On Thu, 26 Jan 2006, Roger Burton West wrote: RBW>I started to get that impression when the idea of downplaying the RBW>importance and influence of the GM became popular. As far as I'm RBW>concerned, the GM-as-God is one of the key distinctions between an RPG RBW>and everything else. (See my post last year about the Arkham Horror RBW>boardgame - it's a GM-less game with strict rules, some of which are RBW>there to enhance the atmosphere.) I'm inclined to say GM-as-God is the key distinction between roleplaying and simming, though I'm not sure what precisely is the distinction between roleplaying+simming and everything else then. Sims tend to have administrators, yes, but they tend toward coordinating things and mediating disputes rather than actually directing plots. But other than that, there's not a vast divide separating them from regular pbem rpg (which is why GAMERS is theoretically about both). RBW>The proposal seems to be that, because someone else might come up with a RBW>better story about your character than you, you shouldn't prohibit that RBW>person from doing it (and therefore there shouldn't really be a "your RBW>character" at all). What if the other person comes up with a worse RBW>story? What if you had some ideas about your character's background that RBW>haven't come out in play yet, but which aren't compatible with the new RBW>proposal? I can see this killing as many interesting stories as it RBW>starts. There's no good reason, in a perfectly conventional roleplaying game, that player A can't tell player B "Wouldn't it be cool if..." I fail to see the need for funky mechanics that *force* player B to accept the what-if. But I'm not so much concerned with this killing interesting stories (though it might) as with having a highly creative, or simply highly pushy, player taking over everyone's stories. Granted with enough wouldn't-it-be-cools he could do so anyway, if he kept convincing the other players and GMs, but... it's a social game, the GM is there to manage that sort of thing. I'm way more interested in meeting-facilitation techniques than I am in funky plot-control mechanics. We have issues with that, because our play group is also a group of friends, and because of busy schedules (Bill works second shift and goes to school, Chris has somewhat demanding family concerns, Carl and I have family and Phoenyx...) we seldom see each other outside game time, and so we spend a lot of time just socializing. We need to work on separating the socializing time from the game time. -- Karen J. Cravens silver@phoenyx.net ---------------------------------------------------------------- GAMERS Home Page: http://www.phoenyx.net/gamers/
