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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8162772" data-attributes="member: 6779196">Sure, I'll concede that those first two points (and arguably the third as well) were, in this hypothetical, proposed more by me than by the players. My point was more that, in your hypothetical example, you didn't seem to accept either playing a plane-hopping game within my homebrew setting or playing in a different, published setting, or working with the players to come up with a lore-friendly reason these Genasi characters were hanging out in the material plane as acceptable alternatives. It seemed therefore that my hypothetical group was for some reason insisting on playing a as Genasi, in my homebrew setting, exclusively in the material plane, and without working with me to come up with a lore-friendly explanation for this. If they would be willing to accept any one of these alternatives, there would be no conflict. Those are all points I would be willing to bend on. But, if the players for some reason insist on all of those points, as seemed to be the case in the hypothetical scenario you've presented me with, then I would decide not to DM this game (hence, "me DMing " being one of the points I listed that the players seemed to want).Well, I wasn't following the other thread, so ¯\(ツ)/¯I mean, so far your hypothetical hasn't illustrated to me that this is anything other than the organic consequence of the designed DM-player dynamic.As mentioned earlier, I'm willing to concede that in the hypothetical scenario, the players didn't ask me to DM. But I got that impression from the way you had set the scenario up. My bad if I misunderstood.I don't think that's a fair assessment. Sometimes the DM will agree with a single player's perspective.Here "ultimate" is being used to mean "final," rather than "greatest". Though, I have personally been avoiding the term "ultimate authority" because it seems to set some folks off. Again, it seems from my perspective like you are really objecting more to the term "authority" than to the actual positions of the folks who advocate for a top-down power dynamic.I don't know what other people have told you. I'm largely just responding to posts directly quoting me at this point.I dunno, my posts seem to be getting a lot of Likes from the folks on the pro-DM Authority side of this discussion, so my position seems to resonate with them at least. There are some who seem to disagree with my position, like [USER=23751]@Maxperson[/USER] and [USER=29398]@Lanefan[/USER], but they seem to be on the extreme end of the DM-Authority spectrum, where I seem to hold more moderate pro-DM Authority views.I mean, that's what I'm claiming that authority is needed for. My preferred game dynamic wouldn't really work without the top-down power structure. Not because I worry players would try to cheat, or ruin the game or whatever, but because I run the kind of game [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER] describes as "exploration-based play," where I as DM set up and control the environment and the players play to discover it. That kind of play just straight-up isn't possible if the players can decide they have a key to this locked door, or there's a city of Dragonborn on this part of the map, or Genasi are native to the material plane. That creates a totally different play dynamic, where the group is creating the environment together as they go, rather than discovering an environment that has already been created.</blockquote>

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