Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9832597" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Which is how I would run things. It's just not the way "GM vision" and all these other things are presented. There, the GM builds an incredibly tight world, where every city (and in some cases even every faction and most NPCs!) is pre-generated, there is no room for a previously-unknown land, a culture that has been isolated up to present, etc., despite that being....actually a real thing that happened IRL. Who remembers the journey of Marco Polo? Or myths and legends like Journey to the West?More or less, I just find it really suspect when the GM brings what seem, to me, like extensive and even draconian limitations on what the players can do or be, but the player bringing even the gentlest of limitations ("I'd like to play a <species X> <class Y>") is portrayed as ruining the GM's fun, hogging the spotlight, subverting the game, etc., etc.Just looks a lot like giving nothing but deference, indeed almost reverence, to anything and everything the GM does, while treating the player, as noted, as an expendable, replaceable nothing. It just looks...well, frankly, deeply disrespectful from the GM. I see the GM as I see...well, basically any authority figure. In order for them to justly receive the obedience and support of their subordinates, they need to prove themselves worthy of it. That requires, yes, some degree of putting the good of the group ahead of their own interests--that's why we trust them with authority. It will, occasionally, require that the GM accept that what would be absolute maximum fun for them is not an acceptable course of action, because it would cause more harm to the group's collective fun than it would net for the GM's personal fun. That is one of the burdens of leadership, accepting that you have some burdens to bear--and some of them will be tedious, frustrating, boring, or displeasing. A leader who isn't willing to do that is a "leader" in name only. If someone wants to take up that mantle of table leadership, I expect them to take up the responsibility to put the group's fun first--but note, first. That doesn't mean they're a doormat to be used by others. It means that when the chips are down and they have to decide between "100% GM fun no matter what" and "95% GM fun so everyone else can have 100% fun", they pick the latter. There are, of course, always going to be bridge-too-far things. It's not a simple "always do X no matter what", because if there were a formula for GMing, we wouldn't have so few GMs. I just don't think anyone who says "my fun is more important than your fun if we have to choose who gets to have the most fun" merits the degree of deference being demanded in this thread.Because that's sort of the concealed assumption, isn't it? That's why it becomes a binary, people act like the GM loses ALL of their fun for ANY concession no matter what, so therefore the GM cannot ever concede. But that's obviously ludicrous. A tiny imposition on one side for a massive gain on the other should never be dismissed out of hand. I don't care if that means some adjustment or patience or whatever is required--that's what (generic) you signed up for when you asked for GM authority over others.You want the power, you take the responsibility--which means putting others first, even when that's inconvenient or slightly less fun for you than what you were originally intending to do.</blockquote>

Verification