I find that I become emotionally attached to certain aspects of the game, and if an aspect I'm strongly attached to changes, it's "not the same game" and I may not be interested in continuing. I find I would rather start something completely new than continue with what pretends to be a previously fun activity but has lost the part I really enjoyed. To return to a comic book example, if I like _Spiderman_ mainly because I enjoy the low-level details of everyday urban life--the way Spidey is an Ordinary Joe even though he's a superhero--and then a new writer does Spiderman Saves The Universe every episode, I'd probably quit buying it. I might not object to saving the universe on its own, but that's not why I like Spiderman and I'd just feel cheated. I probably feel unusually strongly on this point because I've been involved with two attempts to continue a campaign after something irrevocable (in one case loss of a key player, in the other case a too-big change in the PCs) had happened to it. Both of them were really unhappy experiences. The players felt constantly frustrated because it *looked* like the same campaign but it didn't make them happy in the same ways. We should have done something new instead. (One of these two experiences, alas, killed the gaming group it happened to-- though the group had other problems by that point.) I can easily imagine that if the GM walked out of a game I was in, I would argue against trying to continue "the same game" without him. Someone with less tendency to attachment probably wouldn't have this problem. I don't deal terribly well with PC death either. We have a strongly consensus group (admittedly a very small one; even when it was multi-player there were only three players) and a strong world orientation. What this requires is that every single player have a strong commitment to making the world make sense, so that they argue accordingly. I think if you have this, making decisions by consensus is no worse than making them by fiat--maybe better, because several minds may catch what one misses. A snap decision by the group can break the world model, but an all-powerful gamesmaster can equally make a snap decision that breaks the world model. I'm not infallible, anyway, and I've done this a few times. If snap decisions are a problem, they're a problem no matter who makes them--the gamesmaster, one player, or a group of participants. In that case you really have no alternative but to either try to nail all issues before they arise (which can be done by any method you like, including consensus) or to stop the game and settle them on the spot (ditto). My group feels that the mechanics need to reflect the game world very tightly. But we distribute responsibility for the gameworld as well as responsibility for the rules, so we still pretty much run on consensus. If the gamesmaster cares about the world model more than the players do, or knows it much better than the players do, then giving him final authority makes sense. But it's not a given that this will be the case. I certainly cared about the worlds of Paradisio and Radiant strongly, and I knew a lot about them even though I was a player and not the GM. A rules call that broke my sense of how the world worked would have been almost as bad as one that broke the GM's sense of it. We needed to avoid such calls, and we put a lot of mutual effort into it. We discovered, several years into the Radiant campaign, that I thought the space station was shaped like a wheel and the GM thought it was shaped like a tin can. The discrepancy was too big to paper over and someone pretty much had to be declared wrong. In the end, I believe the GM gave way to the player on this point. Other times, and probably more often than not, the player gave way to the GM. But we recognized that the world background knowledge was distributed among us nearly as much as the rules knowledge was. On anything Christine would know about her homeworld of Haven, for example, I was understood to be the authority. If Jon had run an adventure on Haven (didn't happen, but could have) he would have asked me a lot of questions. He might have done things that didn't fit my model, but hopefully these would have represented either changes in the 10 years since Chris left, or naivete on Chris's part about how her world really worked. (And I could deal with them as a player by roleplaying Christine's confusion, disbelief and uncertainty--that would be fine.) If he'd done something that I strongly disagreed with (pleasure yachts, when I have always held that Haven's oceans are terribly unsafe) I believe he would have backed down. Anyway, if the GM knows that the mechanics need to be such-and-such because of a world consideration, he can always say so. I strongly discourage secrecy on such points; I have found it to be a game-destroying hazard in the past. Mileage differs, but that's mine. Partway through Paradisio the GM said, "I'm seeing a possible plot thread involving time travel, but I wondered....we agreed that there wasn't any, so...." and I said "No! Please!" Disclosure helped keep him from ruining the game for me. If he had kept this secret instead I think that he would very likely have killed the game. (With only one player there aren't many options: player doesn't like game, game is dead.) Back to Table of Contents -- Game! # 11 To Game! List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2004 by George Phillies. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com