In his entry at ,
John Kim says,
"Authority is not the same as authorship.
"A referee can have authority in a sports game or other contest. This
means that he can make judgements of the players and has final say over
whether a goal counted, whether a player is allowed on the field, and so
forth. This is not the same thing as authorship. i.e. A referee does not
author the action of the game. The players have defined means to input,
and that input is the center of the game. Now, it is certainly possible
for a referee to control the game, by constantly ruling against one side
and never the other. But that isn't the norm."
Carl's convinced most of the indie authors are writing games that protect
them from the abuses of particular GMs in their pasts. I dunno about
that. I do know there seems to be a general trend toward removing the
authority from the GM, when what (AFAICT) seems to be really wanted is
removing authorship.
I don't like to remove all authorship... what it comes down to for me is I
don't want to author the bad guys *and* the good guys. I want the GM to
author the bad guys. And, heck, some of the interesting good guys, too.
Otherwise the conflict isn't very conflicted.
(This may be another whole issue... I've never particularly had a problem
with villain-hero conflict turning into GM-player conflict, and from the
dire warnings in some RPGs against having this happen I gather it's
sometimes a problem.)
--
Karen J. Cravens silver@phoenyx.net
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