Dungeon Master: Control

There is inherently a power dynamic between the person who runs a game and their players. Different rule systems and even different campaigns can have wide differences in power between the players and the one who runs their game. These differences result in a very different feel and experience. However, they still maintain the heart of tabletop gaming, which is collaborative story telling. Since I find this to be an interesting topic, I'll be trying to put my thoughts into words and hope someone else finds it interesting.

The Default Method

I find that the default Dungeons & Dragons structure is that players control how their character acts within the framework provided by their Dungeon Master. In this kind of setup, the emphasis is immersion and relation with a character. They only control things the character has control over. As well, the gap between the player and the character comes from knowledge. This knowledge might make it tempting for a player to go out of character because it is more beneficial by the rules. These kinds of out-of-character actions cost us the story. However, any knowledge they have out of character can still only be used to influence their character's actions. This generally works well but sometimes a change is welcome and leads to stories that your group otherwise wouldn't get to experience. You could rotate Dungeon Masters, and generally this works well, but I found that the way things go is still different compared to giving players more power.

Giving More Power to Players

We can, however, separate the player and character further by giving more power to the player. By far the most common method from my experience is allowing the player to come up with a backstory for one of their items. It's a bit risky, since the player might come up with something that contradicts the story. Usually it isn't even intentional. Since they don't know all of the Dungeon Master's plans, it just happens. However, when done with responsible players and given a point or two that need to be included, it can create a different experience.

I've seen once or twice where the players might be called upon to create some bad guys they would like to go up against. You aren't completely bound to take their characters exactly as they made them, but it can help in situations when you don't know what to do or what your players want.

Giving the players more power over other characters also helps messes the power dynamic. If you make your player have complete control over their entire kingdom, including possible attempts to overthrow them, they have a far bigger hand in influencing the story. The extent of the control can vary. In the case I'm thinking of, the player told the Dungeon Master what the attempt would generally look like and result in. The specifics were still left up to the Dungeon Master. This helped to keep the vision that a player had of their kingdom but still allowed interesting situations to arise. It also helps that in these kinds of situations, even though a temporary setback is experienced, there may be a long-run benefit. The attempted overthrow was not pleasant in the moment, involved risk and resulting in some lost resources. However, in the long run it resulted in the resources of the entire kingdom coming together more united behind the player. The reward was viewed as worth the risk by the player to come up with a reasonable and well thought out overthrow plan.

Round Robin Dungeon Mastering

Rotating Dungeon Masters throws a wrench into the usual power dynamics of a group. Sure, the absolute power of the Dungeon Master is maintained but the Dungeon Master themselves changes after a certain amount of time. This means each person in the group has a chance to decide on their character's actions and also the world's actions as a whole.The resulting world was shaped by all of the players in different ways on both sides of the screen.

External Rewards

The reward structure in an RPG like this makes a big difference. In something like Dungeons & Dragons, good things happening to their player and bad things not happening are a reward. However, nowadays D&D isn't the only RPG system out there and there are others that reward players for putting their characters into bad situations. In D&D as well, rewarding a player for role-playing well is an old technique. The reason is because it helps tell interesting stories. Stories where players never face setbacks are generally not interesting. By rewarding players for acting in character and resulting in setbacks, the cost-benefit analysis is shifted so otherwise sub-optimal choices might look temping. Balancing this so it isn't too game-y is tough though. You don't want to go too far or players will make their characters trip every 10 feet of movement in order to get the nice benefits.

Competitiveness

Player competitiveness is an issue and I found tends to have worse results the more power the players have over the story. This is because they'll go out of their way to use their power in order to try and make things worse for a different player (it tends to be 2 people against each-other instead of the whole group).

That's not the same thing as having characters that are competitive against each other. If the players are there to have fun and tell a story together, they won't have a problem with sometimes winning and sometimes losing against their rival (in some cases one might have an inferiority complex against the other character and always lose, but this kind of thing should still be agreed between the players or it tends to get nasty).

D&D 5^th Edition and Inspiration

Inspiration is a mechanic that shifts the power away from the players in my mind. Generally, that kind of advantage would be decided by the Dungeon Master based on the situation and the players actions. However, with inspiration, it's the players turn to decide when the advantage happens. It can be a bit awkward if it's used purely mechanically. However, when also combined with giving a player a moment to add to the story (why do they have inspiration in the case they used it?) it's an example of a subtle shift of power. At the end of the day though, the Dungeon Master gets to choose when inspiration is granted (including never) so I don't think it should bother you if you don't like it. It's just another option in your bag of trips if you want to use it. Similarly though, you might let them spend inspiration in other ways to warp the story or to come up with your own mechanic.