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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8921270" data-attributes="member: 82106">You know we have been around this bush an infinite number of times, so you know my reply, which is that the notion that players are just mindless self-aggrandizing actors who's only concern is amassing giant loot/xp piles is an EXTREMELY limited position. In fact I would say it is just plain an extreme position! There's certainly a need for a Process of Play in order to lend the activity the character of a game. It need not be anything like the one D&D chooses! Thus I don't find this point convincing at all. In fact I play in games all the time which, according to this rubric are not possible!First of all, every RPG (I guess someone could invent an exception to this) has a genre, and thus genre conventions, and has fictional position, which the participants acknowledge dictates what sorts of statements about what characters do are legal and which are not. The decisions as to what falls in and out of bounds can successfully be decided by MANY different possible mechanisms. Games, in my direct and extensive experience, do not fall apart merely because players may be making some of those declarations. Nor should we neglect the Czege Principle, which we have discussed many times before (whomever is challenged by a situation should not be the one adjudicating when and how it is resolved). Thus I find all these 'bugbears' you quote above to be little more than fairy tales certain GMs seem to tell their players to justify a certain type of game play.Nonsense. I mean, yes, if you set up a classic dungeon crawl and then have the players take over the GM's role as arbiter of the environment and actions, then that game process will go wonky. Not really because the players CANNOT be trusted to handle adjudications, but simply because Czege won't be satisfied and the games built-in incentives will act in a perverse way. However its perfectly possible to run a dungeon crawl in Dungeon World, in fact it is basically meant for EXACTLY THAT, yet the GM has very constrained options and authority in Dungeon World, and players can most certainly assert what it is that their characters CAN do, for example, as well as making declarations which impose constraints on the fiction the GM is able to put on the table (IE by searching for a secret door in some location and finding it, for example). Now, the GM might be perfectly within her rights to then constrain the utility of said door, making it locked, leading into a very narrow passage, etc. but only in concert with the rules on making GM moves. As we have many times discussed, all this works perfectly well, and the notion that there has to be some sort of GM who 'rides herd on the players' is merely a reflection of the specific way you trad/neo trad people play! It certainly isn't a design constraint on RPGs, at all!</blockquote>

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