designed for a very specific kind of action-adventure gameplay) is not that when people modify or ignore rules to do something else with it they are "playing it incorrectly", which makes it seem as if the grievance being expressed is one of "stop disrespecting the rules, you have an obligation to play 100% RAW". I don't care what people do at their table (and I'm sure photonegative jade doesn't either), and also I'm a rules tinkerer, I've never run a game where I didn't modify at least a couple rules after I got the hang of it RAW.

The problem is that framing "doing something completely unrelated with the game and modifying the rules whenever they get in the way of this completely unrelated thing" as not only a thing you *can* do, but as an *expected* part of playing the game is that it produces a play culture which implicitly frames any limitation of the mechanics to pull off completely out-of-scope things as a failure of *the GM* to adapt the rules for it.

Like I've seen so many discussions where someone says that if you want to run a game of political court intrigue or psychological horror D&D might not be the right choice for it and the unanimous response boils down to some variation of "you can totally do political court intrigue and psychological horror in D&D, maybe your DM is just not good enough to make it work, a good DM would completely rewrite half the game's rules so that you can do whatever you want in D&D :)" Which like. as much as I like tinkering with rules, and as much as I think hacking systems is a beautiful thing (and also the origin point of most of my own games), I just don't think that "hacking a system to do completely unrelated things from what it was designed for" should be considered a standard requirement of the GM skillset, and I don't think lacking that skill should be considered a defficiency on the GM's part, but that is exactly the logical endpoint of the marketing push to sell D&D as a ttrpg that can do anything™ as long as your DM lets you bend the rules good enough instead of being a whimsyless rule-following killjoy.

homestuck act 5

Putting all these interviews here to emphasize the importance of Moon Remix RPG Adventure's in inspiring Toby Fox, and how Undertale in turn inspired one of its devs, Yoshiro Kimura, to take a chance and make a game like Moon again

they've had to face settlements against stealing from current authors, so they'll just go for the old books now. they're also doing this so they have the only copies of rare books.

"You can't put the words FUTON FETISH in 150 point type on the front of the magazine," she explained patiently but at a volume exceeding maximum safe worksite levels. I slapped my watch to keep it from automatically filing a lost-time complaint with the union metamind.

"We already took the photos," I gamely explain. "It's like a high concept art piece. Hugh wanted more of that."

5-RebeccaSue's jewelry pulsed with nightmare light as she removed the photo proofs from the envelope. In each picture, a scantily clad model was performing a pantomime of a crude act with furniture.