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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 9003130" data-attributes="member: 82106">All human interactions are forms of cooperation. This is elementary and should be kept in mind at all times. You, I, [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER], etc. are all MORAL AGENTS, we are free to act in any way within our physical power, and nothing can prevent that, aside from literal physical intervention by other persons. This is reality. Everything else is a mental construct which simply builds a system of greater cooperation between moral agents. You can look at it from any angle you want, but POWER? Aside from the literal physical power of your own arm, does not exist! It is a fiction which we create in our own minds, and communicate to the minds of others through convention and culturally modulated signals in order to achieve things. So, no, there is FUNDAMENTALLY no such thing as 'GM Power', the very notion is absurd. I think you will find that we have all stated this fact in various ways.However, if you are going to rely on reduction of all your arguments to that level, then we can hardly have any meaningful discussion of human relations, let alone RPGs. We must instead, as the proper focus of our attention, rest on these, as I call them, mental constructs/social conventions. Pemerton studies personal law, this is a structure of such things. It has meaning because people accept it as effective, probably though long ages of usage and tradition. However, we do have an additional problem when dealing with a fairly unimportant (in the overall scheme of things) activity like TTRPG play, which is that even strong social conventions may not be terribly binding in respect of that play. That is, if I go back on my word WRT some issue of game rules, this is not a thing of great consequence in life, and is likely to hold rather little weight in people's calculations compared with say "Oh, I can have a bit more fun here if I do X, even though I promised not to." The assumption will be that the other participants will also understand this lack of serious consequence, and in fact most such incidents have little import outside of play.</blockquote>

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