A persistent problem

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Duck One
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Re: A persistent problem

Post by Duck One »

One of the challenges of attracting someone DM is familiarity with the server. You need to know where area transitions lead, what kind of random spawns may be in an area, where static quests might lead people, how players will navigate to reach a zone, etc. These are just practical considerations that let you know where you can set something up, how long it will take players to get there, and what they might accidentally find along the way.

Then there are the in-character considerations: knowing the politics, factions, major named NPC’s, and the major influences of the areas. Without familiarity of these, you run the risk of making an NPC act in a way that it ordinarily shouldn’t, or setting up a plot that would happen differently than it likely would given the factional motives or economic realities of the area.

Then of course there are the ongoing plots; the things the DM’s are presently brewing and the PC’s are responding to. Part of this is knowing the history of plots gone by, and part of it is immediate awareness of things happening in the moment, or coming up in the near future.

Bottom line: the people most equipped to DM on a server are players who have played there a significant amount of time. The rule of not DMing where you play will make players choose between continuing to play the characters they’ve built on the server they know, or dropping it to become a DM. This is the choice I had to make with respect to TSM and others in this thread have expressed.

I find it incongruent that ALFA has shown a level of trust in its members to allow sexually explicit material to happen, but people being responsible enough DM and play fairly is beyond the scope of trust. I, for one, would be much more comfortable trusting another player balance the boundaries of fair play in separating his responsibilities as a DM and player than I would be comfortable trusting another player to know the boundaries of respect and comfort with regard to the personal and intimate nature of sexual material.

Are we a community of well-adjusted mature responsible adults, or aren’t we? And shouldn’t the default position of the policies be one of trust in such a community? If someone picks up a DM wand and misuses it to their character’s advantage, it doesn’t affect me. I play the game for the adventure, which needs a risk, which means I have to honor the spirit of the rules to enjoy it fully. The way someone else plays the game doesn’t have to change the way I play, and so I would prefer to presume a level of trust.
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Zelknolf
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Re: A persistent problem

Post by Zelknolf »

Duck One wrote:Are we a community of well-adjusted mature responsible adults, or aren’t we? And shouldn’t the default position of the policies be one of trust in such a community? If someone picks up a DM wand and misuses it to their character’s advantage, it doesn’t affect me. I play the game for the adventure, which needs a risk, which means I have to honor the spirit of the rules to enjoy it fully. The way someone else plays the game doesn’t have to change the way I play, and so I would prefer to presume a level of trust.
As always, I remind that "no rules" (or having the only rule be Wheaton's Law) is our default position for everything. Nobody wants rules for their own sake. We don't draft rules without problems to solve.

It remains the case that DM corruption happens even with it being pointedly difficult to benefit for a DM to benefit their own character; we still routinely dismiss corrupt DMs (well, HDMs/DMAs ask for their resignations-- it's pretty rare for a DM who got caught to force the DMA to actually remove them), and we do that because such corruption does do damage to the game world-- typically more because bad DMs tend to actively damage the experience of the people they dislike (typically by taking active steps to isolate those they dislike, but up to and including griefspawning their characters to death or explicitly equipping pet characters for CvC [and as DMs, they can say it doesn't require the consent of the other party]).
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Re: A persistent problem

Post by oldgrayrogue »

Ah the "T" word. ALFA has, sadly, never been a community based upon trust.

I'd be totally fine with DM where you play, no 30 day rules, multiple PCs (more than 2) etc etc. Ronan is one of my favorite DMs ever and he killed like 4 or 5 of my PCs. Each death was memorable though and story based which was all I ever asked for.

Clearly, if we ditched these rules there would be more people DMing more often. It just requires too much trust for this community to swallow.
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