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The problems the OP mentions are rendered worse when the player closely associates with the values of the fish out of water character, as all attacks on the PC feel like personal criticism of the player themselves. One piece of advice I give players in similar positions is to deliberately make...

I think that typical fantasy art of adventurers battling hideous monsters was more dynamic, more marketable than, let's say, pictures of adventurers looting a room of treasure, and such artwork became more common even in editions with alternate play styles, some of which were more of the "avoid...

I like "Save the world" plots, but the PC don't have to know that's what they are doing for ages in the game itself. It is true once they are locked into a high priority mode it tends to push out everything else, so I avoid doing that for much of my campaigns, and create a series of linked...

My rule for such things is "The players must care about the world before they can save it". I run a slowish campaign with heroic-ish PCs, so they run through the gamut of save the lost traveller, save the village, save the town, save the kingdom, save the world, along with other more personal or...

agreed I would disagree slightly here. IMO the gameworld only 100% belongs to the referee when it remains his or her private creation. As soon as it's shared with players the DM has limited control over the reactions and interpretations of the players about the world and they may not, and...

The tone and subgenre of the game has a big bearing on this issue as well. A tongue-in-cheek space opera allows for more eccentricity than a hardish science fiction game. I've always been a fan of PCs being a good fit for the type of game that's intended. A game where the PCs are a random...

This is the classic decker problem from Cyberpunk and Shadowrun, which happens whenever there's a subgame in a RPG that only a subset of the PCs can participate in. To my mind there are two families of solutions - Either don't allow deckers or integrate them into standard play. Translating this...

I don't think collaboration is as doomed an enterprise as some other contributors to this thread seem to think. While I run a fairly conventional game I've increased the amount of ideas and material my players volunteer over the years. I retain editorial control because my players are happy for...

Most games I've seen have fallen in the middle ground somewhere. My original question was open, as in any game with GM pre-prepared material, its difficult to avoid having some expectations for how the material will play out, expectations that the players may not agree with in practice. This can...

This is one of the player taste spectrums that rgfa called Develop at start/ Develop in play back in the day. Some players write long multi-page backgrounds for the new characters, others are reluctant to write a single short sentence, the vast majority being in the middle somewhere. I find...

I think different players and play groups care about different sorts of player agency and prioritise different things. A conventional dungeon crawling game might prioritise fair challenge and exploration of highly detailed dungeons. PC survival is a very relevant concern and a constant challenge...

In my early days in the hobby I idolised the totally prepared style of play as a goal to strive for ie. fully prewritten material that the PCs explore and the players learn about. I can't remember the first time I encountered referees with a different style, a more improvisational style with...

As it happens I'm on the autism spectrum and prone to taking thing literally. But I had a different motivation in my comment. I just thought it ironic that the analogy is far less appropriate to RPGs than in most other fields. And I am literal minded. I disagree, as there are no perfect...

RE point 1 above, in fictional gameworlds the sun may very well revolve around the earth(or other planet)(or the world might be flat or whatever). IMO some of the RPGs being discussed are intended to make the game about the way the world interacts with the PCs. Re point 3 above, I disagree that...

Thanks for all the replies, everyone! I deliberately didn't provide particular examples because I was interested in the general case and different perspectives on these problems and I find a specific example can lead to people obsessing about an isolated detail and ignore the general case...

Sometimes players refuse a plot the referee is significantly invested in. I've seen this happen many times over my years in the hobby both as a GM and a player. The referee comes up with a plot that excites her or him and is invested in presenting it to the players and running them through it...

IMO DM and player goals need to be sufficiently compatible to allow a functional and coherent game to emerge. In retrospect when I was a regular player, as opposed to referee, over 15 years ago now I generally sought a low risk strategy in RPG games, which annoyed some referees as they...

This may well work for you and your players, but it wouldn't necessarily work for me, for instance. I'm highly risk adverse as a player and it matters hugely to me how adjudication in a game is actually being carried out, as opposed to how the DM says it is being carried out. I don't want to...

As I see it stake setting, skill challenges etc among other things allow a question to be asked and answered in a relatively short time. The referee and players have to agree what the question is and roughly what the stakes are and based on what transpires the players succeed or fail after the...

While I agree it's unrealistic, the vast majority if not all RPG systems are unrealistic. I expect all RPG systems to have flaws and when I agree to play one there's a spoken or unspoken agreement to tolerate the flaws of that particular system that aren't houseruled away. There are many...