If someone ever called someoine else a "cunt" at my game table - that would be the last time they ever played there.
 Probably,... definitely be escorted to the door.

 Oh and my game group ?
 My game group  = Three women and two men. One of the men is married to one of the women.

- Ed C.

J Arcane> Unfortunately, where we disagree is right at the start. I am of the opinion that dictatorships are inherently bad. I'm using a relatively ordinary philosophical understanding of a dictator as a private individual who rules without restriction, and who maintains his position through a monopoly on coercion. That is, someone who can force you to acknowledge or do what he wants, but does not acknowledge any ability of yours to force him to do what you want him to.

Now, authority itself isn't bad. I don't mind the reasonable exercise of authority, and I am willing to admit that a DM has a certain role which gives him more authority than the other players. But, I want to construe that authority more narrowly, I want to emphasise its contingent and consensual origin, and I think that being conscious of that origin allows us to avoid situations like Spike's "Subtractive GMing" and railroading and all sorts of other bad things.

A GM is NOT a "dictator" - he or she is a GamesMaster.

 Its a sloppy, silly fucking analogy.

Also it helps to be FRIENDS with your players.

- Ed C.

Quote from: PseudoephedrineSay Joe in your game has an NPC cohort and you let him roleplay the NPC cohort. Joe is doing something the DM traditionally does - playing an NPC - but it's hardly some unusual, radical new innovation. Another example would be when you first play a game, and you let the guy who owns it adjudicate the rules because he's most familiar with it. The DM might say "Uh, what do we do if you use the fire burst spell?" Or heck, what about when you switch campaigns, and Joe stops being the DM and instead Tim is? In each one of these cases, some of the things the DM did are being transferred to another player.

In all of those cases, what you have is the DM voluntarily relinquishing control of an aspect of the game. If you force the DM to do those things, to relinquish control, he's no longer the DM; you've dispersed the role of DM among many people. It a different setup, at that point. And the last is just – meaningless, I guess would be the best term – as you've just transferred the same authority to another person.  The original DM is giving up that role.

None of which is to say one way or the other is good or bad.  Both have their benefits and challenges that will appeal to one group or another.

Quote from: PseudoephedrineI don't want to water it down too much though. I don't think it's contrary to how people actually play, but I do think it's contrary to how they _think_ they play. That's why I called it an "ideology". An ideology is an intellectual position that pretends that the world is one way when it is really another way.

Wow.  That's a pretty loose interpretation of "ideology." But rather than get bogged down in your vocabulary, I would challenge your assumption that people are playing in one way and believing they are playing another.

There are probably as many setups as there are gaming groups. There appear to be plenty of people in this very thread who claim they play in games where the GM is benevolent dictator. Are they mistaken? Liars? Trolls?

The ultimate power rests in the group deciding to stay together. Whatever power setup they have is right - as long as it suits the group. That's not "ideology," regardless of your definition.

Quote from: PseudoephedrineI want people to stop making silly statements that obscure the issue of what really goes on in a game group. Most of these silly statements are absolute - "The DM owns his game" "I am the law" and so on. I don't think they help us much, especially when we're looking at things like "Isn't it unpleasant when a DM acts in an arbitrary way? How can we prevent this from happening or ameliorate it when it does?"

Well, as for silly:

Quote from: PseudoephedrineWhen a DM says something like "I am a DM, my word is law," I call them a "cunt" and walk out. It's a cunt thing to do.

The "rules" by which a particular game operates evolve out of a complex interaction of the players with the published material they draw on, with some of the players taking on the roles of individual protagonists and another one taking on the roles of other characters in the story.

For one of the players, even the one who plays the other characters in the story, to assert that he has an arbitrary authority to determine how that relationship will develop is for that player to be a giant flopping cunt.

There doesn't seem to be a lot of wiggle room on those statements; it's just if-you-play-like-this-you're-a-cunt. How helpful was that? Was it not that statement, and attempts to get clarification from you on that statement, that led us down this path?

Quote from: PseudoephedrineProbably. I don't mind people using vastly different communication styles, so long as they fall within my fairly-broad standards.

The irony of that statement is priceless...though I doubt my expression of it meets with your standards.

Quote from: droogI dunno. P's posts seem perfectly easy to understand to me. Some of you other guys seem to be hitting pretty silly positions.

In real life, no leader of a small, voluntary group has more power than he is granted by the group. I, personally, have been in a position to forbid music, take the best chair, have food and drugs supplied etc. (it's good to be king), but that doesn't mean I had every decision go unquestioned. That's how people work, unless you truly are a god among men. Possibly some of you are.


I have one quibble, though, P. Why use an ugly neologism like 'non-trivial' instead of a perfectly good word like 'significant'?

I struggled with his first couple of posts, but he clarified and I was golden then.  I'm not sure why there is now this exhaustive analysis of his writing as if we were Tolkien geeks faced with a newly discovered manuscript.  They're forum posts, if something's unclear we ask what was meant.

Other than that, the GM has authority because the players grant the GM authority, or because the GM has a gun and isn't afraid to use it.  As I live in Britain, I have to rely on the granted authority bit, in America I appreciate that may not always be the case.

My players routinely argue rules calls, by which I do not mean we spend three hours exhaustively discussing the point but that people make suggestions and then I make a ruling and assuming I don't make dickheaded rulings too often people go with that because it's better to have a clear decision than not and the group has made the GM the ultimate clear decision guy.  Usually a player makes a good suggestion, there's more of them so odds are one of them will often come up with something sensible.

I'm not sure I've said anything different to pseudo there, games need veto powers, some games share them between the participants however most give them exclusively to the GM.  That works for me, so I go the way most people do.

As a brief cri de coeur, could we maybe engage with the points at issue and not construe every fucking paragraph pseudo types.

Pseudo, mate, welcome aboard and glad to have you here.  Could you maybe restate your core point in a really brief and summarised way for those of us sitting in the cheap seats?

Quote from: BalbinusI'm not sure why there is now this exhaustive analysis of his writing as if we were Tolkien geeks faced with a newly discovered manuscript.

I diagnose bugs up arses.

Quote from: PseudoephedrineI made a thread a couple months ago about salty language around the table. Most people said they swore and used obscenities quite frequently when playing.

You can't just divorce swearing from context and then make generalisations about how acceptable it is or isn't. There's a whole lot of difference between saying "Holy shit, dude, you fucking wasted that orc!" and "You're a cunt!". If you honestly don't understand what that difference is, let me spell it out for you: in the second case you are insulting someone, in the former case you aren't.

QuoteBeyond just that straw poll, using obscenity to indicate your disapproval of something or someone is a pretty normal thing to do unless it's a particularly formal situation.

It is normal. What isn't normal is going from "perfectly happy" to "calling someone a cunt" in the blink of an eye. There is, believe it or not, a step in between those two extremes which folk down my way like to try out before we start calling our gaming buddies cunts. It's called "talking to people sensibly about the problem".

QuoteIf your problem is your perception that the trigger is too mild, then you haven't paid attention to what I wrote. I wrote that in response to someone making a very extreme statement - "I am the DM, my word is law" I would use obscenity to indicate my displeasure and leave. Trying to pretend that I meant "When someone disagrees with me, I call them a cunt," is silly, and directly contrary to what I wrote, and what I've explained since.

I imagine you have people calling "Dude, I was only joking" at your back a lot.

OK, so in your world once someone has said the "I am the law" there's no going back? No chance of reasoning with them? Nothing to be gained from asking them precisely what they mean? Would it really hurt that much to say "What do you mean by that - are you saying you're going to ignore any reasonable argument we present"?

Quote from: PseudoephedrineJ Arcane> Unfortunately, where we disagree is right at the start. I am of the opinion that dictatorships are inherently bad. I'm using a relatively ordinary philosophical understanding of a dictator as a private individual who rules without restriction, and who maintains his position through a monopoly on coercion. That is, someone who can force you to acknowledge or do what he wants, but does not acknowledge any ability of yours to force him to do what you want him to.

You seriously think that there's a monopoly on coercion at any gaming table where the GM doesn't actually have guns pointing at the players?

Half of why a dictatorship is bad in the first place is that you cannot choose not to participate - thanks to the coercion you mention. You can always choose not to participate in a game. If the GM says "I'm going to arbitrate all the rules disputes, make rulings, and generally make binding statements about the game world, and all the players in the game should be willing to take my word as law as far as what's happening IC is concerned" - or even abbreviates it to "I am the law" - he's not trapping anyone there. People can leave if they aren't enjoying themselves.

Well, for my part I decided to parse his posts because I could see from previous threads the same sort of pattern I was seeing here. I don't mind sacrificing one of my own threads to reach an understanding with someone who, in my past expirences has gotten into unnecessary fights due to miscommunication.

So I have gained a bit more understanding of how/why Psuedo posts the way he does, and I think he's got a bit more understanding of how/why I post the way I do and hopefully we won't have fights when conversations are possible in the future.

Not that it won't happen. I suspect we have incompatable ideals. But now we can disagree with more understanding as to why.

Quote from: PseudoephedrineJ Arcane> Unfortunately, where we disagree is right at the start. I am of the opinion that dictatorships are inherently bad. I'm using a relatively ordinary philosophical understanding of a dictator as a private individual who rules without restriction, and who maintains his position through a monopoly on coercion. That is, someone who can force you to acknowledge or do what he wants, but does not acknowledge any ability of yours to force him to do what you want him to.

Now, authority itself isn't bad. I don't mind the reasonable exercise of authority, and I am willing to admit that a DM has a certain role which gives him more authority than the other players. But, I want to construe that authority more narrowly, I want to emphasise its contingent and consensual origin, and I think that being conscious of that origin allows us to avoid situations like Spike's "Subtractive GMing" and railroading and all sorts of other bad things.

Governmental forms scale downwards better than up.  Some historicalyl scale up worse than others.

In any government, the ruler is, in a sense, always going to have to answer to his people, at least in so far as what it takes to please them enough to prevent a revolt.  

The more you scale the size of a nation down, the smaller the number of people, the more threat the citizens are should their ruler fail to adequately serve them.  This, incidentally, is why the pseudo-anarchist side of me stil believes that mankind would've been better off sticking to small tribal groups and living in the woods.  

At the small scale level, a dictatorship is only different from a democracy in that one person is expected to make the final decision once the responses of the citizens are adequately weighed in, to settle the argument.  It also appoints in him the authority to initiate action autonomously of the group, which is rather an important tool for the GM, given that he's the one who creates the entire damn game world.

Without that authority, you aren't even playing anything resembling a traditional RPG anymore.  You've effectively gone on to the GM-less style of play, where the entire game is nothing more than a long protracted argument and bidding war over what's really happening in the game.  

And I just don't roll like that.

Quote from: J ArcaneWithout that authority, you aren't even playing anything resembling a traditional RPG anymore.  You've effectively gone on to the GM-less style of play, where the entire game is nothing more than a long protracted argument and bidding war over what's really happening in the game.  

And I just don't roll like that.

I don't roll like that either, but this strikes me as a rather disingenuous characterization of GM-less or shared-GM play.

Quote from: RedFoxI don't roll like that either, but this strikes me as a rather disingenuous characterization of GM-less or shared-GM play.

 Are you talking that funny FORGE-stuff now ?

- Ed C.

Quote from: J ArcaneThis, incidentally, is why the pseudo-anarchist side of me stil believes that mankind would've been better off sticking to small tribal groups and living in the woods.

Then we couldn't have neat conversations about make-believe games on the intraweb!

All kidding aside, I agree with what I think is the core idea of your post:

Quote from: J ArcaneWithout that authority, you aren't even playing anything resembling a traditional RPG anymore.  You've effectively gone on to the GM-less style of play, where the entire game is nothing more than a long protracted argument and bidding war over what's really happening in the game.  

And I just don't roll like that.

Except for the bolded part - as Red points out.  I think it's a mischaracterization since we've all been in threads where people claim to play this way and enjoy it and it's not a long protracted argument over what's really happening in the game. It's a taste thing.

I'm of the opinion that there is a subtle line. I think play where the GM voluntarily delegates authority, is the same paradigm (yeah, I said paradigm, what of it?) as "traditional." However, if it's laid out as part of the system and the GM has no choice, that's a different method...

Quote from: RedFoxI don't roll like that either, but this strikes me as a rather disingenuous characterization of GM-less or shared-GM play.

I've yet to see a GM-less game that wasn't effectively built on exactly that sort of mechanic, or at least destined to that kind of "setting war", save for the tiny few that go with the "auto-GM" approach of endless tables.  But those aren't really a democracy, so much as an odd sci-fi-ish "computer dictator" scenario.