That's pretty clear from your posting history. However, more common to my experience, for example, is the refrain the GM of our current game uses when we have some rules dispute or question about character design and so on: "it's your [ie, the players'] game; whatever you want to do is cool with me, so long as it doesn't lead to a degenerate gamestate!" (roughly paraphrased).
Can someone provide a definition of "lusory" for me? Several here, especially @pemerton , are using it a lot, and since I've never seen that term in any RPG (or indeed anywhere else) I'm having a hard time understanding why it's the most appropriate way to describe a process about RPGs.
Hmm. I would say that's a bizarre way to use the word "complete", but that doesn't prove they're not using it that way anyway. It's possible.
Yeah, that is deeply alien to me. If the GM stopping g wanting to run that game, we would play something else, with the same or a different GM. I have no idea how keeping the same game would even work, or how it would be worth doing if it did.
Cooperative multiplayer games with a high degree of interactivity (a.k.a. one-sided games) have certain pathologies that don't happen in multi-sided games (and vice versa). For example, when everyone is on one team, there's an incentive for and tendency towards "quarterbacking" where one player calls all the shots for everyone and other players wind up spectators to some degree; there's also social pressure on newbies because their mistakes negatively impact everyone's success. One way of getting around these problems is to just make success so easy that newbies cannot negatively impact everyone else--I haven't seen this much in person because I don't run games this way but it seems to be WotC's default approach. Another is to make it non-interactive, like a fencing team bout, but that's not popular in RPGs.
Lusory (adjective): of or relating to play.
Is there a reason we have to use such an uncommon word for such a straight-forward concept? Sorry to say this, but it seems very "ivory tower" to me.
Strange, because I have. Nearly all of my games, in fact. We always talked about it as "our game" when I first played in high school because it was the game that our gaming group was collectively playing together. Same was true with my group in college. Likewise, I played Pathfinder 1 with my friends in grad school. We definitely didn't think about it as the GM's game. We thought of it as all of our game because we were friends who were playing a hobby game together as friends. That viewpoint continued when I moved to Vienna and found a new gaming group. It was the group's game that a GM ran rather than the GM's game. These were not people playing "bespoke games" either. We were playing more traditional games in the vein of D&D: i.e, 3e D&D, d20 Modern, Star Wars Saga, 4e D&D, Pathfinder 1, and Numenera. Moreover, this was true whether I was a PC player or the GM player. I think that GM's were possessive about their homebrew settings; however, I think that's different.
I'm unclear if your response means that a rules dispute etc automatically leads to the GM wanting to stop running the game? That seems alien to me, and indicative of childish behavior. In the case of the games I play, the statement of the game being the players' implies that it's a shared endeavor, driven forth by the actions the participants, and that the rules should support fun, consensus play rather than privelege one person's interpretation over others. But maybe I misunderstand your response?
