Charlaquin
Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
Asymmetrical games are a very normal thing. In Android Netrunner, one player is the corporation and the other player is the hacker. They use different cards and play by different rules, but they are both playing Android Netrunner. In Fury of Dracula, one player is Dracula and the other players try to avoid being eaten by them. This kind of thing is all over the place in tabletop gaming, and the idea that you find it “Orwellian” is baffling to me.I am not one to stand on useless descriptivist posturing, but I can't square the first part I bolded with the last part. It's almost Orwellian (All players are equal, but some players are more equal than others ....).
Yeah, one of the player roles being named Player certainly does create unnecessary ambiguity when discussing D&D as a game. It would probably be better to call the players who take on the role of Players as Adventurers or something instead. But from a game design standpoint, the DM is absolutely a role one of the people playing the asymmetrical game of D&D must take on.I get the impulse. Everyone is "playing" at a game. But when the roles are so profoundly different, and when people use the term "player" to mean "not the DM" then it makes no sense to say that the "DM is player."
As others have pointed out, this analogy falls really flat, because the referee in a game of sports’ only role is to hand out penalties for rules violations in a symmetrical competitive game. D&D is an asymmetrical collaborative game, and doesn’t have a punitive structure. A better analogy would be like the dealer in blackjack or the banker in Monopoly, if instead of controlling a piece on the board the banker set the order of the Chance and Community Chest decks.In the same way that it makes no sense (to me) to say that the referee in a soccer match is a player. Yes, they are all "playing" in the sense that they are all on the pitch, and they are all running up and down, and they are all "part of the game," and many referees are also players (and vice versa) at different times ... but it would be profoundly weird to say "I believe that the soccer referee is a player" because the roles are just different.