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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9732466" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think that is a grotesquely simplified version of not only RPG history but the dynamics of play.My reading of the very first RPG campaign as conducted by Dave Arneson is he very much wanted to run an open world sandbox with lots of player agency and player driven goals but that his players revolted against this open structure and vastly preferred the novel "Tiny World" of Castle Blackmoor to the simulationist politics heavy free form wargame framework he actually wanted to run.  The players gravitated to a more constrained set of choices and a less book keeping heavy experience with more immediate narrative payoffs than what the sandbox they had been playing in provided.But that sandbox build your own kingdom hex crawling open world never died as a concept and appears repeatedly in the games history.  I don't think there is any kind of clear trajectory here and the sort of collaborative play you talk about has been around a long time but has always been less popular because it puts more of a burden on the player while granting for most persons a smaller reward.  Writing a book is rewarding but most people would rather read one.  In the same way, most players want the GM to be the secret keeper because the thing they enjoy most is finding out the secrets, especially when the secrets are well constructed and full of interesting twists and turns.  The idea that we just arbitrarily choose a style of play with a GM as the sole secret keeper for no reason and that you aren't losing anything aesthetically when you switch to some other model and that GMs horde power out of their own ego rather than to be a gracious host just needs to die.</blockquote>

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