hawkeyefan
Legend
??? This is a very bizarre sentence that I can't reconcile with the original post.
This thread started with the OP's observations about GMing. So that's largely been the thrust of the discussion. How GMs can work to make player ideas that may seem to run contra to what the GM wants or has established actually work without disrupting their setting.
It's not a question of being "allowed", it's a question of maintaining the mystery and balance needed for crafting together epic stories. It's a question of respecting each other around the table, and putting in place a paradigm of play that looks even slightly like the one D&D has always used.
I didn't mention being allowed. I said involve them. Build a world collaboratively. Collaboration seems to be something you believe it and promote....and yet here you seem to be against it.
And I would say that this mode of play....of shared worlds and collaboration.....dates right back to the earliest days of the hobby and its creators.
Blah blah blah. Please show me some actual, real design done by players in your campaign, something that is even a small fraction of what the DM is in charge of.
I have plenty. In my current campaign, the starting town and its surroundings were crafted by four participants out of six (two players came along later). It's a kind of frontier town on the outskirts of a kingdom. I came up with an idea for a dungeon that was nearby and its history, which involved two ancient races that are possibly awakening to cause trouble in the modern day. Another player came up with a neighboring country and their desires for the local resources, and some plans they have in place to try and take the area. Another came up with the local nobility and how they relate to the local people, and the general attitude of the local people toward them. And so on.
Because my experience (and that of all my fellow DMs) is that even awesome, creative players usually focus their creativity on their characters and their stories, in particular because they are respectful not only of the DM and his work, but of the other players as well, and they trust the DM to balance all that. My players manage initiative for me, yes, and in another campaign, I completely manage the crafting, but based on DM's input although I make suggestions, again because the DM knows the balance that he wants. And that is not even 1% of what the DM actually creates for the campaign, stories, maps, histories, intrigues, encounters, whatever.
As for feedback, we actually generate tons, but based on the DM/players roles that we enjoy, which are the traditional ones, fully collaborative to have fun. Sue us.
Your players have gone from the kind for which it's "very rare that a player thinks about anything else than his entitled little self" to awesome creative players who respect the GM's work.
It's kind of hard to understand.
The main difference is that, even after a bit of tinkering like D&D did with 3e, the designers came back to "the DM has final say" like in the huge majority of TTRPG (I was just reading a bit more of Runequest a few minutes ago and, unsurprisingly, the exact same rule came up): "Remember that the gamemaster has the final say on the appropriateness of attempting Inspiration and its duration."
There are many reasons for this, and they've been put on the table many times, and these are good, factual reasons based on the general type of games that TTRPG in general and D&D in particular are about. And yes, there are very minor counterexamples of this, for games which are totally on the fringe of the hobby, again because it's not the usual players expectations.
I don't really have a problem with the GM being the final arbiter of rules-based questions or conflicts. Beyond that, I don't really care what the books say about the DM's authority and all that, or how minor games that do it differently may be when it comes to market share, or common player expectations. None of that really matters compared to what I think works well.
Why is is about rogues now ? When did we shift to the DM choosing classes for the players ?
It's an example.
And the amount of insistence on the fact that words like "tyranny" mean nothing really is absolutely astounding as well. As well as insisting on the players' side rather than the DM's side as if there should actually be sides. There should not, and anything put on the table to create sides, and in particular words like tyranny are a bad trend for me.
I didn't say the word tyranny means nothing. It's not about sides in an "us versus them" way. But at times, there may be conflict about how to handle something. The GM has one idea, the player has another. This happens from time to time. It's okay.