We all acknowledge the power the GM has to decide in these campaigns. The problem is people are reducing everything in such games to the GMs decision power.
Well, in my case, it's because I ask about what things are removed from that power.
Context? Context is determined
by the GM. Things that the GM doesn't consider relevant context won't be included in the decision. Things they do, will. Hence, what counts as "context" in the first place is wholly under the GM's purview. The context cannot be separate from the GM if the GM is the one
and only person who gets to decide what counts as context and what doesn't. And unless you're actively speaking your decision-making process out loud--which I have been under the distinct impression is
not true of the folks speaking in this thread--then the players don't get any say in what the GM considers to be context or not-context, unless they dispute the decision itself and
then get a (partial) expanation--if they're lucky, and the decision wasn't based on context they aren't allowed to know.
Plausibility? Again, the GM is the sole arbiter of what results are "plausible" or not. That's been made very clear. Players
might--some of the time--have the right to question it. But in plenty of other cases, it's "plausible" only because, again, the black-boxed information the players aren't allowed to know. Maybe they'll learn it later; either way, if that's part of the context, the players (as I have been explicitly told) must wait MONTHS before they're ever allowed to question it.
"Realism"? Already dealt with
that one to hell and back, especially because when people actually did give me an answer, it was...to use the above words to explain it anyway.
I'm looking for something that is genuinely, wholly
independent of the GM. Something that--as was repeatedly referenced earlier in the thread--makes it so the GM
is not deciding to do X instead of Y, but rather the GM
has to do X instead of Y. Where are these "I had to do X" limiters? I know people described the GM as not doing something because they wanted to, but because they
had to. Where is that? All the answers I've been given always loop back to the GM doing a thing because they wanted to, a limitation they could easily (not trivially, but easily) rewrite or discard if they wished to.
Yes, the GM can introduce a goblin, that is one of the things GMs are supposed to do in trad play (it isn't a problem for the GM to introduce something like that). But the GM doesn't decide how the players respond.
No, they don't get to mind-control the players.
But they do get to decide what options are "plausible". In other words...they get to decide the
menu of things the players can pick from. Which is literally what I used very early in the thread as one of the softest forms of railroading, and nobody seemed to be particularly annoyed at that description at the time (not compared to various other things that elicited a much stronger response).
And the GM doesn't decide if the players went to the part on the map where goblins are common in the first place.
Question: What, exactly, prevents the GM from
developing a reason why there would be goblins there, even if previously there definitely weren't? The players cannot see the notes, they'll never know that a new development contradicts that--like literally, it's
not possible for them to know that. Even if the GM has already explicitly said in the most absolute and certain terms, "There are
absolutely no goblins in <region>", it's been explicit that you don't want a "machine" world, you want a world controlled by a person. What stops that person from deciding, a week after saying "there are
absolutely no goblins in the High Forest", that an expedition has been sent from Goblinia to the High Forest? As far as I can tell,
nothing stops them from doing that. They then develop this expedition further--the goblins are trying to keep a low profile so they hide their numbers, forage, avoid settlements. Presumably they want something in the High Forest.
Would this not be explicitly acceptable by your rubric? It's plausible, Goblinia exists and has done raids and such in the past. The High Forest has never been a target, but just because it's never happened before doesn't mean it can't ever happen (after all, before the first raid of any kind, no raids had ever occurred!)
Much of the context is determined by the players and their actions.
I strongly disagree. Because of things like the example above. The enormous amounts of context that have not ever been touched by players (beyond, perhaps, the most cursory references) can act as justification for
damn near anything. That's...kind of the point of my criticism. There's so much the GM
can use, which the PCs literally cannot possibly know about, but which can be used to justify
nearly anything.
I think we are all pretty comfortable with the level of authority a GM has in a sandbox.
Not me! I'm still waiting for some kind of limitation or restriction or constraint that isn't, fundamentally, built on something the GM wrote and thus something the GM could revoke or rewrite or rework or develop (etc., etc., etc.) into nearly anything they want.
But I think others are minimizing how much power players have too (because they keep throwing it back to GM fiat power as if that is the only thing that matters in a trad game: which to me sounds much more like a caricature than how they actually play).
When the world is inside a black box, and nothing can be added except by the black-box-controller, and the players only get to hear secondhand
some of the things that are in the black box, I really don't see what power the players have beyond:
- Complaint, which has been previously dismissed with "you just have to trust the GM", "you need to wait 3-6 business months", or "[functionally] never during session"
- Kicking up a fuss, which has been previously dismissed with "do that and I'll show you the door", or
- Departing the table
Within the dynamic of "I am a player in this game", the player seems to have functionally no power at all. Threatening to leave because the GM is doing something you dislike is already an indication that play is deeply dysfunctional--trying to present that as the players having power is frankly pretty ridiculous. Like saying that being an American citizen is optional because you can always just abandon your entire life, social support network, and physical resources to live somewhere else (because everyone knows immigration and naturalization are trivial processes nobody ever has difficulty with...)
