Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 7918355" data-attributes="member: 6696971">I'm trying to organize my thoughts in another fashion that may tease out or disagreement.Let me go to another arena; Mixed Martial Arts.No clue if you're a martial artist or a fan of the sport.Last Saturday Dominick Reyes and Jon Jones fought for the Light Heavyweight Championship in the UFC.The State Athletic Commissions provide the judges for these events.  This particular event took place in Texas (which has had relatively few events).One of the judges the TSAC provided was a huge problem for 3 fights (I am the last person in the world to buy into Conspiracy Theories, but combat sports have been riddled with corruption for a century...so this level of gross incompetence is...questionable).The Championship fight is a 5 rounder.The overwhelming consensus among everyone watching (and the overwhelming % of professional mixed martial artists) was that Reyes, the Challenger, won the first 3 rounds (and pretty handily), while Jones won the last 2 (when Reyes faded).  That should trivially yield a 48-47 decision for (new Champion) Reyes.Reyes had more Output, landed more Significant Strikes, and Stuffed 2 Takedowns/and repelled attempted Clinches in the 2nd and 3rd round (that Jones had to try to initiate because he was losing on his feet and was dinged).Yet...somehow...somehow that judge scored TWO of those first three rounds for Jones.Ultimately, the judges completely stole that outcome from Reyes and inexplicably handed the decision to Jones.[HR][/HR]So what I'm trying to convey with this is, yes, Reyes was able to "characterize his PC" in the span of those 5 rounds...but the "Force" of the judges utterly overwhelmed the gamestate and their "metaplot" basically subordinated Reyes' agency, dictating the outcome, despite the fact that his work should have cast him as the protagonist.Instead, he becomes just another "also-ran" in the legacy of Jon Jones (DMPC?).I guess my sense of it is that, like judging in an MMA bout or referees on a football field, Force is a zero-sum game.  Whatever the outcome was going to be without Force we will never know...because ultimately, it radically changed the gamestate at its moment of deployment and therefore forever perturbed the trajectory of play, those effects rippling from that point forward.Its a pretty harsh purity test, I admit.  Because of the inherent imbalance of power at the table, GM-driven or character-driven is binary, not a continuum.  If a GM can subvert the gamestate to his/her will once, the participants know it can (and surely will) happen again at any point.  That is the psychology that looms like a Sword of Damocles over the table.  This is why we have the "Murderhobo" legacy in D&D.  Play degenerates to (a) players always engaging in violence as the arena of dispute-settlement because that is the only arena that is (mostly) "Force-proof" and (b) players willfully making no relationships/ties/laying down roots and (c) willfully not engaging with content that the GM is trying to impose upon them.EDIT - and to reiterate, games that feature Force/Illusionism as a gamestate-dictating/fiction-generating technique is a feature, not a bug, to the "Storyteller and Entertainer" ethos of games.  Players who participate in those games want/expect that.</blockquote>

Verification