Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7656519" data-attributes="member: 42582">Are you meaning to imply that people who take a different attitude towards the role of the GM, and/or the place of the rules, have trouble finding players for their games? Or aren't giving "people" what they want?If not, I don't understand the point you are trying to make. Some people like the GM-first, GM-driven playstyle. That's not in dispute in this thread. But I don't see how it makes any difference to those who prefer different approaches.As a player, I've had two significant "I quit" moments. One was very early in my university days. A group of us had met at the university RPG club and started a new campaign under a GM who turned out, after a session or two, to be very much "GM first". The scenario was some fairly simple thing involving kobolds infiltrating a city via its sewage system.Through a combination of good luck and good play, we managed to capture a kobold alive so that we could interrogate it, learn about the kobolds' plans and disposition of forces, and move from a reactive to proactive mode (both in the fiction, and in the player of the game at the table). The GM totally blocked this by playing the kobold as unable to communicate any better than a 5 year old, unable to read a map, unable to describe the nature of its leadership and allies, etc. At the end of the session the GM indicated he would be absent the next week. I arranged with the other players that I would start a Rolemaster campaign, and the next week we did. The (ex-)GM was invited to join when he returned to the club meeting a fortnight later, but declined. As best I recall he found new players who didn't mind his style.About 7 years later, I was in the second year of a 2nd ed AD&D campaign. The GM was so-so, but there was a large group of players (6 or 7) who mostly didn't know one another very well outside the context of the game. So there was quite a bit of game-focused and in-character banter and back-and-forth, which made the game fun. And over the course of the campaign we had built up, among ourselves, quite a degree of investment in and outlook around the core themes and NPCs of the campaign (there were gods, a prophecy, evil overlords etc).After around 8 or 9 levels the GM - apparently so that he could retake control of the campaign story from his players - time-shifted us 100 years into the campaign's future. All the lore we had developed and come to know was made irrelevant. Our PCs had not connections to any NPCs, political factions etc. We were back at the pure mercy of the GM for gameplay, backstory, PC motivations etc. I left the game, and I don't think it lasted much longer after that.I mention these anecdotes to show that there is no necessary connection between a tightly GM-driven game and player retention.</blockquote>

Verification