🍁Nine Ancient Obelisks

For over a decade, I've been playing, and I still can't wrap my head around one thing: if the GM is such an unfair and unjust jerk, who favors some and deliberately messes with others for no reason at all, and all of it results in nothing but constant negativity, then why are we even here? It's as if he's sitting behind the screen, rubbing his hands gleefully, monitoring the thread and responding in it, sacrificing some of his other duties and interests just to come up with ways to ruin someone's mood. By the same logic, one could say that the previous game was proof that Astral hates me and set out from the very beginning to torment my character, but for some reason, I didn't start whining in the thread (or even more so in a private message), accusing him of something made up, and trying to "sort things out," thereby harming not only the motivation of the nasty GM but also the efforts of all the other participants, because the former inevitably leads to the latter. I got upset -> I took a break -> I calmed down and created a new character, which I happily role-played until other things took over my attention. The game is not chess, where all the moves and strategies are known in advance. Besides the conditional "there's a bomb in the chest, and the character who opens it will explode" or "if you eat the fruit, you'll get a temporary buff first, and then it turns out to be poisonous," there are many uncertainties, coincidences, and other things, and the lion's share of what happens depends mainly on three main variables: - Situations (the setting, the atmosphere, the characters' personalities, the relationships between the characters, and so on). - The player's character's actions. - The GM's perception of the situation and the characters' actions. If something "bad" happens, it's not because the GM decided to "personally mess with a specific player," but because the situation, the character's actions, and the GM's perception of the situation contribute to it. And the most, most, MOST important thing is that even this "bad" thing is subjective in itself, because the goal of the game is not to farm abilities, wealth, titles, and everything else, and certainly not to "be more successful than other players," but to "live" a life with your character in a fictional world within the boundaries of a certain plot.