Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7513697" data-attributes="member: 42582">On despotism: clearly describing a ruler as an enlightened despot is not intended as a slander! And if one takes away the enlightened, or puts it inverted commas, that's not a slip-up but a deliberate expression of opinion about whether enlightened despotism is a genuinely feasable or desirable mode of government.Likewise in the D&D context: if someone deliberately describes a certain GM-ing approach as despotic, and when pushed to include the "englightened" doesn't do so, that suggest they think that approach is inherently at odds with good RPGing. Just because you disagree with them doesn't mean they've made a terminological error: they've conveyed exactly what they mean to convey!To me, the principal virtue of RPGing as an activity, which distinguishes it from wargaming, boardgaming and watching a film with friends, is the collective participation in creating a fiction. The sort of approach to GMing that [MENTION=5142]Aldarc[/MENTION] is characterising as despotic seems to push against that virtue; it certainly doesn't seem to push in favour of it.Another virtue of RPGing is skilfully playing the fiction - this is a secondary consideration for me, but still important as it is one of the things that distinguishes RPGing from pure storytelling. This virtue can be reconciled with GM authority over the fiction, provided that the GM is fair in adjudication. This is why classic D&D advice like that found in Moldvay Basic or Mike Carr's B1 places such emphasis on fairness in GMing. But frankly, ones the fiction gets more complicated than the pretty simple situations found in classic D&D dungeon-crawling I think the distinction between fair adjudication of the players playing the fiction and deciding what the outcome is based on one's own conception of where the fiction should ge becomes increasingly hard to maintain. For instance, deciding what happens when I (as my PC) poke a wall with a 10' pole can be a matter of fair adjudication; deciding what happens when I (as my PC) slyly mention to the duchess at the party that I believe the duke is having an affair with her chambermaid is a different kettle of fish altogether. If I (as my PC) hope that the duchess's response will be to walk up and slap her husband, rather than (say) leave the room in tears while cursing at me, I (as a player) will be rather sceptical of a GM's determination that the only true extrapolation of the fictional situation is the latter.So even this secondary virtue, in the context of reasonably complex fictional situations, does not seem to favour the approach to GMing that [MENTION=5142]Aldarc[/MENTION] is describing, and probably pushes against it.A reader of this post may disagree - about the virtues of RPGing, or about my analysis of what sorts of tecniques are well-suited to those virtues - but that's not a terminological dispute. Nor is it a dispute about the good faith of the GM. For many people, the objection to (so-called) enlightened despotism isn't about the englightenment but about the despotism - no matter the good faith of the ruler, the critic regards despotisim as an inherently inapt way to produce sound government that serves the common good.Likewise with respect to GMing - my objection to sole GM authority over the fiction isn't that the GM will abuse that power but rather than such power is incapable of producing a RPG experience that delivers what I regard as the virtues of RPGing: shared creation of a fiction; and the experience of playing that fiction (given that the fiction in my RPGing will be closer to the duchess example than the 10' pole example).</blockquote>

Verification