GM is god?

[Scripty]

The key thing that seems to seperate this from unhappy things (Railroading, Illusionist play), is when the GM is upfront about these issues, and the character players agree to it.

Good post, komradebob. Maybe we can start a thread discussing ways to be upfront about these issues? I agree that it would probably be a good thing and would certainly help out in letting everyone know where the GM felt his role should be as opposed to where the players felt his role should be.

But I've never seen it done in an effective way. Does anyone have any suggestions for how a group might discuss these kinds of issues without bogging down play? Maybe there's a thread already on RPG theory about that. I've searched the archives for social contract threads but have either come up empty or filled to the brim with pages that it would take me a week or so to forage through.

[Scripty]

Sorry for so many posts. You guys are raising some really good points that I think deserve a response. Thanks again.

Scott

[Callan S.]

*snip*
I understand division-of-labor/need-for-mediator in RPGs. The question I'm looking at is: do we really need a mediator with this kind of explicit authority? When a game designer says a "GM is God" or "All rules apply to players, no rules apply to GM" do you think he/she turning off an entire subset of individuals who aren't interested in subjugating their creative interests to the whims of another? (Paranoia given an obvious exclusion to this, of course.) Isn't this opening the table up to some serious abuse (as I pointed towards in an earlier post)? If players are going by what they see in the book, and what they see is "The GM is God!", then could that be a factor when the GM says he wants them to insert a foreign object in their rectum and they go ahead and do it? (Note: I've never witnessed that. Praise Thed...)

You might want to run through my post (prior to the one quoted) again, where I've answered this sort of question. 'GM is god' is only good for covering up any gap in social contract (and in an unhealthy way, IMO. See my alcoholic analogy). But if you fill in that social contract gap with self policing (and perhaps some dude to remind people to self police) there isn't a need for this, IMO, makeshift patch.

Codifying GM as god into the rules would be to create a particular product, to get a certain perhaps quite interesting effect. That would be interesting to talk about (if one wanted to design this product), but isn't this thread more about how 'GM is god' is prevalent in the RPG hobby?

Further, what doors are we closing by setting up such an authoritarian play experience. For example, I know my wife won't play RPGs because she sees them as (a) unwinnable and (b) rigged.

My partner is hard gamist and has said RPGs are just arbitrary and whatever the GM says goes and thus what can you achieve when it's just the GM deciding to pat your on the head or not.

I look at it and eventually explained it to her like it was sparing. It's like martial arts...do the experienced martial arts teacher kick the ass of their students each time, or let down their guard a bit so as to just challenge their student? Well, that's what the GM does if he's granted tons of resource creation powers. He lays some down so as to challenge. She understood it better

Thinking about what she didn't like helped my come to this 'sparing' idea for gamist play. This helps me get the right mind set for GM'ing in gamist play.

I guess I'm talking about how the gamist GM role can be defined in a book, rather than answer you question as to why 'GM is god' should be employed, if at all. I think there's something there for the thread...sorry for the drift if not.

She simply doesn't want anyone telling her what her character is doing/feeling (that's her "playing piece" as it were) and certainly won't stand for another person getting their jollies off of psychodramatic abuse at her expense (which very nearly occurred in one of the few, very few times she tried to roleplay). It's my hunch that she's not alone.

That sort of abuse is where the hobby really gets ugly and really concerns me. I want to write more but feel I'll go on a tangent.

Do you agree that placing absolute authority in the hands of one participant may be pushing people away from the experience? And, even more, what kind of individuals are attracted to this kind of experience, both as GM and players?

I think it does push people away and creates a wierd culture in the hobby. People who'll subjugate themselves to play what should just be an activity and those who find they are rewarded for being opinionated by having those opinions become the way things are. Subs and doms interlaced with people who can actually self police. But it's the subs and doms who newbies tend to run into first...because the subs and doms groups are fragmentary (or rarely, rock solid) while the self policing guys are usually very happy in their group and wont contact newbies as much.

Given that what we are (technically) doing in RPGs is fiddling around in the bowels of each other's subconscious, don't you think that games should take some responsibility for things like GM abuse?

They already take responsibility for stupid players. Ron even does so in Sorcerer where he explicitly points out that people who take the game too seriously or too far are whackos (paraphrase mine). Why don't games take a similar responsibility for stupid GMs?

I might stop here as I may be going off track already. But those are two good points. The intermingling of creativity can turn really sour when someone can swing power over someone elses input. It's like someone doing a drawing of a hero...it'd look perverse if someone else is allowed to walk up and tear it into little pieces. Yet that happens to PC's all the time...creatures we put some thought into. It can be cool for it to happen...but it's a dangerous area.

And yeah, why would the GM be the sane one?

[contracycle]

Ah, politics, the high octane of any social endeavour.

There are sound reasons for centralised authority in many, many collective activities.  The 'GM is god' trope has a number of nuances all of which appear in other forms of human interaction.  Like Chris's Lehrichs analysis of RPG as ritual activity, IMO we should also realise the RPG is also a political activity.

Or rather, RPG is not an overtly political activity but does employ political techniques to achieve its goals.  Centralisation of executive authority is one such technique.  In a sense, RPG is a microcosm of a political community.

This issue raises a couple of related questions that IMO are best tackled individually:
Are there benefits to this centralisation?
Are there dangers to this centralisation?

I do not think it is correct to see the GM's ggodlike authority as covering for gaps in the social contract; this authority is specifically granted to the GM through the social contract just as it is in broader society.  There is only one major distinction between this and most developed political communicities because under most circumstances the GM has no power to actually enforce their rulings in the face of determined opposition, unlike formal states with armed power at their disposal.  The GM-ship and its powers exist purely at the discretion of the players as a group, and consent can be withdrawn more or less at any time.

Thye benefits of centralisation should be well eniough understood: the clarity of a single vision, the economies of scale gained by directing multiple efforts toward a singular end, and the maintenance of what in modern military parlance is a "concept of operations" - what we are here to do, why we need to do it, and how we plan to do it.  As we have often discussed, the Shared Imaginary Space is often tentative, differentially murky, and contains elements that are often not in the sight of everyone at the table.  IMO the fundamental role the GM-ship was called into being to fulfill is the reliable coherency of the SIS.  And this function is not inherently different to that filled by the authority given to a team leader, foreman, manager, captain, pilot officer etecetera.

We know have a much more advanced IMO view of the SIS, the distribution of credibility (identical to consent, above) et al.  Nonetheless I think this explains the initial developement of the GM's role in the specific context of RPG.  Unfortunately, like rather too much political dialogue, our interest has a tendency to focus on the moral or ethical implications of power and leadership rather than the functional and methodological.  The fact that 95% of people over the last few thousand years have chosen to be lead, or have been forcefully subjugated to leaders, does not undermine the effectiveness of having a single node for central decision-making.  Effectiveness is not a moral question.

But with all that said there are of course good reasons for be suspicious of a command authority model for an social endeavour.  For one thing the power we endow such a person with can often be 'leveraged' into other social spheres into which their remit should not extend.  A person with a single and private concept of operations can bend and twist the public presentation of that concept to their own ends, and habitual submission to an authority figure may condition the 'subjects' to obedience even when they should resist.  Habitual deference is indeed dangerous and can be exploited.

Secondly, the command authorities clear vision may well be mistaken.  This is the nuance that democracy introduces to the heirarchical model of decision making, the recognition that even with a central coordinating node errors can be made and that the system is best served by differing, even contradictory, inputs.  Clearly, a command authority with a bad strategy and enjoying habitual deference may make disastrous decisions that affect everyone.

A GMship can be dangerous in exactly the way that other political positions can be: they replace the informal relationships between people with a formal, structural relationships.  And the methods for dealing with these problems are much the same as in other spheres; thus, we might allow a GM or other authority to rule now, but to be held to account for their decision post facto.  Or, in the distributed authority architecture, to obviate much of the power usually given to the position.  And these are not moral issues either, but practical concerns arising from gaming out the power relationships.

None of these issues can be resolved by coming to a decision, an opinion or position, on the role of the GMship, or on the moral or ethical implications of central versus distributed authority.  These issues are not confined to RPG in any sense,  but certainly the singular author mode of artistic production has not hitherto had to deal with these issues and has no language for them, as far as I'm aware.  The only meaningful action to take is to look at what you want to achieve and formulate a distribution of power that seems likely to achieve them.

[Rob Carriere]

I've generally met people through RPGs who then either remain friends or don't. Is this approach wrong?

Despite agreeing that it is good advice, I'm not sure I'd ever get to play RPGs if I took that statement to heart.

Scripty,
I think you just answered your own question. I, too, have a lot of friends I first met as gamers. The ones I keep gaming with are also the ones I go see movies with, go out for dinner with, and so on. And from what you say, you're more or less doing the same thing.

[tangent warning: play through a mid 80's Go game between a Japanese pro and a PRC state amateur and then tell me again that Go is Go everywhere you go. The very moves shout `culture clash' louder than a rock concert's amplifier. Same formal rules, very, very different notions of where they "should" take you.]

But I think that "GM is God" is turning out to be a Humpty Dumpty phrase: it means whatever the current speaker thinks it means. We've seen everything from `he's the rules arbiter' to `he's the guy who can force players to pay him sexual favors' and everything in between. That sorta makes discussion difficult...
SR
--

[komradebob]

There is an interesting side point about GM authority and Social contract that I don't see being brought up, since most of this has focused on abusive GMs.

Some Thoughts relating to the discussion:

Social Contract as related to rpgs goes into group dynamics beyond game rules related issues, and includes other behaviors and interactions that affect the gaming session.

GMing is a set of duties, which are often bound together, and are taken up/assumed by one player. This need not always be the case, but when a significant number of them are assigned to a single player, we tend to call that person a GM (or some equivalent term).

The GM is also a player in the game session.


Now, all of those are things that visiting the Forge has caused me to think a bit more about than in the past, particularly the first and third points.

I guess one of my questions becomes, What part of Social Contract do character players fufill?

I hate to sound petty, but as the person most commonly the GM over the years, I seem to recall spending alot of time and money filling that part of the social contract. In addition to tabletime arbitration, GMs generally:

Do most of the rulebook and related goods purchasing.When they are not the purchaser, especially in the case of supplements, they are still expected to know the material with adecent pasing familiarity.
Do most of the Rulebook reading.
Buy or create setting materials.
Often host the session.
Act as social secretaries insuring character players appear regularly.
Come up with story related reasons that pcs aren't there temporarily when the player fails to materialize (on time or at all).
Attempt to deal with the sometimes competing goals of providing an adventure that makes storyline sense, but that also involves the pc's and their players' urge to "do whatever they want".
Jump between roles as various NPCs, trying to make each distinct, often on the fly.

My point here is not to condone abusive GMs. I do think, however, that the part of non-GM players as it relates to the trade-off implied by the term Social Contract should be examined.

k-bob

[Callan S.]

My point here is not to condone abusive GMs. I do think, however, that the part of non-GM players as it relates to the trade-off implied by the term Social Contract should be examined.

Are you sort of refering to what the GM gets in exchange for all this work?

I sort of had a look at the rewards the GM gets and the utter lack of system support for that reward, in this thread: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=12673

The general responce was that their rewards are happy players and that surely there is no way to reward GM-players like you reward players with XP or whatever. System doesn't matter for GM-player rewards?

Currenly I'm playing GM'less D&D with my son (must write up a play account soon). I'm second level going on third (as is he) and found a nifty scroll (and a heap of gold). Were both GM in various ways and were both being rewarded.

This might be a bit tangentary, but I think the idea of system supported GM rewards should be pimped every so often.

[jdrakeh]

I'd prefer to say it's being challenged, perhaps initiating a debate and resolution procedure that may be an established part of the social contract. It all depends how the 'contract' is constructed.

Simon Hibbs

I think that is a more reasonable interpretation. As the social contract is, in essence a rule, I think that in order for it to be "broken" it must be deviated from in a manner specifically cited within said contract as unacceptable. To merely question the tenets of a social contract (the situation which has been posed) may or may not do this, but likely not (unless a clause such as "the players aren't allowed to influence the game out of character" is a tenet of the social contract, at which point you're moving into the realm of oppressive ultimatum).

That is, a social contract is an agreement, yes - but like any reasonable agreement between a number of individuals, it won't be a concrete, static, thing that is governed by one sole individual. That isn't a contract at all - a contract is an agreement between parties that represents the interest of all said parties to one degree or another. A tenet that intentionally divests other participants of any power by way of threat or declaration of superiority is merely an ultimatum.

When drafting a contract, all parties are allowed to influence the final product. When one individual says "I'm God - do it my way or choke!" a completely inflexible ultimatum has been issued, and the only choice open to other players is to accept it or not - their input matters not at all, having been divested of any power to organize the game in a manner that they find entertaining.

For some reason, when some gamers see the term "social contract" they seem to forget that the drafting of any contract is a shared creative process and immediately pigeon-hole the concept as either "divesting the GM of power" or "divesting the players of power" when it (a social contract) does neither - it allows all parties to share in the power. And that's what it comes down to...

THOSE PEOPLE WHO DECRY THE SOCIAL CONTRACT AS A TOOL DESIGNED TO STEAL ULTIMATE POWER FROM A SINGLE INDIVIUDAL OR GROUP OF INDIVUDUALS HAVE SOME SERIOUS CONTROL ISSUES.

[Scripty]

THOSE PEOPLE WHO DECRY THE SOCIAL CONTRACT AS A TOOL DESIGNED TO STEAL ULTIMATE POWER FROM A SINGLE INDIVIUDAL OR GROUP OF INDIVUDUALS HAVE SOME SERIOUS CONTROL ISSUES.

Hi James, I appreciate your passion on this point but I just wanted to clear something up on my end. Is this statement rhetorical or have we been doing this on this thread? I'm not trying to challenge your point, which I think is a valid one. I'm just trying to clarify the context of the statement as it regards mine and others' participation in this thread.

Also, I'd like to point out that you have revisited a question I posed a while ago about how a group should determine what their Social Contract is. I guess it would be a good topic for another thread, but I think that the Social Contract should be explicit. Almost all the groups with whom I've played, however, have ignored this aspect of roleplaying. Someone just assumes the mantle and the rest, for the most part, fall in line (or not).

Do you have any suggestions for setting up a workable Social Contract in an explicit manner? Have you ever done so? If so, what worked for you? What didn't?

Scott

[John Kim]

Do you have any suggestions for setting up a workable Social Contract in an explicit manner? Have you ever done so? If so, what worked for you? What didn't?

Just a note here -- this seems like it should be split off into a separate thread if you're going to discuss it.

[Scripty]

Just a note here -- this seems like it should be split off into a separate thread if you're going to discuss it.

Agreed.

Thanks,

Scott

[jdrakeh]

Err.. Moved to the split thread.