Is the DM the most important person at the table

[Neonchameleon]

Yeah, that's not really what I said at all. What I said was that RPG gaming has two indispensable roles - GM and player. There was no math implied beyond that at all, nor an implied value judgement of either role. I was certainly not suggesting that four of five players are somehow dispensable and I think it's vaguely disingenuous to suggest that I was. I think it's pretty meaningless to try and ascribe importance beyond that (1-1) given the vast potential differences in systems and tables that we are trying to describe.

What you said was that RPG gaming had two indispensible roles. (Not quite true as Fiasco demonstrates but I'll grant it). But you also said that "five players is not manifestly different than one player" - meaning that there is no need for there to be more than one player in your scale. How important does that make players 2-5? If they are "not manifestly different" then not at all. Now I consider this ridiculous (and I think so do you) - but it is where your logic in the attempt to claim parity leads.

Does this mean that the role of DM is more important than the role of player? No. But you have spares of one and no spares of the other meaning that only one person at the table is critical. @Son of the Serpent tried to give some sort of ratio above.

 

[Fanaelialae]

The example of one DM and four players misses the point IMO. Setting aside solo play for the moment, the basic, simplest unit of 'play' for almost any RPG is GM/player - you need one of each. Sure, you can add more players but that doesn't change the dualistic nature of the basic unit of exchange. So if the basic unit is 1-1 I think it's tough to make an argument that one in more important than the other.

Obviously you can get immensely granular about the difference between the two roles, and spend a lot of time talking about the compared difficulty or workload, but neither of those really addresses the issue of importance. It doesn't even matter what system we're talking about, since that indexes difficulty, not importance. I would agree that DMing is, in many cases, more work that playing, at least when it comes to prep and time spent, but that's neither here nor there when it comes to 'importance'.

I'm not sure I agree. I've played solo games where I wasn't feeling well and the DM did the lion's share of the talking. If the situation had been reversed, I can't imagine we would have even played.

Admittedly though, without a player there is no game. However, the player can be fairly passive and you still have a game. I can't imagine how you'd have much of a game if the GM is passive. If the GM isn't feeling well enough to run, we generally just do something other than game.

 

[Fenris-77]

Far be it for me to talk any of you out of thinking the GM is more important than the players. You need both, and beyond that I think it's enormously unimportant to try and rate the importance of who's at the table.

 

[Sadras]

Conversations move on and evolve, and everyone is going to have their interpretation of what "most important person at the table" even means.

I think this is the heart of it which makes it another pointless thread, since their are so many wildly differing interpretations.

Where some decided to analyse the words most, important & table and even analysed inserted words such as game/s & roles, some of us defined the question by the word person. Now ofcourse the OP elaborates more on the question of the thread, but IMO confuses the issue further. While he speaks about everyone having a good time, he does drill down to A player derailing the plot.

Anyways I don't disagree with @Fenris-77's position of indespensible roles but that is not the position I was debating from.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think this is the heart of it which makes it another pointless thread, since their are so many wildly differing interpretations.

Where some decided to analyse the words most, important & table and even analysed inserted words such as game/s & roles, some of us defined the question by the word person. Now ofcourse the OP elaborates more on the question of the thread, but IMO confuses the issue further. While he speaks about everyone having a good time, he does drill down to A player derailing the plot.

Anyways I don't disagree with @Fenris-77's position of indespensible roles but that is not the position I was debating from.

Pointless? It’s a discussion. We don’t all need to agree, and a definitive answer isn’t needed for the discussion to have value.

 

[MGibster]

Conversations move on and evolve, and everyone is going to have their interpretation of what "most important person at the table" even means. So I agree with @MGibster in the point that he's making. But it was a different point than mine.

I think we can all agree that the best interpretation of this thread is that MGibster is awesome and the most important person in this thread.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I don't even think we needed a thread for that.

 

[FrogReaver]

So I was DM for 3 players over the weekend.

There was a spurt where the players were doing a few things the day before they were going to go out on an adventure. One PC is sleeping, 2 of the PC's prank each other a bit. A guard gets involved. One player decides to prank the guard and for the next 30 minutes proceeds to be the only player interacting in the game trying to annoy the guards. I attempted everything I could think of to move the scene forward to the next morning but he wasn't having any of it.

Finally one of the other players has their PC go get his and lead him away from the guards and we cut to the next morning. That player was more important to the game than me.

 

[macd21]

So I was DM for 3 players over the weekend.

There was a spurt where the players were doing a few things the day before they were going to go out on an adventure. One PC is sleeping, 2 of the PC's prank each other a bit. A guard gets involved. One player decides to prank the guard and for the next 30 minutes proceeds to be the only player interacting in the game trying to annoy the guards. I attempted everything I could think of to move the scene forward to the next morning but he wasn't having any of it.

Finally one of the other players has their PC go get his and lead him away from the guards and we cut to the next morning. That player was more important to the game than me.

No, they weren’t. They helped push forward to the next scene, but without you there wouldn’t have been any scenes.

 

[Fanaelialae]

So I was DM for 3 players over the weekend.

There was a spurt where the players were doing a few things the day before they were going to go out on an adventure. One PC is sleeping, 2 of the PC's prank each other a bit. A guard gets involved. One player decides to prank the guard and for the next 30 minutes proceeds to be the only player interacting in the game trying to annoy the guards. I attempted everything I could think of to move the scene forward to the next morning but he wasn't having any of it.

Finally one of the other players has their PC go get his and lead him away from the guards and we cut to the next morning. That player was more important to the game than me.

That one seems rather easy IMO. If you want to advance the scene you say something like, "You utterly confound the guards with your pranks, leading them on a wild goose chase for hours. The next day..." Sum up and move to the next scene. The DM has that power. The most a player can say is that they're done with the scene and are ready to move on, but it is the DM that makes that call. They can choose to summarize a scene that a player is engaging with to move it along, or introduce new elements to extend the scene beyond the point where the players would have otherwise ended the scene (the BBEG shows up as the player finishes pranking the guards, for example).