The meaning of Fair in D&D -but more on topic this time

Quote from Agilemind >>

 I am glad you raised character death, because I think it provides a perfect example to help you explain how treating players the same could be unfair.  I think your post on the subject also exposes that some of your confusion comes from your own experiences and only viewing the question through that experience.

This is kind of a semantic / pedantic argument, but IMO treating all players equally is fair, and not treating them equally is unfair. But being unfair does not mean you are a bad DM. There are many times when being unfair makes you a better DM than someone who is entirely fair. Same goes with my example of players with different levels of experience. Being more lax and permissive for new players who don't know the rules as well is absolutely being unfair but it also makes you a good DM. Whereas a DM who holds all players to the same expectation of knowing the rules is being fair, but is also not being a good DM. There are many many times both in D&D and IRL where being fair is not the same as being good, and it is not bad to be unfair. Though that does come back to what does it mean to be fair? Is it fair to treat players differently based on their ability, age, experience, or even personality / desires or it that being unfair and the only way to be fair is for all players to be playing by the same rules with the same opportunities and expectations regardless?

 
I want to acknowledge I do not think your definition is wrong, per se.  It is a very common definition that I think colloquially is widely accepted.  Speaking from the perspective of someone who practices human rights law and serves on an ethics panel, I would suggest that definition is misses some of the nuance involved in language, and leads to some manifestly absurd situations.

Take your hypothetical above.  The situation you present with a new versus veteran player results in the conclusion “acting fairly is being a bad DM.”   Even without getting into definitions, I think most folks would agree that is problematic sentence - “how can something generally understood as good be bad?”   Further, I think anyone with basic empathy would recoil at the statement “it is fair to hold a new player to the same standard as a veteran.”

That is why across many fields, dating back centuries, “equal” and “fair” are treated as similar, but each with their own role and nuance.  Equal is treatment exactly the same, whereas fair accounts for different variations in an individual case-by-case basis.  There are going to be cases where equal and fair are congruent.  But there will also be cases where equal treatment is not fair treatment - or cases where equal treatment might not be “fair” but produces a better overall outcome and thus should be applied over fairness.

Finally, you have defined equal and fair as equivalents, and introduced a third term “good dm” to define cases where equality does not result in a desirable outcome.  This is part of the reason those of us work in the field of ethics have defined “equal” and “fair” as distinct terms - we are trying to convey the same three-term concept as you are [(equal = fair) =/= good], but are further reducing the number of terms used to simplify the conversation and remove ambiguity that can result from the same concept being represented by two equivilants words.

Quote from Caerwyn_Glyndwr >>

However, that is not a universal option.  For many players - and likely most - their D&D group is not a pick-and-choose system.  They are a bunch of friends who get together and play the game.  Telling one of the members of the group “oh, you don’t like lethity of the game I plan on running?  Sorry, you’re excluded from the social circle.”  In such a situation, your option might be equal to each player, but it is hardly fair.

 

 
Oh I totally recognise that for some groups they're all friends before they started playing. However, what I've seen in groups that form around game shops, or even just online people are in general more isolated and so it trends toward people who didn't know each other before playing. I take on board the point though, if your table is all friends then telling them to find a new group is a little harsh. By the same token though, I would assume that in a friend group reasonable concessions and give and take might occur. In the first campaign maybe character death doesn't occur, in the next campaign maybe it does and as such you all cater to each other. 

Obviously, I come at this more from the perspective of someone running games for randoms in game shops and online. That's very naturally going to change things up. In that setting it very much does need to be 'here are the rules this table will be playing by' otherwise you end up designing an adventure by committee and it rarely works out so well (at least in my experience to date).