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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mishihari Lord" data-source="post: 6408554" data-attributes="member: 128">I'm afraid your analysis is faulty.  If you want to understand power dynamics in a group of people, "everyone wants to make the best game for everyone" just doesn't give you enough to work with.  There's no "best for everyone," and in the end, everyone acts in their own interest.  The attitudes you see come from people's intuitive understanding of how these things work.  They might not be able to explain exactly why things are so, but our intuition about social situations generally works really well.The right way to figure out what happens is to look at the options, choices, and the enjoyment derived by each party from the various possible outcomes.  This gets into topics like utility, game theory, and negotiation theory.  I'll give an example with some made up numbers to illustrate my personal situation, apologies in advance for the stilted presentation, but I don't really have a better way to say it.  I get my fun out of presenting my artistic vision of a world in the game to the players.  This gives me 100 fun points.  Each of four players gets 80 fun points in this situation.  Al wants a change to the world.  If I make the change Al and Bob get 85 fun points from the game while Chad and Darren still get 80.  I get +20 fun points from the players additional enjoyment, but -40 from compromising my vision and end up with 80 fun points.  My next best alternative is to turn the DM's seat over to someone else.  I get 90 fun points from playing so Ill choose that rather than DM with the changes.  Bob will DM, but he'd rather play and only gets 60 fun points from DMing.  Al prefers my DMing, even without the change, and gets 70 fun points in the new situation.  Net result, everyone's fun is diminished.  Since everyone in the group gets this intuitively, I can say no to the change and the group will accept it just because they know that if they don't accept it, each of their personal fun will diminish.Any real situation is a lot more complicated than this, but the end result is that DMs really do have more social power than an individual player and sometimes more than all of the other players together.  What people term "DM entitlement" or "player entitlement" is nothing immoral, it's not a power trip, it's not psychopathy or sociopathy; it's just the end result of everyone acting to maximize their own fun.Where people do have problems is when they fail to act to maximize their own fun.  Skyscraper has a great post above about listening to your players.  Of course you should listen to your players; maybe you can find a change that will improve both your fun and theirs.  Not listening is counter to maximizing your fun.  And there are plenty of posts by people who are in a game they don't enjoy.  If you'll have more fun not playing than playing and you don't have the ability to change the game, it's time to bail.  As is frequently said, "No gaming is better than bad gaming"</blockquote>

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