You asked in #2794 why we sit down with players we don't trust. I said we pretty much always pick a DM we know something about (as a player or DM), but sometimes pick up players we know nothing about.
No, it was an attempt to point out the logistics and why its less risky in terms of running a continuing game or campaign to take on a player of unknown quality than it is to take on a GM of unknown quality. A particular game can usually progress if a single player is gone for any reason, but not if the GM is.
Given that, it feels like the math says if you want a continuing game to happen and you have several trustworthy people and several folks of unknown trust, your estimated odds of a successful game are larger with a trustworthy GM than with the GM of unknown trust.
Being trustworthy is a necessary but not sufficient quality to be a good GM.
Being a GM doesn't make one trustworthy.
One isn't trustworthy because they're the GM.
But hopefully the group (of three other player and a GM that a new player is seeking to join) picked someone to GM in part because they trusted them.
They at least have the other people in the group vouching for the DM. (If one person shows up at a restaurant with 3 repeat customers eating there, the new arrival knows at least three people like it. Granted, it might be awful and the three might have actively bad taste in restaurants... so the new person might not want to be in an eating club with them anyway.)
Would the three other players at the table continue playing with a bad GM if they were good players and had any other choices? (If we're imagining an established table).
If we're imagining an all new table, then the good player joining a group of 3 + DM would have a 10% chance of a bad DM and 27.1% of at least one bad player among the three (using equal individual bad probabilities of 10%). If you crank the bad DM chance to 25%, there is still a higher percent chance of at least one other bad player at the table (still 27.1%). All with made-up numbers of course.
Would you expect the chance of a randomly selected player to be bad to be about the same as that of a randomly selected DM? If not, what ratio would you go with?
Being trustworthy is a necessary but not sufficient quality to be a good GM.
Being a GM doesn't make one trustworthy.
A campaign can often survive removing one untrustworthy player. A campaign can often not survive removing the GM. (Although another player could step up and run a new one).
I hope I clarified.
No, not really, because you're basing your answer on a flat assumption of likelihood of bad without redress. 10% isn't even remotely an objective estimate. There's cultural baggage that gets thrown in, and you can see it existing in the very expression of "Trust the GM" and "Don't Trust Players." Many bad players are taught to be bad players by bad GMs. Some dysfunctional people exist, yes, but that's true on both sides of the screen.
You asked in #2794 why we sit down with players we don't trust. I said we pretty much always pick a DM we know something about (as a player or DM), but sometimes pick up players we know nothing about.
No, it was an attempt to point out the logistics and why its less risky in terms of running a continuing game or campaign to take on a player of unknown quality than it is to take on a GM of unknown quality. A particular game can usually progress if a single player is gone for any reason, but not if the GM is.
Given that, it feels like the math says if you want a continuing game to happen and you have several trustworthy people and several folks of unknown trust, your estimated odds of a successful game are larger with a trustworthy GM than with the GM of unknown trust.
Being trustworthy is a necessary but not sufficient quality to be a good GM.
Being a GM doesn't make one trustworthy.
One isn't trustworthy because they're the GM.
But hopefully the group (of three other player and a GM that a new player is seeking to join) picked someone to GM in part because they trusted them.
They at least have the other people in the group vouching for the DM. (If one person shows up at a restaurant with 3 repeat customers eating there, the new arrival knows at least three people like it. Granted, it might be awful and the three might have actively bad taste in restaurants... so the new person might not want to be in an eating club with them anyway.)
Would the three other players at the table continue playing with a bad GM if they were good players and had any other choices? (If we're imagining an established table).
If we're imagining an all new table, then the good player joining a group of 3 + DM would have a 10% chance of a bad DM and 27.1% of at least one bad player among the three (using equal individual bad probabilities of 10%). If you crank the bad DM chance to 25%, there is still a higher percent chance of at least one other bad player at the table (still 27.1%). All with made-up numbers of course.
Would you expect the chance of a randomly selected player to be bad to be about the same as that of a randomly selected DM? If not, what ratio would you go with?
Being trustworthy is a necessary but not sufficient quality to be a good GM.
Being a GM doesn't make one trustworthy.
A campaign can often survive removing one untrustworthy player. A campaign can often not survive removing the GM. (Although another player could step up and run a new one).
I hope I clarified.
Quite a few things, here. I'm going to try to go through them.
1. Vouching. Vouching is an interesting thing, because this is assuming that a question is asked ("Is this a good GM?") and that the answers are open and honest and experienced enough to say. It's predicated on a bunch of other stuff, as well, like being able to communicate game agendas clearly and also the willingness to do this. I generally find this lacking. ENW is a site where people that are passionate about talking about games come, and where there's a high preponderance of GMs for games, and that kind of discussion is a fraught one here! At the average table, I can't imagine it's actually better. So 'vouching' is a pretty loose concept built on some shaky assumptions that said vouching carries with it any real informational value.
2. Bad players. I think we can all agree that some socially dysfunctional people are out there, so let's put those people aside and look at the base of players that aren't that. Given responses in this very thread, I can guarantee that I would be considered a bad player by quite a few of the GMs that have posted in this thread. Am I? No, instead I have a different set of priorities and agendas I want from games than those GMs. We are going to clash. But, in this regard, I will absolutely be labeled a bad player and would get extreme pushback if I suggested they were bad GMs. Why is that? Why is this arrow only in one direction? The issue is a mismatch in expectations, but only players seem to get blamed for this. GMs are often held as inviolate -- you get what you get. This is a serious part of the issue I have with "Trust the GM" because it's saying that it's players that have the onus of looking at their behavior and changing, but GMs do not ever have to consider their own play because they start out as right.
3. Your assumptions of frequency of bad players/GMs. Your model is terrible. It's a flat prior on badness that doesn't really represent the state of the hobby and also only considered actually bad and not mismatches in it's framework. As such, it's not generating useful data at all. As a model, it's both wrong and not very useful. So drawing on that model is a poor idea. And that leads into...
4. Selection. Being a GM in D&D isn't really that hard. It's been made hard by the zeitgeist and certain cultural assumptions and playstyles that have gained traction both historically and recently. Much of this is the idea that the GM has to have some significantly worked on setting bible -- either borrowed from published or made themselves -- and have all of the responsibility to present this accurately to the players. Further, more "modern" developments (stemming from 4e and heavily embraced in 5e published material) is the idea that the GM should be presenting a plot (the alternative to this is an even more detailed "sandbox" of smaller plots and places) and then managing that plot to make sure it shines. These put a huge amount of extra work on the GM, but also create perverse incentives for the GM to feel they are more important because they've done this body of work and that they need the extra authority to make sure this body of work gets experienced. This leads to the wide acceptance of things like Force, where the GM just directs an outcome or blocks a reasonable action, railroading, fudging, etc. Individually these may or may not be bad, but they put pressure on the GM to put pressure on play so that it conforms. And that creates places where the GM is feeling fully justified to override players with the belief that the GM is doing it for the player's best interests. Without asking. This creates even more places where players can come into conflict with the GM, and that goes back to 2 where the players are the ones majority blamed for this when it's a mutual problem (at best). I'm ignoring degenerate cases here, so not talking about hard railroads and clear abrogations of player agency, but instances of play that are much more mainstream.
5. Rationalizations. Your post is full of rationalizing why the GM needs to have more "trust." This is mostly predicated on the ideas that the GM is the only one with the story so players have to wait for that if the GM is absent. In other games (even 5e games) play can be suspended if any player is absent because all are viewed as important to the play. I've cancelled many 5e games because a player can't make it and we've done something else. The remaining group usually arranges a different activity. This happens even when I, as GM, can't attend. The idea that players don't have to be present for the game to continue is a de facto acknowledgement that it's the GM's story that's important and players just fill in the cast roles. Sure, there's plenty of cases where a player can be absent and a game can still happen where this isn't true, but that should be the result of a discussion with the group as to whether or not the player is okay with that happening. At least, in the groups I've played in where I feel valued as a player if I can't make it I'm asked if it would be okay to play anyway. So this is somewhat of a rationalization that takes an already existing situation (the GM is put in primacy of place over players who are interchangeable) and argues that it must be good for this to be this way because it is this way. It's arguing lipstick is good for pigs because the pig is already wearing lipstick.
6. "Trust the GM" means don't ask questions. This is the fundamental point -- you need to "trust" that whatever the GM is doing it for your own good as a player. This totally removes good questions about play. Let me give an example -- in a Blades game I was in, the GM introduced a complication during downtime (as they are supposed to do) regarding a faction the PCs had interacted with and set up a clock ticking towards a bad outcome if not addressed. I challenged this, because the complication introduced actually contradicted what had happened in play, where we had specifically addressed this possibility. The GM had forgotten that detail when they thought about complications, and my challenge reminded them, and they totally agreed it was a bad call and pulled the complication. If "Trust the GM" was on the table, this wouldn't have happened -- or, doing so strongly runs the risk of stepping on an intentional decision that the GM made to do just this for reasons and places the questioner into the "bad player" category of not "Trusting the GM."
Overall, "Trust the GM" is a statement that argues you should never question, and insulates the GM from having to look at their own play and adapt to the table. The only brake on this is that if the GM is really bad, they won't be able to keep players, but even here this is doing detrimental work because the players are still culturally expected to sit in the sessions long enough and not question until the GM does enough to overcome the threshold. This can be pretty quick in egregious situations, or borderline and take way too long while the player feels they shouldn't be speaking up. Not to mention the GM entitlement to feel that they shouldn't be questioned.
When you couple this with "Never Trust Players" you have a highly dysfunctional culture. "Never Trust Players" is about assuming that players are going to wreck your carefully put together GM game. It's not about looking for actually dysfunctional players -- you don't need a blanket statement that all players are untrustworthy until they prove themselves to find out people that are bad actors. Instead, this is a statement that players have to prove that they're willing to go hard into "Trust the GM" and not make waves or have wants from the game. It's a statement that puts players over there, lesser, interchangeable, and GMs over here, towering, dedicated, and put upon by the masses. It's frankly an incredibly toxic construct, and one that's managed to ingrain itself into the culture to the point that it's lauded when stated and generates immediately pushback when challenged. But the pushback is all rationalizations to maintain status quo, not reasonable arguments as to why GMs are entitled to more respect than players -- not just more respect, but a vast chasm of respect such that GM are to be assumed virtuous and players villainous until shown otherwise.
