Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Enrahim2" data-source="post: 8993627" data-attributes="member: 7039850">This is a very interesting argument. Let me try to dive a bit deeper into the issue.Imagine there instead for one person being DM of a game, we had 4 separate players with the following roles:One player A describes all adventure content. The goal of this player is to make the game fun for the players playing the standard player characters.One player B is making all judgements on what happens in any situation based on their understanding of what has been described by A (posiblibly privately) and their understanding of rules and other expectations (like realism or what is cool). Their only goal is to make the game feel fair and predictable.One player C is controlling most NPCs created by A. Their only goal is to portray the NPCs as accurately as they can according to A's (possibly private) descriptions.The last player D is controlling all direct adversaries introduced by A, or turned adversaries trough C's controll. Their goal is to further those NPCs goals as well as they can, preferably at the party's expense.In this situation introduce adversial resource mechanics for player A would as far as I can see be purely restrictive. There shouldn't really be any situation where A would introducing any "unfair" element, given their goal of pleasing the PC players (and not player B, C or D). Hence I don't see the empowerment mechanism you describe would work for this case?Moreover player D would never have to feel they have to pull their punches."Unfortunately" for practical reasons all of these 4 roles has been folded into one person. This has the social side effect that D has been significantly disempowered in most groups as the players, and even the DM themselves don't trust something bad happening because it indeed is D that made a clever move, and not  A or B not doing their job properly due to being corrupted by their close relation to "person D".From such a perspective your proposed change is indeed a zero sum game, as you are restricting A (and to some extent person B), in order to allow person D more free reins due to their suspected ability to corrupt A and B is reduced.This might however point toward other ideas for actually increase the total empowerment if somehow A, B, C and D could be somehow more separated, as that would reduce the power restraint associated with the trust issues. In D&D this is to some extent done with A often being partially split out trough use of published adventures. Person B is also to a larger extent played by the game designers during combat due to the tight rules leaving less room for interpretation. Many other games try to solve it with even stronger designer presence as player B.This process taken to the extreme can be found in the board game Descent journeys into the dark 1st or spend edition. Here there were clearly defined adventures (A), strict clear restricted rules (B) no characters with any personality (removing need for C) Allowing a player to take exclusively the D role to their full power, never even thinking of pulling any punches.</blockquote>

Verification