Comment on “Immediately”

Good post. Shitty DMs do a behavior to retain control/resist change, and train their players to expect it, or to use it themselves as DM. I think this behavior, and the "each session/adventure is a self-contained episode" behavior come from the same source*. They are done by the control-freak or over-invested DMs.

There may be another cause for this behavior, although I'm just woolgathering here: in fiction, it's common for the hero to achieve something (e.g. take over a a small kingdom) in one story, and then for there to be a TIME SKIP until the 2nd story (when the invaders attack the now-flourishing kingdom.) The problem is, most games are not set up to make the "skipped time" interesting. Other than magic item creation, there's nothing really interesting to be done during what is called "downtime" (and it's only called that because the players aren't out fighting/traveling, which means "no game" to these people.) In a more fleshed-out WORLD, however, there are e.g. economic ventures, bureaucratic concerns, affairs of state, intrigues, etc for the new rulers to concern themselves with. In the well-run world we can play these things out in full. The shitty game will do a time-skip until the next time there's a fight (or just make a fight happen immediately: the former just pays lip service to the idea of a functioning world). In the same way, some fiction assumes that nobody cares about politics, etc. and skips to the fight scene. Perhaps the DM's jumping straight to destroying the player's achievements has its roots in these shitty books just as the three-act structure bullshit does.

Of course, in the end it doesn't matter where the behavior comes from. If they do it, they suck.

*I also think the "immediately destroy" DM is even worse than the "episodic" one, because at least the latter is explicitly stating that whatever players do will ultimately not matter (and giving you a sign to bail out before it's too late!)