This analogy is not perfect. It is good in that we have in both cases a feel that we can question the "validity of" (Are you really railroaded? Do you really have reality bending powers?) The problem I see is that the first uses a relatively well defined term that can allow the question to gain traction. The second is less established, and hence it might be possible to make it a tauntology by defining reality bending powers as whatever the game invoking this feeling does.
Yeah, I don't really follow that. It reads to me as "this one's okay because it closely aligns to my thinking, this one is not because it does not."
No, that's an acceptable opinion with which I happen to disagree. Just like mine is for you, I'd wager.
Okay, fair enough. I'm surprised to hear that given how defensive you tend to be, but I'll keep that in mind!
For sure. My feeling, though, is that if you are hitting your personal threshold and we haven't gotten to a bad extreme, then you should find a game where your threshold isn't being exceeded.
Well, this depends, right? I don't disagree with what you say, but I also don't expect to know ahead of time if this will happen in a game, and if so, how often. Most of the members of my longstanding play group have GMed and can GM. Most are at least decent most of the time, and often very good. But They also do things that I would not do, and which I do not appreciate as a player.
I'm not saying it's bad enough to abandon the game (although in one instance I essentially did that, but it was fairly unique). But it can impact my enjoyment of a given portion of play.
So this isn't an extreme where it's easy to be like "look at this viking hat jaggoff, I'm out of here". It's my good friend of 35 years who just made a GMing decision that I don't like. Some such will be minor and so no big deal, I may not ever bring it up. This is probably most of them. But there are times where it's something significant enough that impacts my enjoyment of play... for a short period of play, or a whole session, or maybe even multiple sessions.
That's more the kind of stuff I'm concerned with when we talk about misusing GM authority. And my problem with 5e in particular is that it was constructed as a kind of Rorschach test... some people look at it and see 3e, some see 2e, and so on. It leaves so many things open to interpretation.... so there are naturally going to be different interpretations.
So it leaves itself more susceptible to these kinds of instances of GM judgment that may be dissatisfying for some.
I also think that some instances of bad DMing are bad and not just a matter of taste. However, since those are simply instances of a bad decision instead of a bad DM, my experience is that the DM will try to make it right somehow, which mitigates the negative aspects of the experience quite a bit.
That may be. Honestly, though, I've come to kind of accept that there are all kinds of people and all kinds of games may be enjoyed. For some folks, a hard GM railroad is a RPG failure state... and while I absolutely understand why, there are people out there for whom that's a perfectly acceptable and fun way to play. So I tend not to define any kind of play as objectively bad.
Having said that, sure, sometimes a GM may just make an error. Like get a rule wrong or what have you. Again, to me, that's not indicative of any kind of larger concern about GM authority or anything like that... that's someone just misremembering.
I'm only saying you seem to be describing a modal shift between "perceiving" and "authoring", enough that the mental shift can disrupt immersion. And all I'm saying is that when I picture environments in character, whatever authoring I'm doing is "subconscious", because I just see an image being generated.
As I presented, I'm simply demonstrating my own case wherein dictating the contents of the immediate fictional surroundings helps me stay in character, rather than draw me out of it.
For me, this kind of thing is pretty easy to do and doesn't tend to damage my sense of immersion, though I have to say that it depends on the context. How familiar is this place to me? Do I know the patrons? The owner? Have I been here before? Once, five years ago? Or did I grow up in the kitchen? What has already been established in play about all these things?
All of that matters quite a bit to how easily I can picture and describe these things, and how easily it is to author them. Or, perhaps a better way of putting it, how like my character remembering it feels for me as a player to author them. Yeah, I like that better.
I've found that when I say things like what I've quoted, I tend to get a reaction!
Similarly to how, when I've posted about GMing that I thought was bad or even terrible, many posters have replied by telling me that I'm wrong.
Yes, I'm somewhat surprised at the reaction to my last post! It certainly seems more enlightened than many past responses to similar posts.
