Tabletop games

So I found myself writing this on a "These are my first models and I'm using Slapchop" post, and I stopped myself because I don't want to be Debbie Downer.

I'm not saying Slapchop is bad. In fact, the generalized field of grisaille/underpainting is incredibly useful. It's just it's not a great technique for people who haven't painted before.

As originally pitched, it's a very demanding paint style, that teaches a very limited skillset, and requires non slap-chop painting to make some colors look good.

By demanding, I mean that it is more difficult to fix mistakes with slapchop than it is with traditional painting schemes. If you have good brush control it's a time saver, and I'm using a similar technique on the models I'm currently doing. However, brush control is a learned skill and new painters haven't had time to learn it. I hope you're really good at coloring within the lines. If you're doing a traditional base layer highlight, and you mess up, you can just cover over with whatever color you need. You can't do that with slapchop. The paints are translucent and it will show your mistakes.

Speaking of brush control, about all you will learn with slapchop is drybrush and brush control. Some color theory could also be fit in there. The myriad of other skills, like paint dilution, highlighting, etc? Not so much.

Slapchop as originally pitched as gray zenithal drybrush over black primer struggles to give vibrant results with anything warm, especially yellow. Black is an awful shadow color for anything warm, and that yellow will just look bad until you give up and just paint it normally. I know that, you know that, but a new painter? They'll assume they did something wrong.

Is it useful to get an army done quick? Yep. Is underpainting a useful tool for painters? 100% Should new painters try slapchop? Of course.

Should new painters do slapchop as their first thing, with no other skills? I'd suggest not. Learn the wider range of basic skills. Then try slapchop. If I were teaching a new painter's class? I'd even teach it as a part of paining your first model, but it would be the last thing you learned.

I've noticed with a few DMs now, that they use players' flavour descriptions of spells or other abilities, to make them mechanically weaker.

For example, let's say I describe the animate dead spell as a fungus infesting the corpse and taking control of the body. A previous DM used that description to make any such zombie instantly die if it took any fire damage, because he judged the fungus would just burn up inside the corpse, independent of how bad the burn was. I never used that spell again, after he suggested that it might not even work in dry climates.
A similar thing happened when another player described her blade ward spell as rocks around her jumping to cling to her body like armor. The same DM ruled that acid damage would remove the effects of the spell, by corroding away the stone.

Is this sort of thing standard? Thinking about it, all of the DMs I'm talking about either expected or supported the additional descriptions coming from the players, outside the actual game. Taken together, it just seems like an easy way to maliciously make your players feel less useful. If you disagree, please enlighten me.

To be honest, I've had some bad experiences with one very toxic guy, who would do wayy worse stuff in addition to this. I'm probably just projecting his vibe on the other ones, making them out to be worse than they are. I just want to know if this is a usual thing. The newest one is also just starting out as a DM and he probably doesn't realize what he's doing.

Edit: Just to be clear, the examples came from games with the toxic DM and I stopped playing with him after some other stuff. He was pretty abusive in general and didn't give any benefits (that I remember) based on flavor. Also, the new guy is just very new and I intend to talk to him about this. I never expect any mechanical change (positive or negative) due to my description. They are meant to be purely aesthetic.
Also, thanks for showing me that my standards might be kind of low.