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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7346290" data-attributes="member: 42582">Well, to me this is like saying I could start each session by hurling personal abuse at the players. I mean, I guess so, but that would probably be the end of the game.The campaign I'm starting about was deliberately started as the upshot of a player revolt against a GM who was not interested in even a hint of player-driven RPGing. So it was understood from the start of the campaign that the players' concerns/focuses/desires/themes for their PCs would be an element of play. As I said, this was a club campaign, and so over time players come and go. New players were attracted because they knew that this was a campaign which was player-driven in that sort of way.The system used was RM, which doesn't have formal devices for establishing player signals like (say) Fate or Burning Wheel. But that doesn't change the facts about the actual play of the game and the expectations of the participants.You've just described a process whereby the GM chairs a meeting, doesn't seem to have actually cast a vote, and the result of the meeting is that someone else's idea is adopted. I don't see that as a case of GM authorship. The resulting ancient ruins aren't the GM's broth. Someone else cooked it - the players who provided the ideas and material.(Even if I grant that the GM has veto power - and that's not clear in your example and not straightforwardly true in the campaign I ran - I don't think that changes it. To give an example drawn from political practice, the fact that the President could have vetoed a bill that passes both chambers, and didn't, doesn't mean that the president is the author of the bill and the legislators were not its authors.)EDIT:There is a practical, gameplay-related reason to put the GM in charge of actually deciding how particular elements are introduced into the shared fiction (as framing, as consequences, etc), namely, <a href="https://isabout.wordpress.com/2010/02/16/the-pitfalls-of-narrative-technique-in-rpg-play/" target="_blank">the Czege Principle</a>:The “Czege principle” is a proposition by Paul Czege that it’s not exciting to play a roleplaying game if the rules require one player to both introduce and resolve a conflict. It’s not a theorem but rather an observation; where and how and why it holds true is an ongoing question of some particular interest.There are posters in this thread - eg [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION], [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION], [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] - who give less credence to this than I do. And I'm certainly happy to admit to being very conservative in my approach to RPGing as far as this matter is concerned. So I am the one who decides that Vecna's plans include conquering Rel Astra; that isn't the result of taking a poll of my players. But it is the player who has made Vecna's plans for conquering anything actually of relevance to play; and it is the player who has made Rel Astra matter, by establishing his character as (to whatever degree) a Rel Astran patriot.This is a practical illustration of something I posted about upthread: that player agency over the content of the shared fiction can manifest not only in the outcomes of successful action declaration, but also in the contribution of material that is used by the GM in framing situations and narrating consequences.</blockquote>

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