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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8160227" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think the comparison between gameplay and the legislative process is not very helpful. (And I realise you didn't introduce it. But I think it may have led you a little astray.)Upthread, [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER] has (multiple times) mentioned social pressure/understanding. In politics the use of veto powers - be that the literal veto a president can exercise in the US system, or something like the guillotine in a Westminster-type power - is subject to all sorts of constraints that professional politicians are incredibly good at intuiting, that political journalists spend their careers reporting on, and that political scientists try to theorise. At the extreme limits this is the stuff of constitutional crises and even of coups. (Think of the fairly recent debates, now moot given the prorogation fiasco followed by the recent Brexit deal and so I believe not in violation of board rules, about whether the UK government could legitimately advise Her Majesty not to assent to a Bill that had duly passed both houses but that the government did not support. It would make no sense to say that Parliament enjoyed no agency although in some sense the government enjoyed this veto option - which ultimately it didn't exercise, for obvious reasons to do with constitutional tradition.)When we are talking about RPGing, the veto power we typically have in mind is the GM's, and there are nothing like these formally and informally institutionally-generated pressures. In games that contemplate GM veto (eg some approaches to D&D) there is typically a social norm that requires other participants to go along with it, to not muster pressure against the GM not to do it, etc. It's nothing like the political case.To get something even remotely comparable to the political case, I think we'd need to be talking about a GM in a club game (ie played among those who are, in some meaningful way, strangers to one another) where there are multiple candidate GMs and where participants are able to generate feedback that helps determine who GMs in the future. Even then it would depend on other features of the club norms - I've seen club groups that nevertheless work under a very strong GM-is-always-right ethos.</blockquote>

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