Recently at Fan Expo (all my best stories start this way, I promise), I was lollygagging around and decided to play a game of Cartel with m...
Almost every time I've seen this happen in game, I've seen the GM pause, consider, and often cave in to the person who just challenged them. Because let's be honest, after hearing "this game won't have fish, only sharks" and someone replies with "but I wanna be a fish" the person is challenging the GM's authority and their ideas. They're inherently saying "My idea is better than what you have planned" along with "even though you did all this work to write/design/create this campaign/adventure/one shot, I'd rather just do what I want than buy in to what you're selling me."
The worst part of this is, this comes from the perspective that our own ideas are so cool and so special, that we don't realize what we're doing. We don't realize that we're pushing back or ignoring one of the key elements of game buy in. We just have an idea and think that this is a game about playing pretend and how we want to pretend is cooler or more important than how the game wants us to play pretend. But I've got some really sad news for us and our ideas that don't buy in to the game:
At the end of the day, that makes us bad players.
