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Message: <blockquote data-quote="nnms" data-source="post: 6150796" data-attributes="member: 83293">It's also primarily an exercise.  Doing this will teach people things about gaming.So pointing out an issue like DMPC can be a useful tool for a future DM to learn.  Imagine you have someone at the table who's expressed interest in GMing, but they're not ready to dive in.  So you make them a Co-GM and ask them to handle the rules stuff.  They'll soon learn that they need to balance fairness against their own desires just like every other GM out there.Another approach is to put the rules responsibility out to every player at the table, but not the GM.  It'll become super obvious to everyone when one guy keeps trying to lower the consensus DCs and nullify challenges.  When you have rules to follow and it's not the job of the GM to set them aside whenever, people like to follow them.  They like to explore them and have fun with using them.  It's not going to suddenly fall apart.  And if you have an individual at the table that will abuse their responsibility, then you ask them to play traditionally while everyone else hammers out the rules together fairly.If someone wants to cruise through challenges or be more awesome and they're willing to abuse their position as rules-ref in order to do so, then that's no different than someone abusing their position as a GM to do whatever GMs do in the bad-GM stories we hear.The fact that it suddenly seems to illustrate the issues people might be concerned with shows why this exercise might be really useful for a lot of groups.Also, a lot of groups nearly do this already.  3.x/PF is far more about rules transparency than previous editions of D&D and there are definitely groups out there where how the rules are used is more like a negotiation.If you want to see a good example of this working, look at the history of miniature wargaming.  Around the time D&D was birthed out of that hobby, games were played with gamemaster/referees that had total final say in both scenario content and rules outcomes, just like RPG GMs.  Since that time people have figured out that players can actually just agree to both follow the rules, set up pre-written or randomly generated scenarios and have a good time sharing the rules interpretation duties.  Board games have been doing this for even longer.The advantage of giving one individual authority over content (the describer) is that people can be surprised in ways they can't without that person.  It opens up discovery, exploration and mystery.  But nothing about that is interfered with by approaching a more modern approach to rules in the same way miniature wargaming moved on from even having a GM.  In fact, doing so may be very illustrative for a lot of RPG groups as to where and why they are having problems or missing opportunities for fun.</blockquote>

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