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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6111747" data-attributes="member: 4937">Which indicates to me that what he would want from a game is probably more Don Quixote than Morte D'Arthur, and which just proves that it isn't obvious what a belief like, "I am the rightful king of the land." actually creates in the game.  A GM may think he's acting in the player's interest, may actually be responding to beliefs, but still might put the player into situations where he feels the obstacles to the character's success are also undesirable obstacles to the player's success.  Now possibly all of this can be addressed by working out between the player and the GM a backstory, the player hooks, and so forth.  But all of that works quite fine and well without Beliefs and did for decades before beliefs where added, and still doesn't prevent the possibility that a player wants X and doesn't feel he's getting it fast enough.   Any time you have a player with the table agenda of 'Empowerment', or really any agenda, there is the potential for table conflict because of disagreements about how the agenda is being met.  And the important thing for me is that these conflicts are non-trivial to resolve.   The example of a belief involving resurrecting a dead wife can run into problems either way - either not addressing the implied goal ('I want my dead wife back') fast enough so that the player is frustrated or addressing it too fast so that achieving it is anticlimatic and unsatisfying.   The reality is that there can be times when players want things that they don't really want.   A player with a narrative goal wants to get to the climax of the story, but they also need to have the story unfold in a way that the climax is satisfying.  Real stories have to develop; they need rising tension and action.   A player with an empowerment agenda wants to feel cool, mighty, impose their will and do things that they couldn't do in real life, but there also has to be enough opposition to them that they don't feel its too easy, the conquest too trivial, and that they are being given their victories by the GM rather than earning them.   So while there has been a lot of discussion of artful GMing, I don't think nearly enough attention has been placed on being an Artful Player.   How does a player recognize when their agenda has become disfunctional rather than functional?  How does a player act proactively to heighten their interest in the current scene, without coming into conflict with the GM or other players who may have other interests?  How does a player recognize when a GM is acting on their behalf because there is some relevant and interesting reveal which, if revealed now would spoil the story, and when the GM has wandered from thier interests?  How do we go about communicating this without doing a lot of negative emotions that (hopefully) nobody enjoys or ruining other participants fun?   It's simply not the case that all the burden here is on the GM, and that there is a trivial solution in the GM bowing to a player's immediate wishes.</blockquote>

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