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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6099668" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, yes.  Because in my experience, if your gaming group is composed of a random selection of GM + 6-8 aquaintances from school or work or just people looking for a game who find each other, you always get people with special needs.  If your group is limited to the GM + 2-4 players who have stuck with it and played together for years and this doesn't sound familiar, chances are your group is just players that all have the same needs.This now depends on unwinding what we mean by the 'mushroom pizza' and the 'deluxe pizza'.   The problem with analogies is that they aren't also perfect to the thing they are representing (and usually aren't) and that you can end up arguing over the analogy rather than the thing it stands for.The ingredients of play are thinks like fellowship, competition, exploration, self-expression, challenge, fantasy and so forth.   Scenes offer different mixes of the ingredients of play through role-play, problem solving, tactical combat, simulation, mystery, and so forth.   So the mushroom pizza corresponds to a scene with just one agenda - maybe exploration of setting or exploration of character.    The 'deluxe pizza' is that rare scene were all the agendas of play are available together in the same scene.  It's not easy to achieve, and more over it is also the scenario most likely to have something that at least one - and maybe all - of the players would rather 'pick off' and not engage with (often 'handing that topping' to some other player at the table).   So what you are suggesting is that if a fresh mushroom pizza has just been put on the table which you don't really like, in your case exploration of setting, that the guy who really likes that should forgo it for something else - the possibility that the next scenario to come out of the oven will be the 'deluxe pizza' (the one that has those banna peppers he's really not fond of).  You've made abundently clear you aren't the guy that prefers 'deluxe pizza'?  (Just out of curiousity, do you really like deluxe pizzas, goat cheese, wild mushrooms, roast cloves of garlic, etc. on your pizzas, or are you usually a pickier eater?)But Jane is loving the mushroom pizza?  Her agenda is fantasy and exploration.  She wants to feel like she is in a real world and discover its secrets.  If it is just once that we skip her favorite, maybe so, but are you willing to skip the deluxe pizza to have a mushroom pizza or skip the pepperoni (challenge/tactical combat)?  'Just once'?  Are you willing to eat the mushroom 'just once', or at least sit by quietly while Jane enjoys it?But most importantly, as a player you can signal long term what pizza/scene you want coming out of the oven (and if the chef/GM knows his players he'll already know anyway), but you can't necessarily control what is on the table now, what is already in the oven and about to be presented, and what the GM has just put together to put in the oven.  You can't really know how the GM is going to frame a scene.  By engaging the desert, maybe the next scene will perfectly suit your agenda.  Moreover, the player that truly loves 'deluxe pizzas' is precisely the sort that is happy with bacon and broccoli, garlic and carmelized peaches, goat cheese and olive, etc. because he just wants some of everything.  Serve up challenge, abnegation, self-expression, whatever - he's looking forward to all of it.   Now here the analogy already stretched to a breaking point really starts to break down, because now have to extend it to describing the different sorts of 'restuarants' we could create.  I'd rather not.  I'd rather discuss those things directly rather than obscuring them behind an analogy.  You could argue that we ought to have a restaurant where we order our food from the chef so that we each get what we want.  That's true of restuarants but its not clear that its true of games.  For example, the equivalent game will if it really lets you order what you want tend to lack 'hidden knowledge', which means that some agendas just can't be satisfied by that game.  The analogy equivalent is that for some players, not knowing what is going to be served next and instead leaving it up to the preference of the chef, is part of what makes the restuarant exciting.  As a real world example of this analogy, one of my daughters prefers to eat her sushi this way - Omakase ("as the chef likes it").  If Omakase isn't available, she'll ask me to order for her, trusting I'm a better guide to knowing what she likes and what she will like than she is herself.  The analogy of a restaurant falls apart when we consider we don't really have the option of eating off separate plates in the game, but we are all participating at once in a shared experience.Feel free to make that a DMing philosophy if it's your table.</blockquote>

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