NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9476187" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think it's more than semantics, but I don't think it's just about the rules. I think it's about whether or not the GM can unilaterally create a shared fiction.Maybe the game ends when the GM says "rocks fall, everyone dies". But there are many anti-social things anyone else could do, too, that might bring the game to an end. What I'm saying is that the GM saying "rocks fall, everyone dies" doesn't, of itself, mean that that is part of the shared fiction if the other participants all reject it. And I've given some examples, less extreme, which I think illustrate the point.And the lesson to be drawn, stated a bit abstractly, is that all RPGing - even 1970s RPGing - rests on implicit understandings of the boundaries of who has authority to establish what sort of fiction about which elements of the fiction. I don't know of any RPG, for instance, which even purports to give the GM the unilateral power to decide that a particular PC is left-handed, or talks with a lisp. (There are random attribute rolls/tables that can produce such results, but those are not the same as unilateral GM decision.)The framing of consequences, too, sits within implicit if not explicit structures and boundaries.I started GMing in the first half of the 1980s. Within a couple of years, I had learned that there are limits to the GM's authority - that as a GM you can try and make certain things part of the shared fiction, but if the players don't agree then there is no practical option but to talk it out with them, and potentially to go back to the drawing board.Because, as I've said, there is no shared fiction on one's own.So I don't agree with you about what is much more modern. I think the need for everyone to accept that the GM's posited fiction is the fiction is core to the whole activity. (And the same is true, obviously, for any given player's posited fiction,)But if you vote with your feet/logout, then the GM didn't get to do it, did they?And once we recognise this - that the GM's unilateral imagination is not a shared fiction created by the activity of playing a RPG - then I think we can start to have more analytically fruitful conversations about how RPGing happens, what different authority structures rely on if they are to work, etc.To wit:What has to happen, if a group of would-be RPGers is to agree to a shared fiction that has, as its overwhelmingly salient content, the GM's sharing of their vision of a logically consistent fantasy world?For a start, I think we can propose that the GM's vision had better be pretty seriously aesthetically and/or intellectually compelling. And we can think about what a GM advice book might look like that had, as its goal, helping GM's to meet that requirement. It would be pretty pointless for that advice book just to assert "You're the GM, so what you say goes."</blockquote>

Verification