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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tyrlaan" data-source="post: 6653842" data-attributes="member: 20998">I kind of feel like a good counterpoint to this is that if the DM wants his/her imagination to trump everyone else's, that person may be better served writing a book. I'll come back to this.I'll agree that GMing can be thankless at times (and probably varies from group to group). But this doesn't lead to the logical conclusion of "GM gets the final say". GM gets the final say because the GM is supposed to be the ultimate arbiter/referee unless your group works out something different. The GM doesn't get the final say just because he/she is the one that brought the volleyball to the game. I'd go so far as to say that if someone GMs and feels he/she has the final say because he/she put in "all this work" (which yeah, can be a hell of a lot of work), then that person is probably not in the right frame of mind to be running a game. GMing is a labor of love, and if you build up expectations that you are "owed" something from your players ("final say" or whatever), you probably will not succeed as a GM. Your second paragraph partially answers your first here. There's also the joy of seeing what the PCs will think of next and working with it, hearing them try to work out a mystery and realizing they come up with something better than you so you adjust things behind the scenes to adopt their wild conspiracy, listening for opportunities to pull in character specific/backstory bits and give the characters equal chance to be center stage in the story of the game for a while, adapting to the horrible moment when they one-shot your BBEG, and so on.See, to me there are two fundamental rewards to GMing. One is unleashing your creations upon your players and watching with joy as the world you have built comes to life. The other is seeing what players do with it, making it even more alive. I said earlier that if you want your imagination to trump all, write a book. I say that because players will destroy your plans. It's in their DNA. If you can't handle plans being destroyed, GMing is going to be very frustrating for you, or depending on how you handle it, your players. Because, when that happens, you have two choices as a GM. Option one is to play your trump card and somehow twist things so your plans are not destroyed. Maybe that preserves the fun for the GM, but it's terrible for players. KM talks about feeling "impotent" in 4e because of the scaling DCs/fail forward philosophy/whatever, but that's nothing compared to a GM showing the players that their actions don't matter. So I'd say Option one is a quick way to for a GM to feel good at the expense of deteriorating his/her game. Option two is to roll with the punch. Maybe someone saw the events and becomes the next BBEG, vowing revenge. Maybe words gets around of the PCs insane success and soon they are approached with a quest vastly over their head and unsure what to do. Maybe because they took a left instead of a right, a small village was destroyed that connects back to the story in some crazy way later. And so on. The GM is still exercising his/her imagination muscles, but doing it in a way that allows the choices made by the PCs to matter.</blockquote>

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