Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7560109" data-attributes="member: 42582">As I already posted, all this is true of a cheating/abusive player.And what happens if the player(s) ignore the GM "continuing the fiction otherwise"?I mean, the GM is welcome to continue playing his/her own solo game, but that is no more RPGing than the players playing their own game. From the pretty trivial point that RPGing depends upon a degree of group cohesion, nothing follows about how RPGing and GMing can and should be done.An analogy: no one analyses how playing chess works by considering the possibility of a player who will tip over the board if s/he finds him-/herself losing.Once we stop pointing to pathological examples and ask how play proceeds when people follow the rules and principles of RPGing, we find that the proposition that the GM has the sort of power you posit is highly contentious - it varies across systems (AD&D 2nd ed and WoD are two highwatermarks for the approach you describe) and different RPGers have different preferred approaches.This is ignoring the reality of how games are played.It's trivially true that, when I play Forbidden Island with my children or my friends, what matters is what we want and how much we want it. But what we want is to play a game of Forbidden Island, and so we orient our behaviour and our expectations around the rules found in the box. Maybe over time we might develop some house rules or local conventions of play (eg we form the view that we don't like the way the Navigator plays and so we just drop that particular role from our repertoire of player options), but even those will be defined by reference to the game rules.Likewise for RPGing. When I GM Prince Valiant I am playing Prince Valiant. I am looking for the experience that that game provides. So I follow the rules of the game; and I take my players through the rules to introduce them to the game; and when we aren't sure how the game should proceed (not something that comes up much in Prince Valiant, as it's a pretty straightforward mechanical system) we consult the rulebook.You seem to be assuming that there is some notion of playing an RPG which is indepenent of any particular system of rules, techniques, participant roles, etc; and so a group might just sit down and do that (whatever "that" exactly is), with the GM drawing upon rules or mechanics from time to time as s/he thinks worthwhile and consistent with player expectations. But that assumption is in my view untenable in general, and obviously so in the context of this thread which begins with a request for advice on how to approach the game to produce a non-GM-driven experienc.No. You don't get to unilaterally specify what we are talking about.In your first post in this thread you said "I am confused by the discussion" and in your second post you quoted me discussing action declaration and said "Players don't declare actions, they declare intent." Maybe your assumption that everyone is talking about what you apparently think they should be talking about is one source of your confusion. The OP doesn't specify a system and makes no reference to "average" or "traditional" RPGs. My reply (post 13) to the OP which the OP accepted as offering the most useful response to his query did not reference what you call an "average RPG" - it referenced Burning Wheel and Dungeon World.Of course it's open to you to stipulate that by "traditional RPG" you mean an RPG in which the GM has unilateral control over all changes in the shared fiction - but you may find that many posters don't find that a very compelling definition, nor a very interesting premise for a discussion about GMing techniques.</blockquote>

Verification