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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 8162384" data-attributes="member: 7026617">I'm going to step in a little on this and suggest there's some reasons for this.First premise: people can be problematic.  Players, GMs, it doesn't matter.  But there's some practical issues that make a lot of GMs develop the attitude they do that is not unfounded.  In a lot of cases, a given GM will encounter far more players in his gaming career than a given player will encounter GMs.  I'd argue that hitting a bad GM often has more long-term impact on a player (including some bad habits he may carry along for the rest of his gaming life), but its still more possible for a player to rarely hit a terrible one than a GM unless he's lucky and rarely rotates through players.Second, while blindspots can exist in both directions (there are absolutely GMs who do not understand how things look from the players' POV, and even ones that do sometimes can't extract the difference from people who only play and those who do both), it is relatively easy to be a low-investment player in a lot of cases.  That makes it really easy for a player to have tunnel vision about things that impact themselves but may not be a good idea on overall health of a campaign.  The tendency for some GMs to be overprotective of their campaign can turn into a pathology, but its rooted in a basic assumption that things that damage some elements of the campaign and operation of same will be a harm to everyone involved; further, its not always one of those things that the cause and effect will be super obvious from down on the ground with the players; especially in cases where a player doesn't think in a big-picture way (and some players will absolutely actively resist doing so) so they're not going to be interested in helping reign in such things, even when they aren't enjoying some of the side effects of it.The effect of this is many GMs develop what my wife calls "scar tissue"; attitudes toward things because of problem players that carry over to their interaction with players as a group.  (You absolutely see this with players too, which is why a fair number of players have serious trust issues with GMs).  With GMs, further, the effects of this scar tissue propagate to new GMs; relatively few GMs are entirely self-taught (though they do occur) so they absorb expectations from other GMs. And like everything else in human experience, once they have these expectations, confirmation bias will tend to make them select data that reinforces those expectations.Well, to be really blunt, it would be easier if some of them didn't seem to have such terrible tunnel vision.  Even when not selfish per se, there are a rather large number of people who are so focused on their own characters that they don't think of the consequences of for other players in the group.  This doesn't always mean the GM is as good about that as they can be (as I've noted before, even a GM who doesn't think he's doing everyone a favor and they should just like whatever he's doing can have serious misapprehensions about how people are responding to what he's doing, either by his own blindness or because they're averse to telling him for any number of reasons), but at least in general taking the big picture is something a GM has had to absorb on some level.  Many players don't, some are actively resistant to it, and a small minority actively resent being asked to.Yup.  Honestly I suspect its an attitude that has only flourished because of the GM to player ratio being so high in many areas; even middlin' bad GMs can find players because there just aren't enough GMs.Yeah, as I've commented before, some people have a tendency to be flip about this because either their tolerance is sharp-edged enough that they go from "This is okay" to "to hell with this" without any appreciable middle ground where they're having problems but not enough to pull the trigger, or they don't acknowledge the idea of middle cases at all.Who said I want to play in a setting you built? That was the setting you offered, I never said I wanted it.Well, I suspect that in many cases its because if a campaign isn't working, a lot of people will just soldier on and not say anything, because as you say, they'd rather play in a game they are only intermittently enjoying than risk getting punted or the GM just walking away.  So people rarely see a whole group having a clearcut set of issues because even when its occurring most of the players hide it.  So only the guy who's willing to speak up gets noticed, and, well, "The nail that sticks up gets hammered down."I can only say that back in my days as a wargamer (which, mind you, was more than 40 years ago now) I rarely saw serious examples of this except in notoriously complex games.I suspect there's elements of how much overhead and setup that sometimes impact this.  There's a big difference between "I just have to set up a situation from week to week" and "I need to do a fair amount of initial setup and maintenance" to how much I'm willing to engage with a game I'm not super-enamored of.</blockquote>

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