I have both been a “Tyrant DM” and a DM who just follows up on the choices the players take and given them 100% freedom. And ive been a player in campaings with both type off DMs.

1. The DMs that are Tyrants, most off the time dont know they are. Its the only way they know how to DM. They have a “cool idea” for a story and want to present it.
2. I think players know when a DM is being controlling. Some hate it and some just roll with it. But most off us know when this is happening.

And the important question. Is it wrong to be a Tyrant DM?
Well, I agree with Ben Robbins. Both can be right. What ever you like. BUT… one deserves alot moore credit.

There is a big difference between
1. a GM that can create a memorable and strong session based on the personaleties of the PC AND give them free choice, choices that matter for the future events, and create unexpected ripples.
2. and between a GM that has a story to tell, wich might be great, but will force the players into the story if things dont go as expected. And PC never do as expected.

Its not like we all have to be great GMs, but it makes a big difference what kind off GM you are playing under. And we all want choices, its what makes ANY story interesting. And I think its what most off us want roleplaying to be. Well, most off us

The examples here seem a lot like the strawman example of railroads, of course that could be just what a ‘bad’ railroader is, but it’s certainly not an example of railroading in general. Just like a free and open playstyle it all comes down to preference. The freedom is slavery thing is not bad, but here it seems tainted with venomous bias at a style of playing you just don’t like.

That being said, I like tyrant GMing to a point. I like to plan a wellcrafted session with interesting fight mechanics, chandalier encounters and wickedly tricky bosses. That’s why, at the end of my session I try to ask the important choices before hand, will you guys prefer to go to point a where there is an open city in need of help on the frontier, or embark on a dungeon crawl? The story, and thusly the gameplan resolves around something of the choices the players make, of course. DnD is a cruel mistress, planning is general how the game works and if I ran something like Paranoia it’d probably be different.

I agree with points, you should allow the player freedom to interact with the game and feel involved, never should you hijack an honest attempt by a player to play their character, but at the same time allowing them to simply break off the tracks presents problems, do the other players even want to go down that path? Now you have to toss the well prepared fun encounters for a slapdash run in with some bugbears because they decided to go to the cave of bugbears instead of the hall of wicked cool fight scenes.

There is no grand moral law that determines that every GM must let their players play out their characters stories the way they please from moment to moment. Would you want to throw a month of planning in the trash because your player decided his character wants to quit and become a farmer?

Besides, there’s all sort of people playing roleplaying games, and I would claim that those who complain about tyrannical GM’s are children. Joining the game without concern for where it may lead them, and then kicking and screaming when they aren’t allowed to have things their way.

If you want to take the story somewhere as a player, talk to your GM and make sure he has an open enough game in mind, or even a game based on your brilliant idea.
Don’t try to hijack his vision and cry when he won’t let you.

On the flipside, also consider the chicken and the egg, and the associated connundrum.

Is the GM in total control because he’s an inflexible control freak? or is it because the players aren’t taking their responsibilities as someone descibed above, and the GM is forced to do everything to keep the game running. until of one of the players dislikes something he does and calls him a tyrant.

in the end, it all boils down to roleplaying being doable in an infinite number of ways. if you want your GM to provide a sandbox for your brilliant mind to play in, you need to find a GM that likes that. Any GM that comes to you with a plan will want to follow it, keep that in mind when you decide wether you want to play or not.

Who is inflexible? the GM that wants the players to go one way, or the players that refuse?

Now I GM. The funny thing to me is that I would like more of a collaborative art style of play but my players (most are veteran MMORPG players) are firmly planted in tell-me-a-story mode. They want the freedom to explore an entire world and to drop and pick up plot threads at will so I’m trying to accommodate that as much as possible within reason and as much as it encourages fun for all at the table. I suspect that the syncopation that takes place when you get players and GMs with the same style of play, the same interests, and the same preference in gaming systems is something that must be wonderful when it happens but that doesn’t mean I’m going to become a gaming group slut to find it. For now, I game with my friends and that is good enough for me even if I don’t get everything I might want out of my gaming experience. . . and even if it does open me up to the occasional accusation of railroading (AKA tyrant)

If a GM is tyrannical because he’s nervous about wandering outside the ruleset, HQ can be a great help.

What was AD&D, to me?

Pit traps. Poison needles. Rot grubs. Disease rolls. Slavers. Getting your weapons taken by slavers and having to bust out of jail. Pulling the wrong lever and having the ceiling cave in.

Runequest was brutal. We could never catch a break.

Even some old Traveller was pretty unwinnable. The universe seemed stuck in “grim” mode, and the characters seemed to be stuck on the bottom of the totem pole.

And let’s not even talk about Call of Cthulhu. Rejoice when the characters die, rejoice even more when the group stops playing.

Shadowrun was fairly optimistic, by comparison. Hey, we’re scum and we’re going to jail, but for the moment we can slot BTL chips, drink beer while driving, and shoot people at random.

Vampire should have been pessimistic but wasn’t in my experience. Werewolf was an exuberant free-for-all IME.

More recent settings seem more optimistic to me. E.g. the characters can be creative, the characters get a lot of choices. E.g. in D&D 3.0, the DM asked me if I wanted to scribe some scrolls at low levels. Wow! I didn’t want to, but I liked having the option! (And if I had craft points, I would have used the option!)

D&D 3.5 took the optimism too far, and with excessively loose rules, but D&D 4 seems to have swung the pendulum back. I haven’t played D&D 4, so I don’t know.

Lately I’ve been playing GURPS, which is as optimistic as the GM’s rulings make it.

So IMHO pessimistic settings increase player whining about killer DMs, optimistic settings still get PCs killed off, but the players have more fun while the characters are dying, so the players whine less.

I also agree with the thrust of ben’s original post. Letting one person do all the work *is* a whole bunch easier, and it *does* carry with it a strong sense of “well it’s his world, so I guess he gets to run it his way”. At least in my experience (having been both GM & player in this scenario).

My own definition of when GM authority becomes tyranny is when the GM assumes more power over play than the other players are happy to give them. I’d go further and say that this is more likely to happen in games (as in life) where authority is mostly in the hands of one person.

I do think that traditional rules have an almost a priori assumption that you’ll run the game at the high end of the GM-control spectrum. That holds true as recently as 4e, with the GM advice sections saying things like “players like to feel they’re in control of X. Here’s how you let them feel they are.” I’m using 4e here only because I can lookup the quotes if I need to, because this advice has been widespread for at least twenty years. My impression is it’s been around since day 1 of the hobby.

What’s interesting to me about “Here’s how you let your players feel like they’re in control of X” is that:
a) the players presumably have expressed an interest in more control of X
b) the advice is never about giving them that control, just about giving the appearance of it
c) this approach has been around so long and is entrenched in so many popular RPGs that the weight of evidence surely suggests that this approach works: that most of the players quoted in a) are happier with the illusion of control than they are with the responsibilities and effort that goes with actually having control.

I think a significant reason for that is this: the “traditional GM” skillset is a much broader palette than that required by a “let the GM do it” player. Not everyone is creatively equal. Even when players are in a game that allows strong creative input into plot, world creation, narrative control–even when those players are trying their best to give that input–it can be *hard*. At least I’ve found it so, as both GM and a player. Those skills take time and sweat to develop and hone. Even for people who’v been doing it for years–people like GMs. And, as ben said, not every player *wants* to develop those skills, or to have to use them in play. For a lot of players, that’s just not what fun is.

And as has also been said, more power to them.

charles

I, for one, have never had any doubt that 95% of the GMs taking this “do it my way or not at all” attitude are doing it because they think it will make the game better. (The other 5% are just assholes. Not much you can do about them.)

But, based on my personal experience, I would also say that 99% of those GMs are wrong. I have my own personal collection of stories about games that could have been great… except that the GM wasn’t daring enough to let the players transcend their vision of what the game was “supposed” to be. And I’ve heard those stories from other people, too.

A friend of mine actually just sent me a link yesterday to a thread over on RPGNet where a GM wants his advice: His players are facing a BBEG. He wants them to go on a dungeon crawl to fetch the BBEG’s kryptonite. His players want to travel to the neighboring kingdoms, convince them to form an alliance, and lead an army to crush the BBEG’s legions. He wants advice on how to get his players to give up on their epic visions and, instead, embrace the dungeon crawl. I’m sure it’s a nifty dungeon crawl, but I feel sorry for those players. I would love to be a part of a campaign where I rallied an Army of Light to crush the Undead God-Pharaoh. Sounds a lot more exciting than another McGuffin Quest.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s Monte Cook Queen of Lies: He gave his players a “rescue the hostage from the drow” scenario. His players responded by raising an army and waging war on the drow kingdom. How frickin’ cool is that?

My own story is a D6 Star Wars campaign I was playing in about a decade ago: The Neo-Empire and a resurgent Sith Brotherhood had smashed the New Republic, killed most of the Jedi, and left the Jedi PCs on the run. The players responded by forging several planetary systems into a Jedi Republic — we had reached the conclusion that the fault of the Republic had lain in never putting the Jedi in charge. We were all set for a taut political drama mixed with interstellar war mixed with themes of the power of corruption… when the GM abruptly ended the campaign because we had veered too far off his roadmap.

A missed opportunity.

Personally, I’ve sworn to never be that GM.

Look, I think there are plenty of GMs who run incredibly entertaining campaigns which are also completely pre-plotted and/or railroaded. And as long as their players are having fun, then I say more power to them.

But if the players are chomping on the bit to go do X, then I think there’s a pretty good chance it’s because they want to do X and would have a lot of fun doing X.

(Of course, there’s a hard-to-define line here. The PCs shouldn’t automatically succeed at everything they try to do. But I think we all know what the difference is between something failing because it failed and something failing because the GM wants the PCs to be doing something else.)

If you have absolute power you are by definition a tyrant. That’s what the word means. There’s common parlance that tyranny also means abuse of power, which isn’t really surprising given our expectations of human nature (power corrupts, etc.)

Normally a GM never has absolute power over everything at the table. At the very least the players control their own character actions, and most games have rules which the GM would have a hard time just ignoring without having the players walk away from the game (“no, you rolled a 20 but you failed your save and you’re dead, because I said so, for I am the GM”).

So when I’m talking about tyrant GMs I’m talking more about people _trying_ to take over things they shouldn’t, regardless of their complete or partial success. Wannabe tyrant GMs I suppose. A serious storyteller GM may have already taken lots of control of the characters away from the players, and dissolved much of the authority of the rules, but it’s unlikely they would hit 100% control of everything. The players are still doing something at some point.

Another way to think of it is like monopolies in US law: you’re allowed to have a particular monopoly, you’re just not allowed to use that monopoly to exert undue influence. Same with GMs: in a traditional game you have the final say over the existence of things in the game world and their behaviors, but you should not use that power to take choice away from the players. Even if you are the final arbiter of rules (as y’know, the referee) you should not abuse that power to make things happen just because they work for your plot. That would be tyrant behavior.

Yep. Sometimes