I was always the DM among my friends, and they enjoyed my loose interpretation of rules and emphasis on character and story. Sometimes a guest player would come in and get extremely annoyed that I didn't know every stat table and that I allowed people to do essentially whatever they wanted. I believe those kinds of people make up the majority of people that continue to play role playing games. Also, people who grew up playing computer games on consoles are probably going to be used to pew pewing their way through one boring dungeon after the next.

DWEEBS

Yup!

If you're wargaming, you want absolutely defined rules. If you're storytelling, you want a sense of mutual collegiality. A lot of DMs don't make it precisely clear to their groups what style they intend to play, and thus factions and hurt feelings are likely.

Also, I tend to provide a very succinct list of things NOT allowed, so people don't get their hearts set on XP expenditures off in the distance and feel as if they are owed them when they get there. When I play World of Darkness, for instance, it's just easier to tell them exactly what books "exist", and then casually draw from the "non-existent" books and see their little heads spin when they think they know what I'm doing and I throw something at them they didn't expect.

Players are children.

I feel very sorry for someone who hasn't had an amazing D&D adventure with good friends.

Also, calling something "rubbish" is hilarious, because that word has absolutely zero impact. It's like throwing a pillow at someone.

BRP and Unisystem represent. D&D is okay for what it is. A dungeon crawl now and then is kind of fun.

GURPS is elegant once you get through the pain of character creation. I run and play pathfinder these days, and it is an improvement over 3.x, but it's still essentially D&D (the game of exceptions).

Ultimately it's the players and DM that matter, the system is just a tool.

GURPS sells really well for another reason: Since the setting is so easy to adapt, almost every comic book and TV series that doesn't use a different system winds up as a GURPS book. People who don't even play RPGs will buy a splatbook based on their favorite comic/show because they can ignore the stat stuff and read the rest like a technical manual.

He'd probably love it. I've been watching his videos almost non-stop since Lindybeige Week began, and one thing Ive noticed is that he's a pathological curmudgeon. It's all, this is wrong, that's a myth, read this in these books but the authors were all idiots so here's my view on how it actually went down. In fact, a good bulk of his material IS basically just him arguing that early and even recent historical/archaeological work is rubbish - one of his three videos on chainmail, for example, has him denying the validity of the modern ballistics tests that suggest chainmail was phased out because it proved ineffective against medieval arrows. Another one has him going off on casual Trojan War enthusiasts because he feels that modern observers miss what he considers to be the salient point about Achilles - that Achilles was not a "soldier", with a sense of duty and obligation towards his group, but rather a mercenary gloryhound looking for plunder, women, and fame, and that this was the norm for warriors of that era.

Actually, scratch that. He'd probably love it, AND THEN argue with it, because while archaeological work is rubbish, it's a different sort of rubbish than presented in this video etc etc etc