For optimal role-playing experience, strictly adhere to the following rule:

For optimal role-playing experience, strictly adhere to the following rule:

>The GM is to be at least 20 years older than the average player age.

oh boy, a DM now has 40 years of self-hate and virginal rage to take out on his players.

A group of 20 year olds who've known each other since elementary school have gathered to play a game hosted by one player's father, who played the original versions of D&D and has experience in many other role playing games since he also has a group that's survived for decades.

Sounds really nice.
No one could be against this right?

For optimal role playing, adhere strictly to this rule.

> Have fun.

If you aren't having fun, change it up. If another friend isn't having fun, change it up. If you're playing for only your characters story, write a fucking book.

Actually I think I'll do that. GM my own game/setting and roll to see what the character success or fails at. Maybe give him some sort of simple framework for making decisions based on personality and personal ethics, which I would also roll for.

Try for an autonomous protagonist after the story/campaign starts.

Could be interesting. Or shit.

Yes. He's likely to be a grognard who insists on 3d6 down the line bullshit because "that's how we've always done it"

>hosted by one player's father, who is a retired plumber pressured into this nerd crap because it's the only chance to see his kids more than twice a year.

FTFY

>Fun is the measure of all things

Yeah. No.

Turns out that after years of playing with the same group, while he's familiar with multiple systems and an experienced GM, he gets easily frustrated with the players not knowing his style and comes down hard on what he considers to be "wrong" kind of fun. Or constantly insists their PCs "would never do that" when he thinks the players are being inconsistent or aren't picking up his quest hooks.

He continuously tries to make them into copies of His players that he has gamed with for years, and feels at a loss for why he can't stay interested in the game or has to rewrite so many planned events.

I'm just posting to be contrary. Ideally you would learn from an experienced GM (seriously 20 years is an arbitrary bullshit number) but you wouldn't want to always play with one until the next person had experience.

And now the bait: I mean, OPs ideal DM is pretty much Gary Gygax. I honestly would love to have had him run my campaign, but I know you faggot out there only ever think about his tournament/convention games and think it would be hell.

Dude. What the hell do you play games for then? What's your goal man.

You can add all the rules you want, but if you aren't having fun then go do something productive instead.

>What the hell do you play games for then? What's your goal man.

Always treat the pleasures of life as incidental.

A good man eats to sustain himself.
A good man procreates to extend his bloodline.
A good man plays traditional games for edification.

A bad man eats because it tastes good.
A bad man procreates because it feels good.
A bad man plays traditional games because they are fun.

What else is there to life other than gratification of yourself and others?

Sounds pretty autistic, tbqh.

Your definition of a good and a bad man isn't mutually exclusive.

>eat flavorless protein packs every day because it fulfills the bare minimum required to survive
>procreate with the ugly, inexperienced and the desperate, because they will carry his seeds
>play fatal because playing it leads to edification of just how many goblins can fit into a man's urethra
You sound like a humongous faggot, user.

You sound like the kind of philosophy major at universities that only finds pleasure in circle-jerk discussions with other philosophy faggots. Enjoy not having fun at the game table when everyone else is. They would probably have more fun without you anyways.

Stoicism does not make you a better person, user.

How's your first year of college treating you faggot? I bet you play WoD exclusively and do yoga in crowded subway trams you "enlightened" fuck.

>What else is there to life other than gratification of yourself and others?

Transcendence, or unification with the source of all.

A man who does things for good reasons and bad reasons is both good and bad.

Your architecture ignores quality and its essential value.

The lesser pleasures move me too :(

Adopting stoic ethics could make it easier to be a better person.

For the record, I am not a Stoic.

I'm older than our current group's GM. Our games are amazing. Your rule is the dumb.

>2/10 got me to reply.

>A man who does things for good reasons and bad reasons is both good and bad.
That's a very shitty system you have there mate. Why even have categories, if they don't mean anything?

>Transcendence, or unification with the source of all.

Is this a religious belief system or a philosophical non-physical transcendence. Do you know what this source of all is, or what unification or transcendence would look like?

Have you considered that your belief system may simply be a more roundabout method of garnering self-gratification through believing yourself a good person due to the actions you have undertook and this pursuit of being a "better" or "good" person is merely a pursuit of pleasure in a more roundabout and esoteric fashion?

I hint at a deeper system in which realities are approximated to various degrees.

>I was only pretending to be retarded!

Stoic here, and I'm here to call you a faggot.

The point of stoicism isn't treating pleasures as incidental, the point of stoicism is not actively pursuing pleasure solely for the sake of it.
Differentiating the two is crucial.

To reiterate upon one of your examples and fix them,
>A good man eats both to sustain himself and to derive pleasure from it. He will not let the gluttony consume him, but he can actively enjoy it. Experiencing new tastes, creating new dishes, discussing it with others - all of these are things that a stoic can enjoy.
>A bad man eats only because it tastes good. He will overindulge himself, and become a mindless beast that exists solely for satisfying its gluttony. He will not create, he will not discuss, he will not learn. He will only consume.

tl;dr fuck off, faggot

I think the point here is that he has 20 extra years to work his shit out and resign himself to enjoying his hobbies in his lonely twilight years

The funny thing about a cynic is that they usually find all they misery they look for in life.

You eat to sustain yourself, so be happy with what you have to eat, good or bad.
You procreate to extend your bloodline, so be happy that you're procreating, good or bad.
You play games for edification, so enjoy the sensation of testing your wit and be glad you have it, good or bad.

Don't confuse being content with being an obnoxious holier-than-thou intellectual see You ultimately don't need anything to feel good but a good outlook on life, so do yourself a favor and stop sperging out because somebody isn't chasing some kind of hedonistic lifestyle to fill a nonexistent hole in their soul. Just because you're going to die one day doesn't mean that life is meaningless, it just means you have limited time to enjoy what's given, and nobody's keeping score of fun points in the afterlife.

"Enjoy every sandwich" -Warren Zevon.

>the point of stoicism is not actively pursuing pleasure solely for the sake of it.

I'm inclined to believe that pleasure should be enjoyed, but never pursued. Seek the good, and the pleasure follows.

Once again, I am not a Stoic, and never claimed to be. That said, Epictetus was pretty cool.

Every gm we had that had 10+ years on the rest of the group was a power tripping faggot.

Not a Stoic, but I'd say it does. Believe what you like about the moral value in Stoicism at the gaming table, but hedonism in the same situation is always a bad thing.

Personally I think there is a lot of merit in situations that aren't necessarily "fun", like presenting your players with difficult moral choices to make or complex situations that make them think critically about the game.

I can't even really imagine an evil Stoic, just Stoics that I'd disagree with.

Now () is actually evil, and everything wrong with the world.

You can't deny each action we undertake is for our self-gratification, even if it is against our self-interest though.

To enforce fixed ideas which are intangible and have no real basis seems to be a pointless notion, and merely serves to further shackle a person's uniqueness of being.

>A good man eats to sustain himself.
And he feels it has made him superior, able to look down and shame the "bad" man for eating for sensory pleasure.
You can't really argue the condescension, with the moral judgement of good and bad being thrown around.

Both are acting to satisfy their desire for self-satisfaction, on more unconsciously than the other.

>bringing joy to others is evil
Wow, if misery is so great killing yourself should be a virtuous act, just think of the people at your funer-
Who am I kidding, nobody will miss someone as dour and unlikeable as you

>And he feels it has made him superior, able to look down and shame the "bad" man for eating for sensory pleasure.
No, he does it to live in accordance with his principles of right and wrong. You're projecting your own self-centered nihilism onto others.

Chastising you for saying:
>What else is there to life other than gratification of yourself and others?
becomes:
>bringing joy to others is evil
What a transparent strawman. Just keep shoveling Dooritos™ into your gullet until you keel over.

>gratification of yourself and others
>and others
Learn to fucking read. Also look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs sometime.

Well, I'm a cynic, so I'm going to piss on you and then get back to sleeping in my barrel

What if a system was put in place whereby groups of young boys would be assigned older female GMs?

Spotted the philosophy major!

>being this humbert humbert

>Maslow's hierarchy of needs
While generally accepted as an overall concept, specific classification of certain needs can be disputed. It's a guideline, not a dogma.

Counterpoint: Fuck yeah!

This is top-shelf Veeky Forums. Great job.

I don't think you understand what fun means.

If every action you take is inevitably for self-gratification then the concept of self-gratification has no meaning at all.

This is a dumb argument.

Congrats user, you successfully derailed the thread

I ain't even mad, saying fun is evil is damn good bait

He was That GM. If you don't know the rules and you're playing the game, that's your problem. If you consistently run games you don't understand suddenly I'm getting fucked by your incompetence. And regardless of the system they're all the same game about his gmpc

This is actually my group. We got together in 6th grade, been together since. Our DM is a software engineer and has played it forever. So has his kid.

Gygax's idea of a "fun" campaign is TPK's, because he liked to DM and it gave him a sense of power controlling the players fates.

I'd much rather have a DM who's not as consistently insecure about the amount of control he has and lets the players make choices that divert from his rail-roads, as long as they do it in character and aren't actively trying to rebel because the players are just shit-cakes.

nobody get in the pool untill we have a safety meeting and discuss the rules

I can see where you're coming from, but you can shovel all that pretentious horse shit right back into the fat-asshole of a mouth that it dropped from.

>A good man eats to sustain himself.

So what you're saying is, is that taste is irrelevant? Alrighty, so then go shovel piles of tofu into your mouth then, fucker.

>A good man procreates to extend his bloodline

Right, "his" bloodline, not like it's also the woman's bloodline either, you pretentious dipshit. Procreation is just for spreading seed, logically speaking 9000 years ago, men didn't give too much of a shit and only bred and protected their off spring and women from predators and other clans that invaded for territory or food.

>A good man plays traditional games for edification

WRONG. Objectively speaking the definition of a game is an activity of play or sport, especially competitive, based around rules upon which the results are decided by strength, skill, or luck. Games based around luck provide absolutely no edification, but still fall within the rules as written. Go fuck yourself, pompous ass.

Are you saying that a GM in their mid-twenties can only play with young children?

That sounds hellish and stupid.

Your weakness doesn't give you a right to complain. I'm not that guy, but he's obviously right, and you obviously wrong, even if he is being pretentious. Fun is not an objective. That's hedonism.Anything and everything you do should be in an effort to improve your world, or else you're entroping it.

'Wannabe community theater actor.'
This is the correct response to anybody who whines about not having more control of the game than the GM.

>I'm not that guy
Uh huh. Right. You're TOTALLY not him.

I played in a campaign like this, the DM was going senile and kept getting rules mixed up with those from previous editions.

jesus the amount of cheeto dust crumbling threw my monitor just from reading this is incredible...i could feed Africa at this point

>Setting arbitrary rules
>Not just searching long and hard for right people

...

Fun is the only worthwhile objective.

Nothing lasts, nothing is real, all that matters is how we feel about it.

Your ideology is only salvageable in that it is evidently fun for you to express.

>For the record, I am not a Stoic.

With all that pretentious proselytizing and bizarre asceticism I sure as shit hope not.

OP said 40yo GM, not 40yo Veeky Forums user

I don't even know you but I want to give you a swirly and shove you into a locker holy shit

So why play traditional games? Why post on this board?

If it's an OSR like AD&D than there's nothing wrong with 3d6.

If it's AD&D then you use 4d6k3 you fool. 3d6 is for OD&D and Basic.

It's good to be bad.