NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9712653" data-attributes="member: 6790260">You're exploiting two different senses of "potential". One is the potential of a seed: an acorn will become an oak, if it is put into the right environment and nurtured correctly. The other is the potential of a pile of carbon atoms. A pile of carbon atoms could theoretically become an oak, but even if you put that pile of carbon atoms in an environment favorable for an acorn to become an oak, there is no potential that the random pile of carbon atoms will self-assemble into an acorn.Every player is a potential GM in the way that every pile of carbon atoms (augmented with hydrogen, oxygen, sulfur, phosphorus, and various trace elements) is a potential acorn. Not every player is a potential GM in the way an acorn is a potential oak.Some players will be coal; their potential is pure-theory that will never be realized. Others will be acorns; their potential is very much practical, though it might die before it can sprout, or grow, or mature.Nah. There are at least two more alternatives you have ignored:--- they like how they run your game, and have fun playing it, but when they're in the driver's seat, they want something else--- they believe you can "make it work" with a style they otherwise wouldn't like, so when they drive, they aren't gonna touch itThe one and only potential-GM (now actual-GM, as I understand it) player I have had fell into the first of these two. He explicitly told me that playing in my game opened his eyes to his actual preferences; he very much enjoyed my game and said so.As above, this is conflating pile-of-carbon-atoms potential with acorn-potential. The former is an easy thing to assert, because it says very little. The latter is claiming something fairly significant, and so is harder to convincingly assert.The fact is, you're not going to, because even if it could theoretically happen in some alternate universe, it won't happen in this one. No viable path exists for it to happen. Just as no viable path exists for a pile of carbon atoms to self-assemble (with the other missing atomic ingredients) into an acorn, even though, by quantum physics standards, there is a nonzero probability that this could happen.Okay...? That's...pretty much literally what was said. Get people to play in your game because you can then mentor them into giving you something. Not because you enjoy GMing and there's a theoretical potential they might someday do so--doing it because one or more of them will eventually do so. That's using others for your own benefit.</blockquote>

Verification