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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9253067" data-attributes="member: 8461">So either way, you ignored the salient part that directly addressed the point you brought up.Then you're having a different conversation. In my experience, the GM does the majority of the world-building ahead of time (pre-fab campaigns notwithstanding...or at least, mostly notwithstanding, since they'll sometimes tweak those), and while there's usually a discussion among the group as to what kind of campaign will be played, the salient details tend to be the purview of the GM, while the players will try to work within those boundaries. If someone wants to push said boundaries, that's all well and good, but I'd say that requires a compelling reason why such an idea should be greenlit, since it tends to require more work on the GM's part to make fit (and can overshadow the rest of the party), while the same benefits can almost always be gotten via some method of working within the campaign's context.And that's fine, but I'm of the opinion that this leads to a lot of slow-down, at the very least, as the GM tends to need to figure out what's going on and how to integrate it into everything. Quite often, it requires some time between sessions to iron out. And that's the best-case scenario, which is why I find it easier to have things worked out ahead of time."Discovery writing" can be a lot of fun when writing, but that's why writing a story and playing an RPG aren't the same thing.You can discuss that if you want, though as noted above, a movie (like most scripted fiction) isn't a very good point of comparison for a group RPG.Those have already been decided before the game began, but quite frankly, yes. If the GM has put forward a campaign idea where there is none of X thing, and later on a player decides they want to play X thing, then to my mind they're the one who has to make a case to the GM (and the rest of the group) why the consistency of the setting should be altered just for them.What do you mean "we"?I think that's a reductivist way of looking at the problem. If one party member can flatly overturn what everyone in the setting regards as an inviolable law of nature (i.e. there is no magic, and they can use magic), then it's going to be hard to demonstrate why the surrounding NPCs should find the other party members "just as" interesting as that. Even if you can, you're going to have to put in effort to get them to that status, whereas the special PC gets that status just by being what they are.I'm honestly shocked that anyone would interpret that as serious "math" and not as a figurative expression.Which is certainly the ideal, but as presented it seems to presume that there's some sort of happy middle ground, where everyone should get what they want. Quite often, that doesn't happen, not because someone's being stubborn or refusing to give in, but simply because some ideas can't be worked into the campaign organically (or require more work than the GM or other players are willing to put in), at which point a decision needs to be made. And I'd argue that unless there's some particularly compelling reason, that decision is probably best as a "no."Of course, if the player could find another way to make an interesting character without having to turn some convention of the setting on its head, that wouldn't be a problem to begin with.There's a reason why that's the main paradigm in so many games. And I don't think that the reason the GM is so often caught flat-footed is because they haven't "invented" everything, but because the PCs have introduced large-scale changes within the context of the campaign, rather than outside of said context. Assassinating a friendly king can change the entire tenor of the game, but it alters nothing about how the world functions.I think it was fairly pointless, and somewhat tone-deaf. Repeating someone's argument back at them with no changes except to transpose two of their points is needlessly confrontative...kind of like a player who makes a character that they know specifically breaks the rules of the setting. So maybe you demonstrated a good point after all, albeit not the one you meant. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /></blockquote>

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