Re: Can GM also be a Player?
In reply to praguepride (msg # 44):
My experience has been that most players will wind up turning to ask the directions of ANY character who is consistently decisive (provided those decisions don't wind up routinely having some kind of catastrophic results). I've been in a LOT of games where I specifically made a character who was not supposed to be the party leader...subordinate officer, or not even an officer, or an alien in a human-centric universe...all kinds of reasons to not choose to follow that character. But since I tend to play pretty decisive characters, a lot of times my character winds up becoming the de facto party leader, even in games where there is no official party leader.
If you're a GM running a PC in a game, and you let yourself start providing direction for the party through that PC, you're running a very real chance that the party will start looking to that character for leadership. If you don't want them to follow your character, don't ever let that character do anything beyond provide advice (and maybe fire support...) The more your character makes the decisions for the group (or provides suggestions which the group agrees to act upon), the more likely it becomes that character is going to wind up leading the party, regardless of who is running it.
And it's not necessarily a bad thing for the GM to be the one running that character. Not everyone joins a game with an eye towards being the party leader. Some people really take comfort in playing characters who are there to follow someone else's directions...for some people, it's a chance for a quirky character...they're the sergeant who's always telling his corporals about what bad decisions the lieutenant keeps making, to borrow a common archetype from war movies (especially Vietnam war movies). They don't want to make the decisions, they don't want to feel responsible for the fate of the party, but they need someone there to complain about, rebel against, second-guess, etc to fulfill their character concept.
I've already sounded off in this thread about my support for the concept of a GMPC, because I've seen it done very successfully on a lot of occasions. But I've also been equally vocal elsewhere about the fact that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to gaming. If you want to do it, do it. It may take you a while to learn to do it well, but if that's the kind of game you want to run, you should run it. If you hate the idea, don't do it...and if you hate the idea so much that you can't stand being in a game with a GM who does it, tell the GM when you RTJ the game so they can let you know whether or not you should continue with the process of putting a character together. As is the case with darn near everything else about gaming, there is no 'wrong' or 'right' way to do it...if you're having fun, and the players are enjoying the game, you're doing it right, no matter how it happens to be that you're doing it.