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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5983182" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is a huge issue of controversy in RPG design and play.I am not interested in playing an RPG where the GM is responsible for creating the story. (What are the players, then? Spectators? Viewers? Readers? Performers of the GM's script?) I want the story to emerge out of play.<snip>Ultimately, D&D is not a democracy. While a DM should be a benevolent dictator, his opinion is ultimately the only one that matters.</blockquote>Although the 4e rules are a little amibalent on some of these issues (contrast the PHB with the DMG and the DMG2) it is certainly not in unambiguous agreement with you.Consider p 9 of the PHB:The Dungeon Master has several functions in the game. *Adventure Builder: The DM creates adventures (or selects premade adventures) for you and the other players to play through. * Narrator: The DM sets the pace of the story and presents the various challenges and encounters the players must overcome. * Monster Controller: The Dungeon Master controls the monsters and villains the player characters battle against, choosing their actions and rolling dice for their attacks. * Referee: When it’s not clear what ought to happen next, the DM decides how to apply the rules and adjudicate the story.The first two of these functions vest the GM with backstory and scene-framing authority. The third and fourth establish the GM as playing a key adjudicative role in action resolution.There is some ambiguity over where plot authority (ie authority over the unfolding of the story) lies, although I think the best reading of the game overall is that plot is expected to emerge out of actualy play.There is nothing here about rule zero, or about the GM's view being the only one that matters.The 4e DMG says this (p 189):As Dungeon Master, you wear several hats: storyteller, rules arbiter, actor, adventure designer, and writer. Some DMs like to add a sixth hat to that stack: rules designer. House rules are variants on the basic rules designed specifically for a particular DM’s campaign. They add fun to your D&D game by making it unique, reflecting specific traits of your world. A house rule also serves as a handy “patch” for a game feature that your group dislikes... Think carefully about the reason for changing or adding a rule. Are you reacting to a persistent problem in your campaign, or to one specific incident? Isolated problems might be better handled in other ways. More important, do the other players agree to the need for a change? You have the authority to do whatever you want with the game, but your efforts won’t help if you have no group.Despite the reference to authority, this hardly implies that the GM's view is ultimately the only one that matters. And this is before we get to the discussions in the DMG and DMG2 of player-formulated quests, player contributions to scene-framing and stakes-setting, etc.Well a set of rules can't require you in the sense of forcing you - unlike the law in the Australia or the US, for example, they lack police, courts and bailiffs.But a game can certainly say, Follow the rules or this game won't work. B/X D&D doesn't say this - it talks about the rules as guidelines. Burning Wheel, on the other hand, strongly insists on the rules as written being crucial to the experience. Given that they are different games using different techniques to produce different play experiences, that's not surprising. And it's unrelated to the presence of a GM - Burning Wheel, like D&D, has a GM.I think that, in this repsect, 4e is closer to BW than to B/X D&D. Its action resolution mechanics are a fairly tightly integrated whole. (But, as with BW, you can probably toy with some of the elements on the lists - monsters, weapons, spells etc - without destabilising things too badly.)I agree with the need for judgement calls. I think that's what's going on in 4e when the GM acts as "monster controller" and referee. But I think rule zero, as it is typically (or often) used, is about something more than this. It's about a particular sort of GM authority over the ruleset, and perhaps also adjudication (a high degree of GM authority to suspend the action resolution mechanics, in the interests of the story, or to avoid unreasonable results - both notions that Ahnehnois has deployed above).Agreed.[/QUOTE]

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