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I tell them that 'most anything goes as part of the session -1 pitch when individually inviting them into the game (session 0 is roll-up night), and I probably wouldn't bother inviting them if I didn't think they were up for it.

Thing is, because you let it pay off once the player now has a very justifiable argument that their clever idea or rules interaction should pay off every time they can pull it off. You've set a precedent, and going back on that is likely to produce resentful players.

Exactly. Retconning is awful. Don't do it. Instead, that spell now does 2d6 every time it's cast....but see below. As a player, one of the things I have to be able to rely on is that the rules will work (and be applied) consistently from one instance to the next. If a given spell is ruled...

I'd argue it every time, for two reasons: 1 - if it's that much of an error it should never have been allowed to stand in the first place (i.e. it should have been got right the first time) 2 - inconsistencies like that, where rulings change week to week, wreck the game if allowed to stand and...

Does that mean that in at least one previous life you were a fish? :)

Same here.

And now your rulings are inconsistent - it worked that way the first time and this way the second time - which is widely seen as very poor DM form. If I'm the player of the thief and you asked me that out of character, I'd tell you to deal with it in character. And if I'm the DM in that...

Just because someone is a friend doesn't necessarily mean you have to go along with whatever they suggest. If I'm the DM and intend to keep my campaign going, and someone wants to run something else*, then that someone can propose a different night to run and we each get to make our own...

What if the rest of the group isn't interested in learning and-or playing it?

Correcting it later means one of two things has to happen: 1 - The erroneous action needs to be retconned to its correct version, which potentially invalidates every second of play that happened after it due to the one-thing-leads-to-another effect; or 2 - The erroneous action is allowed to...

Here, the onset of M:tG almost completely sank our D&D community. Some of our previously-hardcore D&D players became hardcore Magic players (including me for a while), which is fine. What wasn't fine was the scheduling headaches this created, and by 1997-98 our collective D&D hobby was hanging...

For me it wouldn't be a couple of weeks, were such to happen. If I'm going to go through all the headaches of learning a new system to any great depth it would only be because I'm looking to permanently change to that system.

I love coming up with the concepts and ideas for adventures and the key pieces within them - new items, cool villains, funky traps, etc. - but indeed the scut work (as you call it) required to tie it all together can certainly become tedious. I'm in that position right now, in fact: I have what...

A good - and IME quite manageable - mix can be using canned standalone modules for the adventures themselves, but self-authoring the backstory/ies that tie those modules together. For example, you could run G1-2-3 stock but have your own in-fiction reasons for why the PCs needed to engage with...

I'll look things up then and there if I have to, as will the player(s). Problem there is that the "mistake" has in fact happened in the fiction, and a player has an ironclad can't lose argument to have that same thing work the same way next time. As the campaign goes on and these things get...

Thing is, one group's disruption could be another group's bread and butter. I say let 'em fight, as long as it stays in character. One of the PCs in my current game has a well-known history of murder in her past (including of both someone else's PC and a valued NPC party member), and she'll...

In the mid-late 1990s I very much suspect most of the people still playing were hard-core nutballers i.e. the opposite of casual. Most casuals had long since drifted off, many of them to M:tG

The only case I can present is anecdotal, which I know you'll dismiss out of hand. Of such few people who were still playing D&D in the late 1990s, I have to assume our crew was at least somewhat representative or at least somewhat common: that being, people who started in college/university...

There's also the hosting piece, which in home games IME also falls on the DM 99% of the time. For common stuff, the DM ideally should have it nailed. For anything else, the trick is not to know it but to know where to quickly look it up. Have the rulebooks close to hand (or in pre-opened tabs...

And in so doing you're dredging up faulty data - data that IMO was manipulated to help WotC make the exact point you're making - to help prove your point. Irrelevant.