I personally disagree, I will sacrifice rules for fun at nearly every turn.

NOOOOOO another bad roll!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Please forgive me FJ.

She is sexy AF though

Whining about ponies just netted you more red than the pony.

most people play the game in this way, which is why I don't really play all that much anymore

too many people thinking making a character that has his deity listed as "vin diesel", thinking it is a cool and never before thought of concept

where did all the true adventurers go :/

I like a mix when i DM i have them follow all of the books on character creation, but if they want to make something new, like a spellblade (actual 50/50 between assassin and wizard) I'll work with them on making it reasonable, same for new gods, a cleric in ny party wanted a penguin god, and thus mep the merciless was born, he got bonus movement in snow and on ice and was forced chaotic neutral, however i let them also have their own fun, if they want to break down a session every once in a while to have fun with rolls i just let them know we're having a longer session next time to get some extra progression done, like i let someons roll to convince a bandit to go have a fist fight with a bear while they watched, that took 30 minutes and the bear was damn near dead when i rolled a nat 20 for an attack and just had it rip the bandit to shreds

let's take the hobgoblin one as an example. It can be assumed that if the party was being spied on, the Hobgoblin's current attitude towards the party would be "Hostile" or at least "Unfriendly". It can also be assumed, given that a lone Hobgoblin is a roughly CR 1-2 encounter depending on equipment, that the party was also fairly low level or else dispatching it would have been trivial.

Now, in order to positively influence someone's opinion of you in game, you roll a skill check (d20+relevant modifiers) for Diplomacy, and aim to hit a "DC" or "Difficulty Class" relevant to what you're trying to do. In this case, engaging in sexual relations is almost certainly categorized as "Friendly" at the very least but for the purposes of this let's assume we had to go from "Unfriendly" to "Helpful". According to the chart ( www.d20srd.org/srd/skills/diplomacy.htm ) this requires a DC 40 Diplomacy check, which is far out of the range that even a highly optimized 1st or 2nd level character can hope to reach.

The hobgoblin in the story was obviously legitimately friendly towards the player due to the way it responded to hostile action, and thus Intimidate can't have been used in place of Diplomacy. Additionally, the rules actually do stipulate that while in terms of attack rolls, a natural 20 always succeeds and a natural 1 always fails, when it comes to skill checks there is no such rule. A natural 20 just means you got the highest possible result for you, a natural 1 means you got the loewst possible.

So you just assume all Hobgoblins are hostile? Wow. Triggered!

you make the game sound boring as hell

I doubt he plays like that. He's just discussing the official rules is all.

You can't blame them, I think most of the people who enjoy these stories never played a roleplaying game themselves. So all they know is 20 is good 1 is bad. Even if they played a session of DnD it's most likely because of those stories and they don't know the rules.

If the purpose is entertainment then what good are the rules if they get in the way of that? At some point it just starts to feel like a bunch of nerds who do math for fun finding excuses to force overly complex rules and math and learning on the rest of us less nerdy folk who just want to sit down and have a few laughs over a role playing game.

I mean, i understand that there need to be some rules but i think it's the responsibility of any good DM to figure out when the rules get in the way of the fun and on those occasions bend them if not just disregard them.