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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6335679" data-attributes="member: 4937">- emphasis mineAnd we aren't at all poisoning the well in saying that.  A lot of the time I think that we have RPG arguments entirely over theory instead of practice.  We are caring more about how we perceive the game and how we describe our game and how other's perceive the game than the actual nuts and bolts of how we play.  I've often wondered whether many of the DMs here that have the biggest arguments over theory in fact have much meaningful differences in the way they run a game, or if it is really just an argument over how we describe what is in practice almost entirely the same thing.  I seriously doubt that there are many real advocates for the straw man extremes.   Instead, in practice I bet everyone is doing some variation on...The process probably isn't formalized or even recognized in everyone's game, but its usually there.  Everyone's labeling of the process is more telling I think of their biases regarding how that process broke down in the past, than actual differences in methodology.  When you put down the actual process, rather than the theory of the process, it gets a lot more nuanced in the reality of the give and take than blanket statements of theory tend to be.The assumption that the player is right and the DMs wrong, or that the best game comes from being less restrictive or more restrictive is almost certainly wrong not only in the general case but in about half of them.   I have right in the rules the option to have in your backstory that you are descended from a deity, or a member of a royal family, or raised by wolves, that you are a misanthrope that only gets along with oozes, or any number of equally disruptive backgrounds.  I can't imagine however giving another DM the advice to accept specific disruptive concepts like just because I tend to, and I'm sure there are plenty of DMs that accept backgrounds that I wouldn't and yet profit from it (or sometimes more to the point, concepts not characters).   And likewise, I can see benefiting from some tighter constraints, demands on PC's that they conform to the backgrounds and desires of other existing PC's and work existing NPC's into their backgrounds.  I've seen two campaigns (one I ran, and one as a player) wrecked for lack of DM dictation regarding character concept.  I've seen more campaigns than I can count wrecked because the GM had the theory that the PCs drove the game.  I can equally imagine too much of a heavy hand wrecking a game so that its no fun for anyone, though fortunately I've only heard stories about that one.  I've seen players bully a table to get their way as often or more often than I've seen DMs bully a table.  The notion that its repressive irrational DMs and players who just want reasonable things but are victimized by their DM doesn't represent reality.   Players aren't usually all on the same page or even on the same 'team', and ultimately the DM is a player of the game as well.  The theory that the GM has even less say over the game than a player is if anything much more dysfunctional (because it ignores the reality of GMing) than the theory that the GM has much more say over the game than a player.If GMing was so simple that it could be summed up with slogans, not only would we no longer need to write about it, but we could replace the GM with an algorithm or a computer and be done with it.</blockquote>

Verification