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: 9039567" data-attributes="member: 42582">To add to the post just above:If we want our RPGing to involve not just "circumstances" in which the PCs find themselves, but opposition to the PCs, we will need a method for establishing that opposition. <a href="http://lumpley.com/hardcore.html" target="_blank">Here's Baker on this</a> (back in 2003, under the heading "Doing Away with the GM"):You need to have a system by which scenes start and stop. The rawest solution is to do it by group consensus: anybody moved to can suggest a scene or suggest that a scene be over, and it's up to the group to act on the suggestion or not. You don't need a final authority beyond the players' collective will. You need to have a system whereby narration becomes in-game truth. That is, when somebody suggests something to happen or something to be so, does it or doesn't it? Is it or isn't it? Again the rawest solution is group consensus, with suggestions made by whoever's moved and then taken up or let fall according to the group's interest. You need to have orchestrated conflict, and there's the tricky bit. GMs are very good at orchestrating conflict, and it's hard to see a rawer solution. My game Before the Flood handles the first two needs ably but makes no provision at all for this third. What you get is listless, aimless, dull play with no sustained conflict and no meaning. In our co-GMed Ars Magica game, each of us is responsible for orchestrating conflict for the others, which works but isn't radical wrt GM doage-away-with. . . . GM-swapping, in other words, isn't the same as GM-sharing.That's a reason, then, to have the asymmetric participant roles that are typical of RPGing. It's not about setting but about conflict or opposition. It's not a knockdown reason, of course, because not everyone wants genuine conflict or opposition in their RPGing. If the goal of play is to imagine what it might be like hanging out in a tavern, or wandering around a pseudo-mediaeval market and fair, then we probably only need symmetric roles, though it might make sense to have one participant play the main character (the "PC") and another swap in and out of the bit parts (the "GM", but really they're just another player as far as authority and function are concerned).If we do want conflict, and hence a GM, we are - to allude back to the Baker quotes in the OP - opening the door at least a crack to the unwelcome and unwanted. And then - again, as per the OP - rules become interesting to help achieve this, and hence go beyond what group consensus and negotiation make possible.If we don't want conflict, and hence aren't looking for fiction beyond what group consensus could deliver, why have rules nevertheless? Because we don't trust what our consensus?</blockquote>

Verification