Thomas Shey
Legend
By his past posts, because every player he hit has the problems he's calling out; so he makes the best of a bad situation.
D&D General How has D&D changed over the decades?
By his past posts, because every player he hit has the problems he's calling out; so he makes the best of a bad situation.
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
Legal mediation is exactly what I'm talking about: both sides present a case and then the legal hammer comes down in favour of one or the other or somewhere in the middle. Final resolution, end of story, time to move on. At an RPG table, that's what a DM does.
Consensus without resolution (which is all consensus ever is) doesn't end the story or finally resolve anything; and allows for - almost begs for - later relitigation after backroom discussion and lobbying, meaning everyone has to go through the process again. And again, and again, until either one side gives up in disgust or someone is given (or takes) authority, lays the hammer down, and imposes a resolution.
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
I'm also Canadian, and my experience with out-of-game consensus building among people who may or may not otherwise be friends or acquaintances has almost entirely been negative.
Consensus is a very very game-able system if one is determined to get one's way (which IME most people usually are, to some extent) and has the patience for it, and I've seen some masters of this gamesmanship at work in my time both in my favour and against me.
Fair, but I couldn't think of another way of putting it that one person has to think of the game-as-a-whole first while everyone else can think of their PC and-or the party first and more or less stop there.
Hussar
Legend
Yeah, but, man, that's some sheer bloody mindedness. If I had nothing but problem players for the last 40 years, I really, really wouldn't keep playing the same game. I'll certainly cop to some specific tables that I didn't enjoy and I'll absolutely cop to the notion that my lack of enjoyment was my own problem and not an issue with the table, but, even though I've had some tables I didn't enjoy it certainly wasn't the majority and very certainly wasn't all of them.
I've walked from five groups that I can recall. The first two were because the DM was just toxic and the players revolted. It wasn't just me leaving the table, the entire group left en masse. The next one I left because a change in the group dynamic brought about by shifting players resulted in a table play style I no longer enjoyed, so, I walked. The next was a fairly short lived 4e group where the DM was completely unprepared to run on a virtual tabletop, typed (this was pre-voice) about 20 words per minute and refused to create any macros. Meaning that every fight (and 4e fights were rarely short) lasted about 3 hours. I lasted about four sessions.
The last group, which I recently walked from, was a result very much like the one before where a change in the group dynamic resulted in a shift in playstyle that I just didn't enjoy. But, at no point would I even consider continuing play if every single group was as toxic as @overgeeked talks about.
Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
That's arbitration, not mediation.
Consensus is resolved -- if there's consensus, there's consensus. You're describing a lack of consensus as consensus! I'm having trouble following the usage of English at this point, it seems very off.
Hussar
Legend
That is absolutely not how mediation works.
Again, I think you may be projecting just a teeny bit.
But, then again, I have zero problem with relitigation actually. It means that you are constantly examining and reexamining results to make sure that things actually work. The whole "one and done" approach to any dispute is simply a recipe for disaster. There are far, far too many examples of this that are way outside the bounds of what we can discuss here. But, it's not hard to find example after example where an imposed resolution leads to far, far worse consequences down the line.
Heck, wars (include at least one very, very big one) have been fought over this.
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
Same thing in my books: it's a legally-enforced agreement.
No, I'm describing "consensus" as a stalling tactic rather than a resolution, as that's how I've most often seen it used.
Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
One requires the parties to agree, the other doesn't, so, in terms of consensus, not at all the same thing.
That is not how the word is defined in any context. You're using it incorrectly, and it's lead to disputes of meaning. If you honestly think that consensus just means stalling, I get where you're coming from -- you've got the wrong word but not argument that intentional stalling leads to no resolution. However, consensus means "everyone agrees" and is 100% a very clear resolution to what is being discussed. Not everyone (or anyone) may be happy about the outcome, but everyone agrees to it.
Thomas Shey
Legend
Its easy to read too much into what people say when they're complaining about something. They can be having serious problems with some elements of the player group(s) they have, and still net out getting enough out of the game to justify the effort.
Its one of the things that makes me tend to roll my eyes at "No gaming is better than bad gaming"; that phrase only usually makes sense when someone's sense of "good" is very strict and anything lesser is worthless. There absolutely are people like that, but at some point you have to kind of feel their lack of gaming is then a self-inflicted wound; if you set your expectations too high, you're asking to run into problems; some people are lucky enough that they don't, but its not something you can assume. Its much easier when you set a couple of lines in the sand and otherwise accept that its not likely to be a perfect experience.
But that's it; I suspect he wouldn't refer to the players he's had as "toxic"; he'd likely just consider them "typical" and maybe "tolerable".
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Lanefan
Victoria Rules
Sure, and that's excellent if checking whether things are working is the honest reason for review.
In my experience, however, it far more often boils down to someone saying/thinking "I saw that I wasn't going to get my way last time so instead I pushed for and agreed to a compromise which gained consensus; and now that I've done six months worth of lobbying and persuading I'll reopen the issue (or get someone else to do so) and try again to get what I really want".
