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Elephant in the room: rogue and fighter dailies.
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5928928" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>By your standards I'm probably a fairly traditional GM, but by general ENworld standards I get the vibe that I'm a fairly liberal GM.</p><p></p><p>For example, when one of the PCs - a human wizard - died in a recent session and the player wanted him to come back as a deva invoker, I was completely happy with that (and not especially surprised, given the prior path of development of the PC, and the direction I knew the player was taking him in) and straight away worked how to fit it in.</p><p></p><p>A different example from a recent session: the players wanted to recover a property in town from the wererats who were living in it, and instead of fighting them (which I'd assumed would happen) made legal inquiries, won a court case and then served an eviction notice on them.</p><p></p><p>The player of the dwarf has the artefact Whelm, but is a 2-hander specialist and so wants to have Whelm reforged as Overwhelm, a mordenkrad. His idea, and Whelm is currently with the dwarven smiths being reforged.</p><p></p><p>The player of the drow sorcerer who worships Corellon regularly makes up new details of his secret society and their rites and members and plans, and I dutifully incorporate these into the game.</p><p></p><p>But I'm still the gatekeeper, and the one who is responsible for mediating all this stuff into the broader backstory. So the players can still be surprised by stuff that comes out of their choices, or even out of stuff that they introduce into the game. For example, I used the court case against the wererats as a chance to introduce a political complication into the situation that the players hadn't expected and that their PCs don't want: their grounds for the eviction were that the assignment of title to the wererats was done by the Baron's wizard advisor, who - it turns out - was a traitor the whole time, and they successfully argued on this basis that none of his deads should have the force of law. In agreeing with them, the patriarch of Bahamut who was overseeing the hearing noted that the Baron, in whose name the wizard had acted, "surely wouldn't have consented to the action had he know - as sadly he didn't - that he was being used as a pawn of the traitor".</p><p></p><p>For me, what you're describing is just crappy GMing. It really is the pits.</p><p></p><p>And it makes me want to pull out a favourite <a href="http://Ron Edwards quote" target="_blank">Ron Edwards quote</a>; he's talking about another poster's problems sorting out authority over backstory and scene framing:</p><p></p><p style="margin-left: 20px">I think it has nothing at all to do with distributed authority, but rather with the group members' shared trust that situational authority is going to get exerted for maximal enjoyment among everyone. If, for example, we are playing a game in which I, alone, have full situational authority, and if everyone is confident that I will use that authority to get to stuff they want (for example, taking suggestions), then all is well. Or if we are playing a game in which we do "next person to the left frames each scene," and if that confidence is just as shared, around the table, that each of us will get to the stuff that others want (again, suggestions are accepted), then all is well.</p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px">It's not the distributed or not-distributed aspect of situational authority you're concerned with, it's your trust at the table, as a group, that your situations in the S[hared] I[maginary] S[pace] are worth anyone's time. Bluntly, you guys ought to work on that.</p><p>A lot of my work as a GM is frankly doing stuff I'd do anyway, like thinking about ideas for stories and scenarios and reading and thinking about RPGs.</p><p></p><p>The bits I work hard at are (i) the record keeping, note keeping aspect (my group relies on me heavily fo that), and (ii) making sure that the way I frame situations, and then the way I adjudicate them within the confines of the action resolution mechanics, produces results that are worth my players' time.</p><p></p><p>I know that's not how everyone thinks of the GM's role, but I imagine that you (Hussar) can see where I'm coming from.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 5928928, member: 42582"] By your standards I'm probably a fairly traditional GM, but by general ENworld standards I get the vibe that I'm a fairly liberal GM. For example, when one of the PCs - a human wizard - died in a recent session and the player wanted him to come back as a deva invoker, I was completely happy with that (and not especially surprised, given the prior path of development of the PC, and the direction I knew the player was taking him in) and straight away worked how to fit it in. A different example from a recent session: the players wanted to recover a property in town from the wererats who were living in it, and instead of fighting them (which I'd assumed would happen) made legal inquiries, won a court case and then served an eviction notice on them. The player of the dwarf has the artefact Whelm, but is a 2-hander specialist and so wants to have Whelm reforged as Overwhelm, a mordenkrad. His idea, and Whelm is currently with the dwarven smiths being reforged. The player of the drow sorcerer who worships Corellon regularly makes up new details of his secret society and their rites and members and plans, and I dutifully incorporate these into the game. But I'm still the gatekeeper, and the one who is responsible for mediating all this stuff into the broader backstory. So the players can still be surprised by stuff that comes out of their choices, or even out of stuff that they introduce into the game. For example, I used the court case against the wererats as a chance to introduce a political complication into the situation that the players hadn't expected and that their PCs don't want: their grounds for the eviction were that the assignment of title to the wererats was done by the Baron's wizard advisor, who - it turns out - was a traitor the whole time, and they successfully argued on this basis that none of his deads should have the force of law. In agreeing with them, the patriarch of Bahamut who was overseeing the hearing noted that the Baron, in whose name the wizard had acted, "surely wouldn't have consented to the action had he know - as sadly he didn't - that he was being used as a pawn of the traitor". For me, what you're describing is just crappy GMing. It really is the pits. And it makes me want to pull out a favourite [url]Ron Edwards quote[/url]; he's talking about another poster's problems sorting out authority over backstory and scene framing: [indent]I think it has nothing at all to do with distributed authority, but rather with the group members' shared trust that situational authority is going to get exerted for maximal enjoyment among everyone. If, for example, we are playing a game in which I, alone, have full situational authority, and if everyone is confident that I will use that authority to get to stuff they want (for example, taking suggestions), then all is well. Or if we are playing a game in which we do "next person to the left frames each scene," and if that confidence is just as shared, around the table, that each of us will get to the stuff that others want (again, suggestions are accepted), then all is well. It's not the distributed or not-distributed aspect of situational authority you're concerned with, it's your trust at the table, as a group, that your situations in the S[hared] I[maginary] S[pace] are worth anyone's time. Bluntly, you guys ought to work on that.[/indent]A lot of my work as a GM is frankly doing stuff I'd do anyway, like thinking about ideas for stories and scenarios and reading and thinking about RPGs. The bits I work hard at are (i) the record keeping, note keeping aspect (my group relies on me heavily fo that), and (ii) making sure that the way I frame situations, and then the way I adjudicate them within the confines of the action resolution mechanics, produces results that are worth my players' time. I know that's not how everyone thinks of the GM's role, but I imagine that you (Hussar) can see where I'm coming from. [/QUOTE]
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