GM as arbitrator and opponent - conflict of interest?

[timfire]

Does setting up the GM as both an arbitrator of the rules and explicitly as an opponent create a comflict of interest?

I did a search but didn't find anything that specifically addressed my question.

Thanks.

[jdagna]

Taken alone, the roles of arbitrator and opponent do conflict.  However, I think the key to good GMing is understanding that they shouldn't be taken alone.  GMs should put having fun as a top priority, with arbitration and opposition supporting the fun.

Think of it like a teacher/student dynamic.  A teacher's job is to help students learn the information - the teacher wants you to pass the course.  A teacher's job is also to grade papers and such, with the potential outcome that they may need to flunk you.  Most people don't see this as a conflict in interest because both aspects are subservient to an overall goal (learning).

I'm sure you've had examples of teachers who took this dynamic to one extreme or the other.  I knew one (in a senior level college course nonetheless!) who refused to give a lower grade than a C for anything, no matter how bad, late or inappropriate to the assignment.  In another class, I almost passed out when my calculus midterm came back with 54%... until I realized that the average was only 42% and I was practically setting the curve (a curve that this teacher adopted partway through the course because the department wouldn't let him fail everyone).  The Monty Haul and Killer DM stereotypes fit these two almost perfectly, and the students responded to the teachers the same way the players will respond to GMs who play like that.

However, I'm sure you had teachers who realized that if they're going to teach you effectively, then they must challenge you just enough to find your limits and then help you to exceed them.  You may not have liked these teachers quite so much at the time, but I'd bet they're your favorites as you look back on them.  I think I learned more about essay writing from one 11th grade English teacher than in the rest of my time in school (college included).  She was simultaneously the most and least liked teacher in the school because she'd push so hard.  My own reputation for GMing reflects that - I still have people who call me an evil GM even as they ask if we can go to four sessions a month instead of two.

When it comes to GMs, I think the key lies in realizing that the primary goal is to facilitate an enjoyable game.  Players want to be challenged, not lavished with undeserved rewards or struck down with unavoidable death.  So the roles of opposition and arbitration are not roles unto themselves, but facets of the overall role (having fun).  They only conflict when you forget about the having fun put.

[Doctor Xero]

The motivation topic went off onto a tangent which addressed this idea somewhat.
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=9631

In my personal opinion, there is always this danger.  However, even when the game master
is working cooperatively with both players and player-characters, there is still some
danger.  Game masters have been known to develop favorite players and/or favorite
player-characters without even realizing that they are doing so.  Game masters are still
only human, so it's possible for a player or a player-character to push the GM's emotional
buttons accidentally.

I think that this is less a matter of the function of the game master in a particular RPG
and more a function of the individual game master in a particular social group playing
an RPG.  A game master who is playing as an opponent to the player-characters but who
is genuinely cooperating with the players will try very hard to be fair, giving himself or
herself no unfair advantages.  Not an easy thing to do, but it has been done many times.
A game master who is playing as both an opponent to the player-characters and as an
opponent to the players will soon be tagged as a "killer DM".

Copious mechanics might make it easier to avoid unfairness in games in which the
game master is encouraged to work against the player-characters as much as he or she
is able, with The Game Book as the final arbiter rather than the game master much of the
time, but there are still too many situations which authors of rules book can not anticipate.
Some people might argue that rules-lite games actually make it easier to avoid unfairness
because the game master has so much overt authority that all eyes are upon him or her,
with no labyrinthine rules to hide behind.  Since I do not enjoy gaming in which the
game master is overtly hostile to or competitive against the player-characters, even when
all the players expect the game master to oppose their player-characters,  I have no idea
whether or not rules-lite games actually have that effect.

I wonder if there are players who genuinely enjoy playing under game masters who are
overtly playing under conflict of interest?  I have some vague memories of a friend who
enjoyed gaming under a game master who bragged he was out to hurt both players and
player-characters, saw it as a sort of macho thing to survive the game without acknowledging
any feelings hurt by the game master's hostility to both players and their characters, but
I've never met anyone else who enjoyed that kind of gaming.

Doctor Xero

[Loki]

I agree with what you are saying regarding most GMs balancing the conflict of interest (and the teacher metaphor struck me as particularly apt--could teaching be a form of illusionism?).

However, given that this is The Forge, I can't help thinking "system does matter", and any system that sets up that conflict of interest is bound to fail frequently, GMs being flawed and human. Are there examples of games that take the 'master' out of GM, and make him more of a special-case opposing player? What about games where the GM is truly just an arbitrator, and can't frame the game in such a way to screw/favor players?

[Callan S.]

A post I started awhile ago talks about this, doing the old 'take the opponent hat off the GM and put it on a player'. But its a bit more interesting than that.

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=8811

[John Harper]

The first game that comes to mind is Primetime Adventures. The GM ("Producer") in that game has no adversarial role whatsoever. There's very little "master" either. Being the Producer is very much like being just another player.

The Questing Beast, Dust Devils, My Life with Master, and Trollbabe also do away with a lot of the "master" elements of Game Master.

[Doctor Xero]

Noon, I've occasionally had scenarios in which players played villains/monsters/what-have-you
opponents, and they always worked quite well.  Because my gaming groups have been more
cooperation-oriented, no one likes to play only opponents, so the opponent was usually played
in addition to playing a valued comrade.

I ~always~ made certain first that this was all right with the players.

Often, a player would play the personal nemesis NPC for another player's PC.  In those cases,
I always made certain that the nemesis NPC was played by a player trusted by and friends
with the target PC's player.  Usually, I had best friends play each other's nemeses, because
as best friends they could play intensely without any risk of hurting each other's feelings
or wrecking fair play.  I also made it very clear to players that a SEVERE penalty would result
if any player misused the privilege of playing a nemesis.  I recall one game when two players
were quarrelling and one player used his character to cause considerable problems for the
other player's character even after numerous warnings.  I penalized him 15 experience
points in a game system in which the average experience points for a full day's gaming
was 3 experience points.

However, most of the time it worked, and it worked well!

Doctor Xero

[talysman]

Are there examples of games that take the 'master' out of GM, and make him more of a special-case opposing player? What about games where the GM is truly just an arbitrator, and can't frame the game in such a way to screw/favor players?

my Troubadors of Verticaille attempts this, but I haven't playtested the blasted thing, so heck if I know if the mechanics work. it's meant to be played GMless -- or rather, who gets to GM changes from scene to scene. the GM for the scene only fills in details for the opponent; the player whose character gets "spotlighted" in a given scene also sets the difficulty of the task, so no screwing or favoring is possible. the game is not about whether you succeed or fail, but about what you have to go through to succeed.

I think The Fantasy Trip was the first rpg to suggest seperating the GM and opponent roles by having a "monster player"; however, this was just a suggestion, and I don't know of anyone who played that way. GMs were a little more limited than in a typical rpg, though, because the combat and magic rules were designed as stand-alone one-on-one arena minigames, which puts the GM and other players on a more equal footing.

there is also, of course, Rune as an example of balancing GM as opponent. hmmm... come to think of it, Rune also works by reducing the GM arbitrator role.

[timfire]

Noon, that was an interesting thread, thanks for the link.

Rune does seem to have an interesting strategy in dealing with this. From what I gather Rune deals with the GM-as-opponent issue by completely removing the arbitrator role. From the reviews I read, it seemed that GM's can only design encounters off of the power level of the PC's. Challenges are given a rating, and the GM has little authority to modulate that challenge level. What's also interesting with Rune, is that while the GM receive points for PC failure, GM's receive a penalty when a PC dies. I guess this encourages a "challenging but not impossible" mentality.

I bought this up because I'm trying to develop a game with a strong competetive player-vs-dungeon(GM?) aspect. I realize that the goal is "fun," and "fun" for the players is defeating the dungeon. But what about the GM, shouldn't their be a place for the "fun" of defeating the players?

If part of the "fun" for the GM is defeating the players, is the only solution breaking the role of arbitrator away from the GM, whether it's by adding a 2nd GM or by limiting the his power?

[Mike Holmes]

I think everyone has the right idea. Systems that do a good job of this "partition" off the GM's responsibilities. That is, he acts as referee on one level, and as a competitor on the other. Yes, there's a potential conflict of interest, but then, the same thing can be said of pickup basketball and calling your own fouls as I'm fond of pointing out. The social contract causes the competition to be honest. This is made more easy by verification of the results. For example, if the GM isrequired to have a written record (as in Rune), then the players can check to see if he's cheating. That is, the GM's authority is partitioned off such that ajudicaiton responsiblities do not apply to that part of the competition.

Thus level playingfields can be created and maintained, even while the GM still retains some arbitrary rights to adjudicate other things. Many designs simply rely purely on the honesty of the GM - and this works in most cases. But there's no reason why not to have a better system in place that makes everyone more comfortable with the competition as it exists.

Mike

[Loki]

Mike, you make some excellent points and summaries. As I've alluded above, I think that much of the time social contract is sufficient in creating an enjoyable game. It's just that it's not a part of the game, any more than, for instance, faking injury is part of the game of soccer. It happens, and it's part of the social contract for that game (at the professional level in Europe anyway), but it's not part of the rules.

I like the pick-up game of basketball analogy. It's true, the social contract of the game is that you are fair in calling fouls. However even that game has a built-in way of encouraging this: if I call questionable fouls, you can too. So in that sense, the rules encourage fairness.

When a basketball game has a referee to call fouls, and the reffavors one team over the other, there is no in-game recourse to the team getting screwed.

I gotta check out Rune at lunch today.

[Doctor Xero]

Personally, in the groups I've been in, RPGs which minimize or eliminate game masters ruin one of our
interests in gaming together.

As players, we see one (of many) pleasures in RPGs as the opportunity to romp through the imagination
and dreamscape of the person we've chosen as game master.

There's an element of "tell me a story" and "show me your dreams" in a lot of our games (not all, of course,
and certainly not most World of Darkness games! <g>  On the other hand, one of the best horror games we
played was based off the game master's worst nightmares as a child . . . )

We have no interest in romping through the unliving imagination and stilled dreamscape of a gaming book.

When I've tried to use certain group-as-game-master freeware RPGs, I always have to alter them to
reinstall the game master or they fail our group's interests.  (Sorry, Zak!)

I've found a number of groups work this way.  I think constructing an RPG with no game master can be
a good idea, and I think constructing an RPG in which game master is out to get the players might work
for some gaming groups, but let's not discount the gaming groups who enjoy adventuring in the
personal fantastica of someone they personally know and game with.

Doctor Xero

[talysman]

Personally, in the groups I've been in, RPGs which minimize or eliminate game masters ruin one of our
interests in gaming together.

As players, we see one (of many) pleasures in RPGs as the opportunity to romp through the imagination
and dreamscape of the person we've chosen as game master.

that's why I think good GMless designs require player creativity. you're still romping through someone's imagination -- the imagination of whoever is adding details to the gameworld at the moment.

[Doctor Xero]

let's not discount the gaming groups who enjoy adventuring in the
personal fantastica of someone they personally know and game with.

that's why I think good GMless designs require player creativity.
you're still romping through someone's imagination -- the imagination
of whoever is adding details to the gameworld at the moment.

I never discounted good GMless designs.  I pointed out we shouldn't discount those of
us who prefer otherwise.

The groups about which I write are filled with tremendously creative individuals.

But in this situation, they aren't looking for a creative patchwork or montage of the creative ideas
of the entire group.  They want to romp through the personal imagination of one specific individual
at that time -- with all the coherence and individual vision and insight into that person that implies.

I'm not discounting your love of GMless designs, talysman.  Please do not discount those of us
whose personal enjoyment moves more towards campaigns run by a single individual game master
with his own singular creative vision with which we interact and go wild.  Our players are creative,
our interests involve creativity -- and this is how we enjoy expressing our creativity and imagination.

Doctor Xero

[talysman]

no one's making any accusations against you, Doctor Xero, so please don't get defense or angry. I did not say that everyone should play GMless, or that playing with a GM isn't fun, or that I myself would never play with a GM. you mentioned that the GMless encounters you had lacked something: the ability to explore someone else's imaginary world. I suggested that this could be added to a good GMless design.

that's not a criticism of you. if anything, it's a criticism of the state of GMless game design. that's what the Forge is for: to look critically at the state of game design and game play, to spot problems, to share solutions. it's not a forum for me to criticize how you play, so I don't.