Sabledrake Magazine
May, 2004
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The Play's the Thing
Copyright © 2004 By David Goodner
When GM's Attack
Welcome back. I decided this month to do a column I've been thinking about for a while: "When GM's Attack -or- Why Bad Things Happen to Good Characters."
I'll begin with a story. After I left my much-beloved Shadow Run game, a new player started - the GM's girlfriend. She was playing an Elven Street Shaman with Snake as her totem, which nicely filled the dual voids of Healer and Hot Elf Chick that the loss of my two characters had caused.
However, because she'd come into the game very late, hardly any of the plot threads directly related to her. She told the GM she felt like she was always on the sidelines and didn't really matter to the game.
So, the GM looked over her background and came up with a plot line that was hers and hers alone. She got center stage and her own personal spotlight.
She hated it. She said the GM was being mean to her character.
He responded with a line that I have taken to my heart: "The characters in the spotlight... they don't want to be there. They'd much rather be on the sidelines where it's safe."
(Hope I quoted you correctly, Dave. It's been a while.)
That's the great conundrum of Player Characters. Most PCs want to avoid the spotlight, while most Players want to be in it. That's also the topic of this column, or at least part of it. I want to discuss the reasons GMs are mean to poor, helpless Player Characters.
Another brief story: When I still lived with my parents, I used to enlist my mom as a reader for my fiction (at least some of it). She's not really the ideal audience for horror/fantasy action adventure stories, but I had a dearth of choices. One complaint she always had was that I was too mean to my characters. Bad things always happened to them.
I used to answer that if nothing bad happened, there was no story.
Unless it's very unusual, that's probably true of your game, too. (And if your game really does run with no conflict, I'd be curious to hear how that works)
There are several reasons for conflicts, setbacks, and general bad days:
Reason 1: It's Just the Plot
The dungeon full of Orks, the Empire of Darkness that's crushing the PCs home town, the elder god beneath the sea: usually these will cause the PCs some problems. It's nothing personal. The PCs are just in the way. (Well, actually, the Orks are in the PCs' way from a certain point of view - but for now we'll assume they're evil, nasty Orks who were just hanging out in the dungeon until they figured out how to get the dragon out of the 10' halls. THEN they'd be trouble)
The faceless, impersonal hordes of evil are a staple of gaming. They're easy to manage, and the reaction to them is fairly obvious. You kill them, run from them, or banish them as appropriate, and pursue your other goals along the way if you have any.
Usually, the main plot affects all the PCs more or less equally. Individual events may hit one PC harder than the others, but over all everybody's in the same boat.
Dealing with this sort of conflict is often what a game is about. If you're playing Star Wars, you're probably trying to defeat the evil Empire (or protect the failing Old Republic these days. You kids and your prequels. In my day we had to walk ten miles to Mos Eisley through a sandstorm, and there was hardly anyone there, and we liked it.)
It is to be hoped that the big conflict figures into your character's personal goals in some way, but this could be tangential. Look at the Hobbits in Lord of the Rings. None of the four really got up one morning and said "let's go destroy the One Ring to prevent the rise of Sauron." Frodo wanted to keep the Shire safe, and his friends wanted to keep him safe. That the safety of the Shire was dependant upon the destruction of the One Ring was kind of a bonus.
In earlier columns, I've already suggested that you should choose goals for your character that will then to lend themselves to the GM's plot. You should also pursue your goals in a way that doesn't directly conflict with it.
Frodo could have decided to throw the Ring down a well. The series would have been much shorter, or at the least would have gotten off to a much different start.
The central conflict of the game is a great way to define your character. How does he feel about it? What does he do about it? Why?
Since I just introduced her to you all, I'll use Juri as an example. The big conflict in our Buffy game is the continuing battle between the champions of humanity and the forces of darkness. Juri has been raised to believe it's her job to protect people from the forces of evil. Further, after a little reading on Shinto religion, I decided she's something of a supernatural racist. Humans are descended from the Kami (the gods and spirits of Shinto religion). Demons and vampires aren't. Therefore, it's always the right thing to do to kill a monster - though it might be occasionally advisable to wait and kill one later if it has something you want.
In practice, she's always eager to fight, because it's what she was raised to do, and the only time she feels like she's fulfilling her purpose. On the other hand, she's very concerned with the safety of the rest of the team. If a team mate is in trouble, Juri will probably drop whatever she's doing to help them - which isn't always the best decision. Her "kill them all" attitude is rapidly eroding, not out of compassion for the monsters, but because she's been in several situations already where letting one live for a few minutes would have vastly simplified her life.
Other members of the group have different outlooks, which lead to some interesting situations. The most fun is watching Travis and Theo (who hate each other) both try to protect Juri while she's trying to protect both of them.
Reason 2: You Asked for It
This is my favorite. One of my gaming epiphanies was the realization that if I was running Champions I didn't actually need to plan adventures. All I had to do was roll everybody's Hunteds and DNPCs and figure out how the latter got in trouble with the former.
In almost any game with an Advantage/Disadvantage system players have the option of creating ties between their characters and certain NPCs. This is a practice I strongly encourage, even in systems that don't allow it formally.
Since I'm tired of using Star wars as an example, let's look at another cinematic classic: Die Hard. John McClane, trapped in an office building with a bunch of terrorists, and without his shoes. What does he do? He saves everybody. Why? He's a hero, and the movie would be really short if he did the smart thing and snuck out - but also because his wife was one of the hostages. Later on in Die Hard With a Vengeance, the brother of the terrorist he beat the first time comes after him for revenge.
It's all personal, and therefore more gripping than it might otherwise be.
When your character's personal ghosts come back to haunt him, there are essentially two forms the interference can take. Either it will be part of the main plot, or it will be a distraction from it. Either is fun.
In my Now is the Winter game, Dr. Zhou (the Tremere) had a Dependent: his mortal family. In the second adventure, Dr. Killian (the Malkavian bad guy) kidnapped his granddaughter as a reprisal for Dr. Zhou breaking someone out of Killian's asylum. While under the good doctor's care, the poor kid was subjected to lots of nasty mind control powers that warped her mind for the rest of the game. In session 2, rescuing the girl was the main point of the session. For the rest of the game, trying to unravel what Killian had done to her mind distracted Dr. Zhou and almost induced him to sell out the rest of the group once.
NPC ties aren't the only thing the GM will exploit. If your character has a fear of spiders, then expect at least once that he'll drop something he really, really needs into a hole full of daddy longlegs.
Rather than looking on this as persecution from the GM, I look on it as a way to make sure my character will always be involved in the story. When your enemy shows up, it's your chance to shine. When your loved-ones' lives are on the line, failure is not an option. Cool stuff.
Careful choice of disadvantages has allowed me to steal the spotlight (well, just borrow it for a while) of several games.
Reason 3: Just One of Those Things
Even if your character doesn't' have Enemies (for which he got, or paid in 7th Sea, points) he has enemies. He's probably a gun-toting maniac. Of course he has enemies. If he left them all dead, then their kids, girlfriends, and bill collectors are his enemies. If, somehow, he doesn't have enemies at all, he still has some ties to the game world.
Eventually, those are going to cause him problems.
(If your character doesn't have any ties to the game world, go back and read all my earlier columns and re-make him. The game is really a lot more fun if you have some vested interest in the outcome. Honest)
These can be some of the most annoying misfortunes ever to strike a character. The come out of nowhere, more or less, and can utterly screw up your plans. Sometimes they serve the greater plot, but sometimes they only seem to serve the GM's sadistic urges.
As a GM, I've hit more than one PC with a complication just because it seemed like it would be fun. I'm more than sure that some of my favorite GMs have done the same thing to me.
Sometimes it's realism. If your character wanders into the area the GM has decided is the lair to a big monster, he's probably going to end up mauled by said big monster. If he was there for a totally different reason, there's going to be irony dripping along with the blood.
Sometimes it's an attempt to steer the characters (affectionately called "railroading" in many cases). If all the avenues open to you but one are guarded by ravenous wolves, guess which one the GM thinks you should take. This is really annoying when it's blatant, less so when the GM is subtle about it. If he's really good, you'll never notice.
Sometimes it really is just one of those things. For instance, I tend to run about half my games off the cuff. I have a general plan, but at least of half of what goes on in a session is pure improvisation. If my PCs do something I totally didn't expect, I have to come up with something fast, and I'll try to make it interesting. "Interesting" in gaming parlance tends to follow the conventions of the old Chinese saying...
These random conflicts can be annoying, but they can also be a lot of fun. The potential for them is one of the things that makes gaming a lot different than fiction. In a story or a movie, everything that happens is part of the plot. In a game, there's potential for lots of plots all at once.
Assuming your character survives his unfortunate encounter with the beast from my earlier example, maybe now he thinks it would make a nifty jacket and pair of boots. There could be some fun later down the line when he goes back with the right equipment this time.
Reason 4: The GM is a Jerk
This is the one I don't like. There are times when a GM is just out to get one player, or to kill them all. Those are two different situations, so I'll take them one at a time.
First, the Party Killer. This GM wants to run his game (at best) like a chess match where he throws all his resources at the party and the players do their best to beat him, and (at worst) like an endless deathtrap where the party will fight wave after wave of threats until they're overwhelmed.
The first case is fine, if that's what everyone wants to do. It's more like a strategy game than a story game, but that's what it's meant to be. As long as everyone's on the same page and everyone's having fun, they should keep doing it.
The second case is the kind of game I'd walk out on. The realization that broke me out of my munchkin phase in High School was that the GM always had more hit points than I did. He always had more experience. There were always more monsters. There was absolutely no way my character would ever be more powerful than the GM could threaten.
Once you realize that, there's not a lot of point in collecting power anymore unless you have something you want to do with it.
The flip-side of that realization was that as GM I could always, always kill the entire party whenever I wanted to. There was no ability a PC could possess that I couldn't defeat, remove, or circumvent.
Once I saw that, I couldn't see much point in wiping out groups of stalwart adventurers any more, either. The Tarsque and the Death Star were comforting security blankets that I had largely outgrown.
So now for the hard part, the vindictive GM. There are levels of vindictiveness. Sometimes the fault lies with the player, and the GM is just trying to rein him in, or the player is just trying to push his character in a way the game is not designed to go.
In my Now is the Winter game, Jason the Brujah seemed determined to ignore the fact that the city was about to be sucked into hell as he pursued his political agenda. Eventually, I decided to smack him by having the Prince offer him an Office, then use the Dominate power of Fealty (which makes an oath literally binding) to force him to toe the line. I'm not sure that was the right decision, but it was enormously satisfying - particularly when Prince Marcel rolled so well that I had to extrapolate more slots on the effects chart to see how long the Oath would bind Jason.
But sometimes the GM just has an axe to grind. I really don't know what to do about that. GM favoritism is just about always bad. If the GM and the player can't settle their differences amicably, then maybe the player should leave the game. Some people just shouldn't game together, even if they get along in other ways.
If the game isn't fun, you definitely shouldn't play. If it's the only game in town, then you'll have to decide if which is less fun: a game where the GM is out to get you, or no game at all.
Since everyone reading this article is presumably equipped with an internet connection, I'd recommend looking into PBEM, PBP, and IRC games.
Parting Words
This is usually the point where I tie everything together into a nice neat bundle, but I don't really have one this time. The big point is "The GM is probably not picking on you." The lesson, to the extent that there is one, is that setbacks and conflicts are what make your character. How he reacts to them is what defines him.
When Players Attack
Welcome back.
Last time I talked about GM generated conflict, but that's really only part of the picture. In a lot of games, it's the biggest part of the picture. In fact, it's kind of the default assumption in most games: the GM comes up with a plot, and the players interact with it.
But there are other options. In games like Amber or most social LARPs Player vs. Player conflict is assumed to play a big part. Even in more traditional games, PCs can have conflicting goals. Players can also initiate plots of their own. In fact, one of my favorite ways to GM is to give the players a setting and see what they find to do there, only stepping in with my own plot events when it seems like fun.
So let's talk about Player-generated conflict. In previous columns, I have talked about having goals for your character, and how they don't all need to be in harmony with the rest of the group. PC goals are the seeds of Player-generated conflict.
Well, they're the seeds of good Player-generated conflict. Real-life disagreements being dragged into the game in stupid, immature ways are the seeds of more than a few Player-generated conflicts.
But let's talk about the constructive ones, instead. As a Player, you have the potential to generate conflict whenever you have your character pursue his goals. That conflict can go in two basic directions. Player vs. GM, or Player vs. Player.
Player vs. GM
Player vs. GM conflict is fairly similar to the usual setup in gaming. In fact, it can be hard to tell who's generating the conflict sometimes. The PC tries to do something, and the GM puts obstacles in his way. The PC reacts, and the cycle repeats. The only real difference is in who started it, which can have one major consequence. If the Player does something the GM really didn't' expect, the GM has to improvise.
I probably don't need to mention that some GMs are better at improvising than others.
The Platonic Ideal GM would have considered every possibility and would already be prepared for that course of action. I am not, nor have I ever played with such a GM. Fortunately, there are ways to fake it.
A really good GM probably knows enough about his setting to figure out how to react on the fly. Since most of my games are only informally mapped out at best, I'm doing a lot of that anyway. I spend more time figuring out who the NPCs are and what they're likely to do than I do working out exact events, so my players can't do too much that's unexpected. I wasn't expecting anything anyway.
(They have really floored me more than once, though.)
A less flexible GM might stonewall the player temporarily, or, better yet ask the player, out of character, to hold off for a while, until he figures out what to do. I've had to do that a couple of times. I think the result was better than if I'd tried to work completely in the dark.
A really inflexible GM could just make the unexpected actions impossible or force them to end in automatic failure. This is commonly called "railroading" or "bad GMing." Bad GMs will even do it when the Players are following the "main" plot, but in an unexpected way.
As a Player, here's what you need to think about:
How open is the GM to Player-initiated plots?
I've run and played on both ends of the spectrum: games that pretty much ran on rails, and games that didn't run at all unless the players found something interesting to do. I'm happiest somewhere in between, with the GM presenting a compelling plot for the players to unravel, but with room for some pretty significant subplots that the players introduce.
In fact, I'm gearing up to play in a Witchcraft game (finally) in the next month or so, and I tacked about two pages of subplot ideas onto my character background. I told the GM what kind of things I'd like to see, and what I'd generally be doing if left to my own devices. He seemed to appreciate it. We'll have to see how it goes when the game starts (if we don't end up playing Champions instead, with a different GM)
This gets into some fundamental gaming issues. If you really, really want to be able to pursue your character's own agenda, and your GM really, really wants to run just his plot, then it might be that you should find a different game. More often, though, it's just a matter of striking a balance and smoothing out the difference between play styles. For instance, I personally love it when my players tell me what their character goals are so I can work opportunities to pursue those goals into my plans.
I guess that turns a Player-generated plot into a GM-generated one, but I'm not really sure.
How important are your character's personal goals?
Assuming the GM has a plot in mind, you might have to prioritize a little. To this day, I still don't understand what was going through the player of Jason's mind in my Now is the Winter Vampire chronicle. I'd pretty much established that one of two evil Malkavians was well on the way to completely shattering the Masquerade beyond all repair, and wanted to kill the PCs just out of spite (Jason in particular). Further, the Prince was the only guy around who could stand up to him one-on-one. Even further, Jason's own Sire wanted him to help the Prince.
But Jason thought now would be a good time to try to spark a minor Anarch revolt and seize power for Clan Brujah.
Well, in a way I guess I could see his point. Still, it was a pain to find ways to convince Jason to at least look in the direction of my plot from time to time, and he took up more of my time than was really fair to the other players.
My rule of thumb is "Saving the world" outranks "wining the heart of the fair damsel." If the GM has a strong plot, I'll usually try to follow it to as great an extent as is logical for my character, but try to get time for my personal goals whenever I can.
Back in my goal setting columns, I already discussed the idea that your character's personal goals have to be worked in as the GM has time for them. If you're one of five players, you can only really expect about a fifth of the GM's time.
Of course, if you can get several players involved, then jointly you get more time. Such was the case with a character in my Now is the Winter game by the name of Maximillian.
Max was a Setite envoy, recently come to Scarborough to see if maybe the Prince was in a forgiving mood. (See, he'd kind of kicked them out when he caught one selling heroin to a member of his Herd. And by "kicked out" I mean "staked, decapitated, or and burned to ashes.") Max was something of a ladies' man, and liked to flirt and show off his vampiric nature to those who knew the signs by giving roses to female vampires he met.
One of the male PCs came to instantly hate Max when Max gave his girlfriend, and later in the same night his new Childe, a rose. Pretty soon, he had the rest of the group convinced that Max was the living personification of evil.
So, in the interest of getting the PCs to do something, I wrote Max into the plot. It was actually really handy. I needed a way to mess with the Brujah, and having Max corrupt one of the Anarch leaders worked great.
None of that would have happened if the group had just ignored Max or casually beat him up like I thought they would.
The tricky thing about Player-generated conflict is that it's hard to know when, as a player, you're generating conflict, or when you're just rising to the GM's bait. If you declare your vendetta against the Dark Prince, is that player-generated conflict? Or did the GM just make the Dark Prince such a natural target that your vendetta was almost inevitable?
I don't know, and I don't think it matters a great deal. If the end result is fun, then the process by which you got there is probably not worth worrying about excessively. Probably, in the vast majority of games, the GM provides the seeds of most of the plot. In a smaller minority, the GM is more responsive to the Players. Some games lend themselves to this more than others. Amber leaps to mind, as does Nobilis. Games with less cosmic settings tend to be more GM controlled, but there's no reason it has to be that way, and I'm sure a lot of people play them with less GM control.
I write most of my columns under the assumption that the GM will be providing most of the direction for the game. That's the way it's been for most of the time I've been gaming, and I don't see that changing any time soon.
But, as I've said, that's not the only way to game. In a game where the GM is taking a more reactive role, PC goals and Player-generated plots become a lot more important because without them, all the PCs can do is sit around in the inn, waiting for the mysterious old man to show up.
In a game like that, you need to choose your goals carefully. Of course, there's not a lot of useful advice I can give you. The very nature of a game like that makes it hard to generalize. Almost everything I say in this column still applies, but in a slightly different way. Most of the stuff in the next session is particularly important, since a game where the players have so much freedom is likely to have more room for PCs to get in each other's ways.
Player vs. Player
Player vs. Player conflict is a lot easier to nail down. If PC #1 pulls out his sword and tries to run PC #2 through, then you've got very clear PVP conflict. Of course, not all PVP conflict is so direct, or so violent. A pacificist PC trying to convince a warlike companion to cut down on the slaughter is engaging in conflict. So is a stuffy Tremere trying to get a loopy Malkavian to SHUT UP during an audience with the Prince.
(Did you all know that "Shhh!" can be used as a Command with Dominate?)
Player vs. Player conflict can be awesome. Absolutely nothing is more personal than a fight with a friend or family member. The potential for drama is amazing.
Player vs. Player conflict can be terrible. Absolutely nothing is more personal than a fight with a friend or family member. The potential for trauma is amazing.
So, unless your ideal gaming experience is a lot different than mine, you'd rather have more of the former than the latter. The question is, how do you get it?
The answer, at least the only answer you're going to get in this column, is "I'm not sure." Player vs. Player conflict is tricky. I know that I have taken abuse from GM controlled NPCs that would have provoked a much different response if it had come from a PC. There's a strange sort of neutrality associated with the GM. Perhaps because he plays so many characters, players don't tend to associate him strongly with any one.
People have different tolerances. Someone might be fine with his PC getting into a fight with yours in one game, even if his character is seriously hurt or killed. In another game, with a different character, he might take a nearly identical situation really hard.
(Of course, if you killed his character twice in two different games, there might really be some issues you want to address)
These are the things I want to know about any conflict between PCs?
Why is this happening?
It should go without saying that PVP conflict should arise from totally In Character stimuli. A game involving five other people is not the appropriate venue for you to take out your aggressions on someone else. If you're mad at one person, deal with that one person. If you're mad at the whole group, then leave. Or suck it up and deal with your problems like an adult.
Ok, enough sermonizing for the moment.
Similarly, PVP conflicts should make sense within PC motives. In real life, and even in most fiction, most people won't pull guns and try to kill each other over trivial matters. They're more likely to argue, snub each other at parties, or insult each other a lot. When a serious mutual threat arises, all but the most casual of allies will temporarily put aside their differences.
The response should fit the circumstance. One of my little brother's friends had this habit of playing obnoxious characters who would try to attack other PCs if they offended him. He was always really surprised when the other party members killed the sociopath in their midst, and even more surprised when the GM backed them up on it.
But sometimes violence really is called for. Right now, in the IRC Buffy game I'm playing, there is a decent chance that Juri (my Slayer-in-training) will end up trying to kill Theo (a werebear - only now he seems to be a Wendigo). Theo has killed a human, and if Juri finds out about it, she will feel like it's her job to kill him, even though doing so might break her heart.
That could be way fun to play. Before it happens (if it happens at all), I'm going to have a long talk with the GM and Theo's player. As fun as the subplot could be, I don't want to screw up the whole game over it.
What will the results be?
You can never really know what the results will be, but you can make a good guess. If the conflict will make the game better, I go ahead full-steam. Back when I was LARPing, I actively sought out chances to screw with other PCs, because that's what made the game go 'round. The best one (stillborn because the game ended early) was my Tremere, Sir Cynan, playing out a long, slow con-job on the city's Giovanni that would have culminated in him convincing them to teach him Necromancy - at which point he would have killed them all because he didn't need them anymore. The mysterious Tremere/Giovanni alliance threw most of the group for a loop, and was loads of fun. After the game broke up, I told some of the Gio Players what I was up to, and they said they would have loved it - even if they died.
If it's something that I might enjoy, but that won't have a big effect on the game, I'll go ahead for as long as it's fun. For instance, in the aforementioned Buffy game, there's a love-triangle between Juri, Theo, and Travis (the token normal guy). It happened pretty much spontaneously, but it's loads of fun. The bickering between Theo and Travis is entertaining, and the whole mess produces a great group dynamic. Theo and Travis haven't tried to seriously hurt each other or anything, and whenever the Big Bad rears his ugly head, everybody focuses on the task at hand. For as long as it makes sense (not much longer, if Juri decides to kill Theo, obviously)
I want to keep that dynamic. I'm not going to force it, though.
If I can't see a way for this particular conflict to make the game better, then I have to ask myself what it's worth. I, personally, would rather metagame to avoid a conflict, rather than play my character "accurately" and spoil the game. If the conflict becomes so obvious that I have to resolve it in order to have fun, then I'll try to resolve it with as little disruption to the game as possible. The conflict between Juri and Theo might reach that level. (Since John reads my columns, you might find out, too)
"I was just playing in character" is not a defense that frees you from responsibility for your actions.
What do the other players think?
I've mentioned this already, but it bears repeating. You are not playing the game alone. Your decisions affect the other players. Play nice.
If your character is about to severely harm another PC, you should really talk to that player first. Killing another PC without any warning is particularly vile. Even if you have a really good reason, you should probably discuss it with the other player first. Sure, you know that because of your obscure Code of Honor, you're honor bound to kill him, but does he know that? If he did, he might not have done whatever he did to offend you.
Consent is kind of implied in a game like Amber, or in most LARPs that I've seen, but even in those situations it's a good idea to at least try to discuss what's going on out of character. That can get pretty hard, though. Not all players are of the same caliber. Some people have trouble keeping IC and OOC knowledge separate.
In a case like that, you have to make a judgment call. With some people, I wouldn't hesitate to discuss my secret evil plans. With others, I wouldn't reveal what I had in mind unless I absolutely had to. I'd still be trying to feel the situation out, though. My goal in most RPGs is to have fun, and to make sure the rest of the group is having fun. Winning good, but only if it's fun.
The VLARP I just used as an example ended when a bunch of new people joined the game and threw their combined weight around to wipe out the Giovanni utterly without warning (and with a healthy disregard for a few inconvenient rules). They managed to sow enough hard feelings that about half the players quit, and the ones of us who were left had to start a new campaign because they'd damaged the old one beyond repair.
Sure, they "won" but what good did it do them?
(And of course, if they'd waited one more session to do it, I would have been ready to help them, but I'm not bitter.)
Now that we've figured out when and why to have PVP conflict, the question is, what do you do with it?
I don't really have any answers to that, either. Every case will be different. The primary goal is to make the game more fun. There can be lots of secondary goals. Most often, I find myself in a PVP conflict for roleplaying reasons, rather than because I have a personal goal. For instance, Juri's potential conflict with Theo arises from the fact that she's a monster-hunter, and he might be a monster. "To see if Juri could beat up Theo" isn't really my goal.
(Besides, I know she'd toast him.)
(I'm kidding, John)
Summing Up
This is the part where I condense everything I just said into a couple of pithy paragraphs and provide some incredible insight that will forever alter your gaming experience.
Unfortunately, I (a) don't feel like trying to boil the article down to two paragraphs, because if I could have done that, I would have only written two paragraphs, and (b) I don't really have any profound insights to offer.
But let's see what I can come up with:
Player-generated conflict is the most dynamic way to blur the line between Player and GM. If you really embrace it, it will change the way your games play out. The GM's job will be different. Rather than just throwing events at you, he'll have to be able to react to events you throw at him.
Taking the reins that way gives you, the Player, more responsibility than you would otherwise have. You have to balance what you want with what's good for the rest of the group.
Your ability to deal with that responsibility will, in large part, determine how entertaining the conflicts you generate are.
Which is kind of the point, isn't it?
That's all I've got for now. See you next time.