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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6122833" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, every group will have its own culture. Gygax was apparently rather authoritarian in terms of envisaging his game as HIS. I'm sure he was also collaborative, but it seems to have always been modeled in OD&D/AD&D as an asymmetrical relationship with Gary deciding what was what and how it would all go. That seems to have been (and IME was to some extent) the model for RPGs for a while in the early period. Game masters made stuff up and players interacted with it. If the player exercised some agency in the game world it was strictly through their character. There has been a lot of time and experimentation since those days. Nowadays in a group like mine the players help to drive things. I started a new campaign the other day. One of the players decided her character worshiped the Witch of Fate (basically the Raven Queen) and a desire to hunt undead was expressed. Undead were then forthcoming, and the party is currently trying to sort out Fallcrest's undead problem (which I cleverly built on top of a bunch of events that happened offstage in the last campaign I ran which some of the same players were in). The players are thus 'responsible' for this undead problem, but narratively it is a consequence of some NPC actions. As the DM I've clearly authored a basic outline of the scenario and supplied most of the details, but the players could easily express that the story should go in some other direction. Perhaps the undead will turn out to be a minor threat, or they will tie back into other existing background stuff that is going on in the setting. It really up to the players. They'll probably tell me what they want to do, and so far I've really only been following the lead of one player (the others are on a slaying kick right now, they're all playing strikers and all they want is stuff to kill, lol). As for the DM 'tweaking' things like spells or items. Yeah, the DM CAN do that, but IMHO the question should be looked at from a higher level. FOR ME I would ask myself why I would feel like this needs to be done. If I'm having an issue with giving the player something they "shouldn't have" that's silly, its a game. I should talk to that player and see what THEY think. Obviously players have a biased point of view, maybe more so than the DM, but there's likely some reason like "lets not make your character a lot stronger than the other characters" or something like that.</blockquote>

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