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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7508232" data-attributes="member: 42582">I want to go further than [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] - a GM who even regards this as a price is a GM with a flaw that I would not want to play with.The GM's basic function in a RPG is to provide the players with obstacles and antagonism that they can pit their PCs against. The details can vary dramatically - from mapping and stocking a dungeon, to coming up with a Dragonlance-like series of set piece encounters to be worked through, to "indie"-style scene framing. But that provision of obstacles and antagonism is the basic function. Playing NPCs is a means to that end: they are elements in the obstacles/antagonism (whether as framing or as consequences) or else they are mere colour.A GM who regards it as a "price" that a player wants to put some limits or offer some direction in respect of those things is (in my view) just about the lamest GM imaginable. This is why, as these arguments are set out, I am actually becoming more sympathetic to [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s description of it as an ego thing: because we seem to be talking about a GM who is more interested in telling his/her pet story (which would not have even been on the table had the player not chosen to play a warlock, or a bikie, in the first place) than in performing hs/her core function of presenting the players with engaging obstacles and antagonism.What line? How is this any different from the urination example already discussed upthread? Or the fact that almost no RPGs scenarios with villages involve funerals of children who died in childbirth or not long after?I assert: if a Vampire game can't progress without a player worrying about the cost of insurance premiums and petrol for his/her PC's motorbike, then the game sucks!Maybe some would think the players can handle this. Some games formalise it (eg Dungeon World, Fate, to a lesser extent Burning Wheel). Others don't. But what is the point of these GM-imposed "side quests", "bonds between PCs", etc. Are the players incapable of coming up with their own PC motivations and inter-relationships?As I said, this is terrible roleplaying. The penalty for playing a cleric or warlock or whatever is what - I don't get to fully play the game because sometime the GM tells me how I should play my PC?Why can't the player handle this decision-making? And furthremore, what is going on that the GM has made the fight with the orcs more boring than something else when s/he knows there's this orc-fighting PC in the game? That's what I call lame GMing.</blockquote>

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