Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Snarf Zagyg" data-source="post: 9239736" data-attributes="member: 7023840">I think you fundamentally misunderstand the issue that I was describing, as well as the tradeoffs.You have to start by acknowledging that I am not advocating for (or against) a particular model of play or distribution of authority; as I wrote before, all of them come with advantages and disadvantage- that is to say, that they come with tradeoffs. More fundamentally, I think it is best to examine these models of play assuming good faith (and high trust) with all the participants. Unfortunately, people don't. Instead, people always assume that everyone playing their game is playing in good faith, while everyone playing the other game is playing the least-optimal version. Which makes conversations difficult. It's why you have the endless regress of:Commenter A: My game runs great! We have a great DM!Commenter B: Yeah, well I've met a lot of bad DMs. Your game sucks. My game, on the other hand, is awesome!Commenter A: That's because you don't trust your DM. I've met a lot of bad players, and your game sucks.Commenter B: How dare you not trust players! Players are awesome, and it's your game that sucks because of bad DMs!etc.As I wrote before, games with a more distributed authority model can be great! Depending on the table. Trouble is this ... if you have a "LeRoy Jenkins type" (or any of a number of other types) they can do a lot more damage in a model where you have more distributed authority. Different types of players, even bad players, or low-energy players, can have their disadvantages mitigated somewhat with centralized authority. Not to mention a lot of players simply don't want the authority. There is a reason that not every player can, or wants to, "bring it" every session.Which is why (IMO) games with distributed authority continue to be great games, but tend to be the minority of the market. There are a lot of games I love that have give a great deal of narrative authority to the players, but I've found that you have to have the right group for them. Different models work for different groups at different times, and that's a good thing.</blockquote>

Verification