My FLGS (friendly local game store) has a Discord server where patrons can chat about all sorts of subjects in clearly marked channels. Most channels are highly active, and my heart is warmed by the pure excitement shown for their wide and varied outlets for finding joy in gaming of all types. I’m not just talking a variety of RPGs, but all sorts of tabletop gaming. There are war gamers, card slingers, role players, mini painters, board gamers, and so on. It’s a fantastic community with clear rules of conduct and safety measures put into place to keep everything civil. If you can’t tell, this Discord server is one of my favorite places online to engage with my fellow gamers.

However, people will be people. Big sigh.

Disagreement

 Disagree with respect. 

In this case, two folks got engaged in the Dungeons & Dragons channel on how they played the game differently from on another. Instead of cheering each other on about how they enjoyed the game in different manners with diverse approaches, they got into a finger-pointing, eye-poking, slappy-fight over how the other person was wrong in how they had fun. None of them crossed any lines to violate the code of conduct (which isn’t my role to enforce anyway), but they did get pretty vehement about how the other person wasn’t playing D&D “the right way.”

Resolution

 Be the cooler head. 

After about an hour of back-and-forth, cooler heads prevailed, and they both agreed that they would never play with one another. They also both agreed that since the other person enjoyed their approach at playing D&D, then there was no harm done. A proper resolution to the disagreement in my book, but I don’t think the disagreement should have happened in the first place.

Open Talk

An intellectual discussion about variances in playing a game or interpreting game rules is perfectly fine. As a matter of fact, these types of discussions are highly encouraged in most gaming communities because that’s how new ideas and perspectives are born. This is rarely a bad thing. Honestly, it’s usually a really good thing to learn new ways to do old things. It breaks us out of our formed habits and can give us a fresh outlook.

No Wrong

 Open your mind like it’s a parachute. 

However, telling someone that their fun is “wrong” is a hard no from me. (Unless, of course, someone’s fun is harming another person’s fun, but that’s another matter.) So long as safety and consent in the gaming is involved, there is no “wrong fun” in a gaming group. If everyone at the table is smiling or enjoying themselves, then whatever rules interpretations the GM (or the group as a whole) has made are completely valid.

The Point

The point I’m trying to make is that you shouldn’t “yuk someone’s yum” by telling them that they’re doing it wrong. There’s also a saying floating around that goes, “If you’re having fun, you’re doing it right.” This all means that you should let people enjoy the things they’re enjoying without stepping in to enforce your own ideas upon them. Just don’t do that. As I said above, though, if you want to engage in rules discussions do so with a functional parachute. What I mean by that is that your mind is like a parachute: It only works properly when it’s open.