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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jack7" data-source="post: 5188128" data-attributes="member: 54707">I'd say personally that up to this point these statements aren't mutually exclusive in any way. Chances are they're more related than not.Weem, I hope you don't think I'm being argumentative. Cause I'm not. But to me DMing is playing the game (among other things), just from a different perspective.As a player you play from the First Person point of view (most of the time). When DMing you are, at elates to a degree, playing the game as God, from the Omniscient point of view. I'm not saying you're "playing God," in the typical pop culture idea of "controlling all things tightly, or even controlling things you shouldn't interfere with," but rather you are playing the God point of view. Much as the author who takes the Omniscient point of view can look upon a work or series of events and know things others cannot, or do not. The DM does not try to (or should not anyways) control the players, but he is omniscient as far as the world goes, and he does control the NPCs, the base and milieu of the game. In that way he plays Omniscient. I like playing omniscient, I fully admit that.However that being said, I am also often very pleased when my players do something I did not anticipate or develop a solution or response to a problem or situation superior to what I had anticipated. (Sometimes I'm pleased when they just develop something totally unanticipated or unpredicted, superior or inferior to my anticipations.) In either case my play as DM then becomes "qualified omniscient," and that is very gratifying to me. It reminds me both as a person and as a "creator" (of my world, milieu, game, adventure, etc.) that I am at best a "qualified God of fiction," that I can experience the joy and satisfaction of being surprised, and that my vision is limited. There is in any role play game I think a necessary tension between the way things "should go, or seem they must go," (and this is the creative impulse of the DM, the structurer of things as they are or should be, and that is for the DM to play), and the way they will actually go (or will go as no-one could have predicted, and that is for the player or players to play). The DM sets the play level of "being," (the baseline) and the player sets the play level of "what they will actually become." I am often happy though to see my baseline of play shattered, especially when that baseline is exceeded. It is a sort of an unconscious desire in the back of my mind, for my players to exceed me and my ideas of play and world-being as a DM. (In this way it is roughly analogous to my joy of seeing my children exceed me and my capabilities, in themselves and in their own capabilities.) So I like playing omniscient not because it allows me to control everything (though sometimes i almost can), but because it allows me a vantage point from which to watch others break or exceed the built in limitations of my own preconceived assumptions. About players, about the world.That is a good form of play to me. It reminds me that being a DM is not separate in essential nature from being a player, but separate in degree from being a player. That my point of view (as DM or GM), no matter how large and encompassing, cannot really be that of God, but is actually more like that of a General to a Enlisted Man.I wouldn't say being a DM is not different from being a player. It is very different. But neither is it is alien to being  a player. To me a DM is a kind of player. Writ large, with very different concerns, with a qualified Omniscient point of view, but still he is in and of the "play of the game."Now, all of that being said I still desire to do the best job it is possible for me to do.I very, very rarely play, but when I do I desire to be the best player. In that way not only will I enjoy the game but hope to help the other players enjoy the game, and hope to help them achieve their own ends as well.As a DM I hope to be the best DM because that will help me enjoy what I have created better and hopefully it will better help the players achieve whatever it is they are hoping to achieve.I've enjoyed the thread by the way.You usually have very good threads with interesting ideas and proposals.</blockquote>

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