Those are all fair points, but you are missing two important things, the first is scaling. games of D&D often have 5-8 players involved, including the dm, more than that is very unusual. Metalforge at one point recently had 30 players on it. Agreeing to play with one dm is one thing, but if they were to then turn round and decide that some other person was going to stand in for them, then there might well be cause for objection to that.leaf wrote:DM posts/announce/etc. that they are looking for X players to join in a campaign/session/module/etc. of some genre/setting/world/etc. and players join.cavesomething wrote: Sure, but they /do/ get to pick the dm who makes the rules..
Sticking with the D&D analogy..
Some of the player(s) in the group don't want to play D&D using the DM house rules and how the DM is running the campaign. However, they are using the DM's books, dice, miniatures, table, parent's basement (), beverages, food, etc. - what options do the player(s) have?
On metalforge that is a requirement due to timezones, but this doesn't mean that the dms that do exist can't be known, a simple addition to the MOTD (or even just somewhere on this website), listing the dms is what I am thinking of here. (such a measure may well have stopped this entire thread from starting in the first place)
The second point concerns what type of game Crossfire is. Is it a CRPG like neverwinter nights, a japanese style RPG like final fantasy, an adventure game, a graphical rougelike, a medieval version of elite, a chess game, or a multiplayer version of gauntlet. No category quite fits, and it is currently somewhere in between all of these. This I consider to be one of the greatest strengths of the game, but it is nonetheless something that makes the D&D analogy maybe not always appropriate.