NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Snarf Zagyg" data-source="post: 9237201" data-attributes="member: 7023840">While I have written on the topic <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/the-dm-is-not-a-player-and-hot-topic-is-not-punk-rock.677121/" target="_blank">before</a> (and <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/respect-mah-authoritah-thoughts-on-dm-and-player-authority-in-5e.683302/" target="_blank">before</a>, and etc.), I think that it it fairly easy to understand.All people involved in the game are "participants." So, to the extent that certain people want to engage in semantic games to score debating points, it is a truism that every participant in the game (the "players" and the "referees") are all ... playing the game. Which means that they are all "players." Because ... wait for it ... they are all playing. But this is akin to someone saying that the the umpire in a baseball game is also a player because ... yes, they are also "playing" baseball- technically correct, but also not how anyone would use the word. No referee of a basketball game (for example) would say, "I am a player!"Under the general conventions that I previously discussed, TTRPGs have always defined two different roles within the game, and those roles have always been ... Players and Referee (GM, DM, etc.). To the extent that the few games that do not have referees (Fiasco) explicitly are denoted as such. Now, there are certain people who want to confuse this long-standing delineation that everyone else understands in order to make a certain ideological point regarding their style of gaming. As you note, "games such as Forbidden Lands, Apocalypse World and Torchbearer 2 ... expressly call {the} GM a player{.}" The reason for that is not because of the long-standing understanding within TTRPGs, or even because those games don't recognize the distinction (they do!), but because they are making an ideological point about the division of authority within those games. But instead of just being explicit about that, we get endless debates about the definition of a "player," even though this is a meaningless distraction about what is going on. It's like a lot of the debates we get ... it's just certain people trying to force terminology that is not used on to others. Which I am generally against.</blockquote>

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