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!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Campbell" data-source="post: 8658649" data-attributes="member: 16586">Some games do not have referees. They may have a GM or a Watcher or a Master of Ceremonies, but those roles are not the same. The Master of Ceremonies in Apocalypse World is not a referee. They are a player of the game with a different set of responsibilities than the other players, but one that is also fundamentally different from a B/X referee. B/X and Apocalypse World have different structures of play.In Apocalypse World players cannot go wherever they want and do whatever they want in the sense of exploring a fictional setting. The player's responsibility is to respond the situations presented by the GM and play their character with integrity while addressing the situation in some way. The reason we have a human MC is to frame vivid scenes that are fundamentally about the player characters, apply pressure to the players through their characters and respond to the actions players take to keep things in motion and centered around the characters. The structural restrictions in place are there so the MC can focus on providing that adversity  in a safe and fair way.The reason we need those restrictions in place is because the game explicitly breaks from convention and grants the GM express powers that would be extremely fraught in the hands of a traditional GM because they do things like allow a GM to decide things like a character's emotional state or separate them from other characters without recourse. These sorts of broad powers require a more restricted view of GM authority in other places.Let's please take this discussion elsewhere. This tangent has taken over this thread.</blockquote>

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