Quote Originally Posted by Telok View Post
Well it came out of the stuff about if it was the setting, game, or GM making things grit/hero/myth. Sort of semi-tangential since some people were describing PCs with social status using that to hero/myth with characters that were mechanically in grit.

Basically if the game mechanics lack or punish stuff then the GM may override that or insert anything that crosses their mind. Some GMs may do it as a matter of course or habit, others on a case by case basis, others may want to follow the rules. Players learn from that and tend to develop habits based on early experiences. Playing with less experienced GMs & players who were introduced to gaming from video games there is, in my experience, a tendency among most to start from a point of using and trusting the rules first.

And this ties back into the original point I made: That games with weak or no social rules or structures are dependent on the GM to make that stuff matter. D&D, being these days a game generally lacking such rules for the players to engage with, rewards murder-hobo style play with more time spent on combat and more powerful pizza characters because less freeform GMs will more often nope or ignore stuff outside the core rules.

Anyone can chime in with "well i dont play like that and players at my table dont either", but that just means they're a GM who uses freeform rp to reward the players or have homebrewed something to use instead of the weak/missing rules. This applies to any game and to and missing rules or obscure optional rules subsection.

I noted that in my area the majority of muppets & GMs are comfortable following a game's core rules, uncomfortable modifying game state based on freeform rp, and have negative opinions of homebrew & optional rules as things like "too op" or "too fiddly". Its taken years to get some of these people to start trying more rp stuff that's not codified in the rules in games I GM, and I can sometimes tell when another GM in another game has slapped them down for trying to go outside the rules. Therefore, if the games doesn't mechanically enable something and the GM isn't proactively pushing for that thing, then players revert to the things they can count on being rewarded by the game mechanics.
Depending on the GM to make any of the pillars matter isn't a good or bad thing, it's just a design decision. D&D relies heavily on the GM for the social and exploration pillars, and less for the combat pillar, because they (I would argue correctly) determined that combat is where newcomers to the genre would need the most help with crafting exciting challenges.

I'd further argue that it's not D&D's job to repair player trauma with bad GMs. Simply creating the space to encourage unlisted actions and checks, as D&D 5e does, is enough - eventually players will feel comfortable exploring this space with a GM who is fine with it, so long as said GM cares about their fun.