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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9253157" data-attributes="member: 8461">Yes, both in terms of measuring (if I'm understanding you correctly) the number of hours engaged in that specific aspect of engaging with the game, and in the salience that you're ascribing to it. Does someone who's sunk one thousand hours of time into a particular course of play necessarily understand it better than someone who's only put in nine hundred? Or is that just pointless posturing that detracts from actually examining the substance of the issue in favor of yelling "I know better than you, and here's why"?Leaving aside that you yourself avail yourself of "but it's true" later in this same post, I want to reiterate that what I described as a self-evident truth is that it's harder for a GM to instantly and cohesively react to a major change that spontaneously arises during the course of play. I don't see that as being an issue of the philosophy of how to approach questions of world design, GM authority, player autonomy, or similar concerns; it's just acknowledging that big changes which come out of nowhere can catch people off-guard, and so are hard to react to. That's not a value judgment.Which is all I was saying.The idea of "needs to be" is one that you're introducing. As you said, GMs can struggle to react to the unexpected. Recognizing and accepting that is all there is to it; so let's take that as a self-evident truth and build on it, i.e. that some GMs (I'd say a lot of GMs) need time to figure out how to react to that, either pausing a session or suspending everything beyond the most immediate consequences, and then figuring out the rest later on.Again, being able to learn how to deal with this accepts the premise that it's something that has to be dealt with in the first place, and so is an issue. I think it's great if you have a GM who can handle such things without missing a beat, but not every GM can, and in my experience most can't. So maybe let's start the conversation under that presumption and go from there.Okay.To be clear, when you say "it" you mean that the GMs ideas should be given the same level of consideration and oversight by the players as any individual player's are by the GM, right? Because that's a value judgment, and not one that's universal, let alone self-evidently true. It's an entirely legitimate school of thought that the GM is doing more work, and so gets more weight in making decisions. In fact, you don't even have to predicate that on them doing more work; the idea of a referee in a game, who makes a call and is the final arbiter of how things are decided, is one that predates tabletop RPGs altogether.Now, obviously the ideal is that there's still some discussion that goes on and a consensus is reached. But the idea that the GM's input should be "as subject" (i.e. to the same degree) to review by the players as their input is to the GM's review, in terms of hashing out points of disagreement (let alone points where consensus cannot be reached), that's not one that I personally agree with. And I don't find that to be a fringe position.</blockquote>

Verification