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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7509642" data-attributes="member: 42582">I believe that it completely refutes the claim that has been made or implied by multiple posters in this thread that (i) if the player of a cleric or paladin or similar sort of character is allowed to establish what the demands are that allegiance to god/patron/etc makes on his/her PC, then (ii) those demands will have no consequences in play and will probably not even manifest in play such that other participants in the game can observe and engage with them.OK, so you agree that if my character concept includes having a loving family waiting for me when I return from my quest, then that is part of who my character is, and hence the GM changing/overriding that can override/distort my character concept.Change it to a noble and loving family, or an honest and loving family, then. As per my post upthread, I had in mind a revelation that a dear dad very similar to Samwise Gamgee's Gaffer was in fact a serial killer - ie something that radically undermines the PC and player conception of the family.Is it part of the campaign or not? If the GM just imagines to him-/herself that my PC's father is a serial killer, that is definitely in the "playing with oneself" category. Solitary imagination is not an instance of RPGing.So I'm assuming that this is something that the GM actually reveals in play. At which point it completely changes my character conception - eg instead of doing this stuff so that I can make the world safe for my family and return back to them (again, this is pointing to Samwise Gamgee as the paradigm) I've been completely misguided about what I was doing and achieving. And what affect did it have on my action declarations? It meant that I made them grounded in a false rather than true belief about the nature of my PC's family and my PC's relationship to them and to his/her goals and values. In the realm of fiction, there are many well-known example of this sort of revelation changing the meaning of a character's actions and the relationships those actions are connected to eg Jane Eyre (Mrs Rochester), Howard's End (Jacky). The most devastating I can think of is Graeme Greene's The Human Factor.I know that many people play RPGs as essentially tactical or puzzle-solving exercise, and in that sort of play PC actions don't have any meaning beyond their contribution to tactics or to the resolution of a practical problem (eg choosing which NPC to ask for a favour, which wall to search for secret doors, etc). And one often sees discussions of "meaningful choice" for players framed in essentially those terms.But I play RPGs because of my pleasure in the process and result of fiction creation. And the conception of meaning that informs my engagement with RPGs is similar to the sense used in discussing other narrative modes - so that we can say, for instance, that the meaning of Luke and Leia's budding romance in Star Wars, or of Luke's anger towards Vader after Vader kills Obi-Wan, is completely changed once it is revealed that Luke and Leia are siblings, or that Vader is Luke's father (and so not the killer of both his father and his father-figure mentor). In The Human Factor, the meaning (in the same sense) of the protagonists activities as a spy is completely transformed by the revelation at the end of the book.And in a RPG, the meaning of my PC's actions - when framed against an understanding of dear dad waiting for me back at home - is completely transformed once it is revealed that dear dad is in fact a serial killer.A variant of this - pertaining not to a family member but to an instigating NPC patron - was the GM flaw in the third of the three campaigns that I mentioned in my first post in this thread: betrayal by the patron completely changed the meaning of a MacGuffin quest which had no narrative logic to it except that we were fetching a MacGuffin for a patron because that was the situation the GM had presented us with. It reveals the PCs as suckers and patsies. And in the context of a RPG, it also reveals the players as the GM's patsies - the GM has lured us into the game with the promise of a mildly interesting fetch quest for a NPC, and it turns out we were sucked in and were really telling quite a different story. [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] upthread asks - but was the fetch quest fun to play out? Answer: not terribly, it was pretty mid-grade RPging, but tolerable because the group (including the GM) was a group of friends who had RPGed together for quite some time. But mid-grade RPGing with friends can be fine when you have (as we all then did) the time on your hands. What made it less than fine was the GM move of unilaterally changing the meaning of something that was outside player control and that no player action had ever put at stake. [MENTION=6688277]Sadras[/MENTION] describes this as "story now" sensibility. My memory for when this happened is a bit hazy, but I want to say some time around 1993 to 1995. So something like 10 years, certainly more than 5 years, before Ron Edwards wrote his "Story Now" essay. In a group who at that time played Rolemaster almost exclusively (the game in question was a RM one). I point that out so as to make the point that objecting to this sort of GMing is not some super-radical new-fangled thing.</blockquote>

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