No, you misunderstand. My fault, it's an inside joke. I was invited to play in this game, and was very excited to do so, but had to decline because my work schedule means I could not commit.
I've had one very good experience of being involved with setting design as a player. This was for an SF game where the would-be GM had a good general idea of what he wanted his future to be like, but wanted to construct an outline of history from here and now to then. There's a game specifically for doing that, Microscope.
I've never made the claim that other people are not satisfied with these aspects when play with your approach.
I've never said it's impossible. I've said in practice I haven't seen it successfully done to my satisfaction. I do not attend every game store or play with every possible group in all the country or world.
Well of course I don't like being an author because that is not the viewpoint I prefer in roleplaying. I've stated elsewhere what the goals of my style of play are. Sandbox, Skilled Play, Non-dissociative character only viewpoint. It's not rocket science. And I don't find the idea jarring at all. I just don't like it so your statement is by no means an absolute truth. I don't enjoy games where everything is made up on the fly. I've given my reasons but you insist that my reasons aren't my reasons. You should take a breath and realize that people are different. They see things differently. That what you enjoy and experience is different than what others do.
That sounds like an effective way to do it. I hope I've been clear that I'm not, like, spiritually opposed to player input of this kind; it's just that the tables I've been at where it existed, there wasn't (as I look back on it) anyone specifically empowered to say "no" to an addition to the setting, and there weren't any specific genre considerations (such as "an SF game") to provide any guidance or foundation for doing so. Maybe the tables were expecting the GM to enforce limits, but the GM was unwilling to. So, things were muddled, or cluttered, or something.
I think there is a group of players that don't want to contribute and if forced to contribute will punish you by suggesting stupid things. e.g. naming their character Michael Jordan in a fantasy setting. There are other players that really embrace a setting and want to extend it. Those players can be encouraged so long as they stay within what is already there. So if a cleric character wants to come up with the marriage rituals for his faith I'm fine with it. It's highly unlikely I've made a note on that as marriage is not common in my games.
While there may be players who punish GMs that way, I never got the feeling that was what was happening. It was a matter of the GM saying, "What do you want in the setting?" and the players saying "This" or "That" and those things not meshing well (at least in my brain, either as a player or as a GM). The larger problem was that (at least in some instances) it was hard, hard work getting ideas out of them. If you ask the players for that kind of input, and you don't get (much of) it, it doesn't make the GM's workload particularly lighter. If there's a difference in the amount of input you get from the players, it's hard not to at least look as though you're playing favorites (especially if the player giving the most input is your wife) but that's a different consideration.
