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Message: <blockquote data-quote="overgeeked" data-source="post: 9004971" data-attributes="member: 86653">Maybe. Certain kinds of players have zero interest in being a referee, even if it's a shared responsibility. Some players are not good at being a referee. For some players, having to be a referee even part-time destroys their ability to play the game. Like me, for example. I'm far more interested in immersion than anything else while I play. Having to referee would prevent me from being able to play the way I want. To the point where I'd rather just be the referee or just be a player.Well, that's very clearly a few posters' position, that referees are somehow inherently bad and entirely unnecessary.Absolutely. Some referees think they need not only the power to control the entire world, but to also make decisions for the players (i.e. railroading and illusionism). They really, really don't need that power. It's perfectly easy to run a game without taking control of the PCs along with literally everything else. That's generally how I run D&D-like games. I control the world, the players control their PCs. Never the twain shall meet. To me, just like it's an egregious overstep on the part of the referee to control the PC, it's an egregious overstep on the part of the player to control the world. But that feeling is also largely because, in my experience, players given the authority to alter the world or narrate outcomes will simply abuse that to engage in petty power fantasy. "A billion gold coins fall from the sky and we're rich forever." "With one swing of my sword I behead the Demon King and we win forever." In my experience, most gamers are terrible storytellers. If given an "I win" button they'll simply smash that until it breaks everything. Worldbuilding, storytelling, obstacles, drama, tension, arcs, etc be damned. Pick anything that makes for a good story and gamers inevitably want the opposite. There are a few decent-to-good storytellers who happen to play RPGs, but they are vanishingly rare. A table full of them? That's a one-in-a-billion occurrence.The referee can absolutely disclaim responsibility or authority for some given thing, permanently or temporarily, but games simply run smoother with the referee as default. Not all game have to be that way, obviously. Not all games are designed that way, obviously. I also run with a lot of random charts. Because I like to be surprised, too. It would be trivial to have the players make those rolls, but that destroys immersion. So I do that behind the screen.Sure. But the vast majority of games have some version of a referee. Even some games that claim not to still have a referee. Take Fiasco as an example. There's no referee, right? Wrong. The spotlight character in each scene is explicitly given the authority to run the scene, excepting the bit that the other players decide with the dice.Yeah. It sounds like we run similar kinds of games. Even when there's only two glaring options, the players will find a way to invent a third, fourth, and fifth...and then get analysis paralysis about which route to take. It's their PCs, so it's their choice and I'm fine running whichever thread they pull on...even the ones they invented*...but there's something about committing to a decision that just stops a lot of players dead. They seem to think there's an "optimal" choice or that I have some secret "right" choice up my sleeve. Nope. Just make a choice already. Let's go. * Invented here meaning a thread that isn't really a thread but they've decided to pull on it. Sure, you can absolutely go harass the mayor about how she murdered the local sage, but in "reality" she had absolutely nothing to do with it. So it looks like your reputation with the mayor is about to tank. Hope you don't need her help with anything soon.Exactly. Generally the person at the table with the least amount of patience. The rest of the table waffles endlessly so the impatient player gets frustrated and either kicks in a door* or tells the rest they're going to do X or go to Y location...and the rest just follow along. It's like the group is resistant to actually making decisions. And people want that same decision-resistant group to have all the authority of the referee? No thanks.* In XDM2E, Tracy Hickman tells a funny story about him doing just that in an early D&D game.</blockquote>

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