Oct 10, 2015, 5:33 AM

@Jaunt said:

@Thenomain said:

as what tends to happen when people are more concerned with enforcing rules than using the rules to enable gameplay.

Yep. It's one of the big reasons that I'm opposed to over-policing "theme" and other peoples' roleplay. Micro-managing players is a slippery slope to No-Fun-for-Anyone Town.

Policy should create options for players and not reduce options for players. That can also mean making sure that staff aren't playing the leadership characters in a game, so that players can drive that bus themselves.

There are a lot of ways to go about it. Some are more heavy-handed than others.

I don't see telling someone 'there are no skyscrapers here, and no you can't build one just because you feel like it' as heavy-handed if skyscrapers don't suit the setting.

When discussing setting cohesiveness -- as @Groth was -- what you can and can't do is entirely relevant. That's part of world-building, and plenty of RPG systems MUXes are built on already have a giant mountain of 'can't do' all over them. Every game decides which parts of those systems to use.

Using WoD as an example, if you are making a game in the Arctic designed for werewolves hunting down The Thing, and it says so on the tin, you are generally going to say no to the player who wants to come in and play a vampire running a sun-and-surf beach resort there because that's not the game you're running, because that player is out there. They are not looking for that game, they're looking for a game that will let them do that thing, and if yours isn't it, and if you don't say: 'no, that isn't going to work here', you can say goodbye to whatever coherent world-building you've done, for the most part.