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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 9239747" data-attributes="member: 7026617">I'd find that more credible if I was describing a game as I run it.  Other than the fact I've never assumed the really hard edged rules and narrative control some gamers seem to do, I run pretty conventional games in most regards; at most some people would probably consider me "slack" on allowing rules challenges in a way that violate their sense of pace.The gig is that while I don't assume malice in other participants characterization of how they run or think games should be run, I absolutely don't also assume their characterization of how things should and do work out is accurate.  People are too capable of being blind to failure states in play, and there's often incentives for players to let things pass until they're utterly intolerable, and people who place a value in how things are already done are not heavily incentivized to see whether there's problems that are not obvious to them.  I've seen enough of that over the years that claims of "I never see a problem with how I'm doing it" just don't hold heavy water (they also aren't automatically wrong; it can be entirely true in their person situation.  Its just not terribly relevant).And again, I'm still claiming that I don't see this as intrinsically the case.  It (to be clear) can be the case, but as a generalization I'm simply not seeing a reason why it should be.  At worst, it simply means that a subset of the participants in a distributed model are needing to do the heavy lifting, but I'm still not buying that's somehow more problematic than having one doing it.  Everything else is just accepting the hobby's default expectations rather than setting new ones for a group.This requires an assumption leap in my opinion, since the historical weight of centralized authority in games would have to be overcome for it not to be the norm; the benefits a more distributed model would have to not only exist, but be ovewhelming to dislodge that cultural inertia (and isn't likely to be helped by the way hierarchical structures are taken as a given in so much else in modern life).Yes, the question is whether the default assumption of the top-down model is actually work best for the majority of groups, or is it just history and expectation talking?  I don't find the arguments I've seen to date and observation of the hobby having made a strong argument for the former so far.</blockquote>

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