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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Samothdm" data-source="post: 1522742" data-attributes="member: 5473">For the group that I DM...Yeah, there is a default leader.  It took them more than a year to get to that point, though.  By default.  The guy who read most of the Adventure Logs (posts I make on the campaign website after the adventure that describe what happened) and did a little more research on the campaign website to read up on the material I sent them ended up having a better background from which to make decisions.  He started speaking up more and the rest of the group just followed along for the ride.Now we have a situation where we've added a new, veteran player who is very rules savvy.  He doesn't want to be group leader, but ends up talking as much as, if not more, than the current group leader.A good group leader is a DM's best friend.  He/she helps keep order in the group and ideally would help prevent situations where everyone is yelling at the DM at the same time regarding what they want to do.  What happened in our group for the longest time (basically at least the first year of the campaign) was this: I'd present them with a situation and they would literally discuss amongst themselves for 15-30 minutes of actual playing time what they wanted to do.  No one wanted to step forward and take action or make a decision.  They were too polite.  I was lenient on them because they were all newbies, and I tried to talk someone else into being group leader, but she didn't want to feel like she was forcing her opinion on the other players.  It was very draining until the other guy finally stepped up to the plate.  They still debate decisions but with the group leader taking a strong stance, things are usually settled a lot more quickly (and not always in his favor, either).  He knows when to back down for the sake of group consensus.I think that there could be a difference.  You could have a potentially intelligence and/or wise person with bad social skills.  He/she might be the leader among the members of the group, but let someone else take the lead when interacting with other NPCS.  The current leader in my group has one of the highest Charisma scores in the group and is a cleric of the predominant church of the area so he tends to also be the "face man".  From a DM perspective, I think it's a great thing.  From a player perspective, I can see how sometimes it might seem like your character is getting short-changed.  In the game in which I play, for example, it came to light after a long time of campaigning that we were actually playing in Tolkien's world, about a 1,000 years after the end of the War of the Ring.  Our DM had created a highly detailed setting on the other side of the world (basically, Asia).  Once we discovered that we were in Middle Earth, things changed pretty rapidly.  My character, a samurai-type from the equivalent of Japan became incidental, while the player who knew the most Tolkien lore (having read Silmarillion and most of the "History of Middle Earth" books) quickly came to the forefront.  So, I felt a little lost because my character background didn't really fit into the whole "Middle Earth" theme.</blockquote>

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