Gms are Bastards - blurb and notes from my Panel
This is a presentation that I did at Intercon M on the Thursday night entitled GMs are Bastards
Let me begin by saying thanks to you all for being here. I know some of you also attended Tony Mitton’s Players are Scum panel last year. If you didn’t and you haven’t read his treatise on why Players are Scum then I encourage you to do so at your earliest opportunity.
https://sites.google.com/site/tonymittonagain/playersarescum
I must say Tony has changed the way that I look at players and how I think I behave as a GM. I no longer beat myself up about players being scum, instead I can indulge in navel gazing and beating myself up for being a bad GM.
I am indebted to Tony for passing me the mantel, and I would like for us all to consider why GMs can be Bastards, and how you can prevent yourself from falling into that trap and becoming a bastard to your players, and also to Con and game organizers to whom I feel that GMs owe as much to as they do to the players.
I shall be using real life examples, believe me I have a slew of them, from both sides of the Atlantic, some from Freeforms, some from LARP, some from Laser tag. Every gaming system has the potential to screw over players, and what I hope to do by pointing these out is to stop you from making the mistakes that I and others have made. I have played some truly terrible games over the last fifteen years, and I bring this experience here. It has not all been bad, I have had some fantastic games and even some fantastic moments in some terrible games, but what I shall try to do over the next few minutes is to bring out some examples that I personally think make playing games a lot less fun. And if the players really aren’t having fun then I suspect that most of the time that the GMs aren’t either, unless they truly are Bastards and don’t care about the players.
A lot of this is actually things for writers to consider, so perhaps this should be subtitled Writers are Complete Cocks (at times). Some of this is for people who GM games written by other people. They are all my personal opinion. And in no way reflect the views of any of the groupings that I am associated with.
The small print being out of the way let me share with you my twelve commandments, you will have others, and you probably won’t agree with me in all of them, but it’s a starting list.
1) Thou shalt not lie to your players
If the game isn’t ready then don’t tell the players that it is, and that you have formatting issues or internet connectivity issues. Man or woman up and tell them you are still writing. Players can be lovely if you are honest with them, do not treat them like idiots. If heaven forbid a goodly proportion of your game is not ready at the point at which it is due to run in the schedule then at least have the decency to apologise rather than becoming defensive and arrogant.
2) Thou shalt not lie to the con organisers / game wranglers.
Do not tell people that your weekend long game for 70 some players is just being polished a year before it is due to run, when you’ve not written a word on a character sheet yet. I understand and indeed subscribe to the policy that you don’t start doing things until the last minute. I know the joys of procrastination, I started writing this down on Tuesday. By trying to write an enormous game in a very short time, it leads to stupidly tired GMs who cannot run things effectively, and make terrible decisions, because they have spent the last few months writing every night. I know. I have been that GM.
3) Thou shalt not try to look clever
You may be the coolest GM in the world, and have a truly brilliant idea for how to turn the world upside down, but if you take away most of a character’s goals and achievements part way through the game, and relocate them making whatever they have achieved be a huge waste of time then you will piss players off, and it will never end well. If your aim in running a game is not to make sure that the players have fun then I for one probably don’t want to play your game.
4) Thou shalt not put in place artificial boundaries to play without a really good reason,
Thinking through what is going to happen to players. It may be that you have three citadels which are separated by a huge wilderness, which you need specific skills to pass through, but if that leaves players stuck in a tent without anyone else to talk to for long periods of the game because they don’t have that skill, then you are probably doing something wrong. If you find that a terrific number of the characters are dying and not doing anything to stop then that might be a clue that your game is not working.
5) Thou shalt not Guarantee that I will have fun
6) Thou shalt not centre the entire plot around one character.
You are just asking for trouble. If they decide not to share then you’re going to have a lot of unhappy people sitting around doing nothing.
7) Thou shalt watch what is going on and feel confident that you should be able to call a halt to things, ask yourself shall I intervene now or let these people be really miserable for the next couple of hours.
8) Thou shalt not create a load of unnecessarily complicated game mechanics
Particularly if you change them the night before the game, so no-one except you has had time to read them, and which stifle roleplay, which I think is why most of us play games. Lining up your players in character initative order, and then telling them to stop talking to each other because it is inhibiting your mechanic is probably a clue that you’re doing it wrong. As an adjuct to that do not present them with a 20 page rule book the day before the game. They will not read it. And don’t make things non logical. I spent most of a game trying to work out the epidemiology of why some people were turning into Zombies. The answer turned out to be that they were NCPs and had paid a lower amount to go to the game
9) Thou shalt not assume that your players have psychic powers
If they need to know something you have to tell them, especially if you are running something like Gloratha which has thousands of pages written about it. They will not have read everything you have and will not know the simplest things. Apparently Lunars wear red, who knew. Especially do not then have a go at them because they turn up in a costume which is not red because you didn’t tell them that they needed to. Until you sent them a 20 page rules booklet the day before. Which they haven’t read. Nor did they read the supplement published in an obscure magazine published in 1973 which says that on the third Tuesday of every month that any high priest shall carry a panda under their arm. It really does make that little sense if their raison d’etre is not yours.
10) Thou shalt not assume that your player care as much about the characters you have written as you do, because they won’t. Do not be precious about them. If you expect players to love them then you are deluding yourself and this only leads to misery. I find that there are things I wrote which give me immense joy, and a warm glow in my heart. Other people will not even notice those sentences around which you have hung a character. Accept what you get from players and don’t give yourself another reason to be miserable. Accept criticism with a smile and thanks, even if you want to stab the player through the heart because they broke your game. It’s not yours at the moment you hand it to the players. The ownership transfers to them and you then need to hang on for the ride and see where they take it. No plan survives contact with the enemy. Don’t have a hissy fit because they didn’t play the characters the way you wrote them. I am not very good at this one.
11) Thou shalt read the entirely game if you are running someone else’s. It doesn’t get absorbed by osmosis you know. It is a courtesy to the players that you at least have read every word.
12) Thou shalt not break players. Players are people too you know. Make sure they have the basic human needs of food, liquids, warmth unless you have put some contract in place to say that you are ignoring all human rights legislation and are out to break them specifically, and not their characters.
How not to be a bastard GM - some shalls.
Think about every character and how they are a hero or an antihero in this game. Ask yourself what are they going to do. Remove non goals like prove you are not dead. If they are the baddest person in the game tell them why and how. If they are a healer find ways to make sure they don’t get shut out of the action because they are too valuable, and for gawd’s sake don’t shove them in a sick bay upstairs by themselves all night! Watch the game as it unfolds. Use your AGMs effectively.
You do not want to be the author or GM of a platinum plated turd, a fruit tea game, a bring your own spoon game. Do you want to walk past a group of people saying “I was so bored, what a crap game.” especially if you gave them nothing to do and then guaranteed that they would have fun? I think not.
Here are a whole bunch of notes that I took in the war stories section of the panel
Continuity check
Spelling grammar check
Pronouns
Don’t have characters who are a mechanic, e.g. a researcher who spends their game looking things up for other characters
Don’t have characters who are an Item card
Be aware of triggers
Make a character someone who no-one wants to talk to
Trusted - betrayal in the first five minutes so that no-one wants to talk to you
If the Character not the same as the TV show / Book / Video game then make it clear (Sue says I think you should make them different and TELL THE PLAYER!)
Not rob your players - GM taking away their item cards
Do not throw bugs at players
Send players everything - don’t expect them to go and find the stuff you have hidden on the web
Being pregnant is not a plot
Blackmail not a plot
Don’t cast your friends in all the cool roles
No colour characters - everyone needs stuff to do.
Don’t kill people in the first half hour
NCPs grandstanding
Give people leverage if they think they have leverage
Gms should not spills secrets
Cut and paste mistakes
Learn from things
Don’t hover
If they change things from what was emailed then you need to know when the characters are handed out
Don’t take all the important people away
Trials and auctions not very exciting
Gods should not show up in your game - unless it’s a game of Gods
Pickpocketing never works
Cast all the members of a plot or let them you haven’t
Tell people that a character is not being played
If something is a map/puzzle etc then players need to know
Locking a player in prison
Named character in Star Trek
Don’t give a really really important bit of information to just one character
Don't get players to spend loads of character points and in game money on stuff you will never let them use
Feel free to share - It would be nice to have things pointed back to here so I can read what people think
Let me begin by saying thanks to you all for being here. I know some of you also attended Tony Mitton’s Players are Scum panel last year. If you didn’t and you haven’t read his treatise on why Players are Scum then I encourage you to do so at your earliest opportunity.
https://sites.google.com/site/tonymittonagain/playersarescum
I must say Tony has changed the way that I look at players and how I think I behave as a GM. I no longer beat myself up about players being scum, instead I can indulge in navel gazing and beating myself up for being a bad GM.
I am indebted to Tony for passing me the mantel, and I would like for us all to consider why GMs can be Bastards, and how you can prevent yourself from falling into that trap and becoming a bastard to your players, and also to Con and game organizers to whom I feel that GMs owe as much to as they do to the players.
I shall be using real life examples, believe me I have a slew of them, from both sides of the Atlantic, some from Freeforms, some from LARP, some from Laser tag. Every gaming system has the potential to screw over players, and what I hope to do by pointing these out is to stop you from making the mistakes that I and others have made. I have played some truly terrible games over the last fifteen years, and I bring this experience here. It has not all been bad, I have had some fantastic games and even some fantastic moments in some terrible games, but what I shall try to do over the next few minutes is to bring out some examples that I personally think make playing games a lot less fun. And if the players really aren’t having fun then I suspect that most of the time that the GMs aren’t either, unless they truly are Bastards and don’t care about the players.
A lot of this is actually things for writers to consider, so perhaps this should be subtitled Writers are Complete Cocks (at times). Some of this is for people who GM games written by other people. They are all my personal opinion. And in no way reflect the views of any of the groupings that I am associated with.
The small print being out of the way let me share with you my twelve commandments, you will have others, and you probably won’t agree with me in all of them, but it’s a starting list.
1) Thou shalt not lie to your players
If the game isn’t ready then don’t tell the players that it is, and that you have formatting issues or internet connectivity issues. Man or woman up and tell them you are still writing. Players can be lovely if you are honest with them, do not treat them like idiots. If heaven forbid a goodly proportion of your game is not ready at the point at which it is due to run in the schedule then at least have the decency to apologise rather than becoming defensive and arrogant.
2) Thou shalt not lie to the con organisers / game wranglers.
Do not tell people that your weekend long game for 70 some players is just being polished a year before it is due to run, when you’ve not written a word on a character sheet yet. I understand and indeed subscribe to the policy that you don’t start doing things until the last minute. I know the joys of procrastination, I started writing this down on Tuesday. By trying to write an enormous game in a very short time, it leads to stupidly tired GMs who cannot run things effectively, and make terrible decisions, because they have spent the last few months writing every night. I know. I have been that GM.
3) Thou shalt not try to look clever
You may be the coolest GM in the world, and have a truly brilliant idea for how to turn the world upside down, but if you take away most of a character’s goals and achievements part way through the game, and relocate them making whatever they have achieved be a huge waste of time then you will piss players off, and it will never end well. If your aim in running a game is not to make sure that the players have fun then I for one probably don’t want to play your game.
4) Thou shalt not put in place artificial boundaries to play without a really good reason,
Thinking through what is going to happen to players. It may be that you have three citadels which are separated by a huge wilderness, which you need specific skills to pass through, but if that leaves players stuck in a tent without anyone else to talk to for long periods of the game because they don’t have that skill, then you are probably doing something wrong. If you find that a terrific number of the characters are dying and not doing anything to stop then that might be a clue that your game is not working.
5) Thou shalt not Guarantee that I will have fun
6) Thou shalt not centre the entire plot around one character.
You are just asking for trouble. If they decide not to share then you’re going to have a lot of unhappy people sitting around doing nothing.
7) Thou shalt watch what is going on and feel confident that you should be able to call a halt to things, ask yourself shall I intervene now or let these people be really miserable for the next couple of hours.
8) Thou shalt not create a load of unnecessarily complicated game mechanics
Particularly if you change them the night before the game, so no-one except you has had time to read them, and which stifle roleplay, which I think is why most of us play games. Lining up your players in character initative order, and then telling them to stop talking to each other because it is inhibiting your mechanic is probably a clue that you’re doing it wrong. As an adjuct to that do not present them with a 20 page rule book the day before the game. They will not read it. And don’t make things non logical. I spent most of a game trying to work out the epidemiology of why some people were turning into Zombies. The answer turned out to be that they were NCPs and had paid a lower amount to go to the game
9) Thou shalt not assume that your players have psychic powers
If they need to know something you have to tell them, especially if you are running something like Gloratha which has thousands of pages written about it. They will not have read everything you have and will not know the simplest things. Apparently Lunars wear red, who knew. Especially do not then have a go at them because they turn up in a costume which is not red because you didn’t tell them that they needed to. Until you sent them a 20 page rules booklet the day before. Which they haven’t read. Nor did they read the supplement published in an obscure magazine published in 1973 which says that on the third Tuesday of every month that any high priest shall carry a panda under their arm. It really does make that little sense if their raison d’etre is not yours.
10) Thou shalt not assume that your player care as much about the characters you have written as you do, because they won’t. Do not be precious about them. If you expect players to love them then you are deluding yourself and this only leads to misery. I find that there are things I wrote which give me immense joy, and a warm glow in my heart. Other people will not even notice those sentences around which you have hung a character. Accept what you get from players and don’t give yourself another reason to be miserable. Accept criticism with a smile and thanks, even if you want to stab the player through the heart because they broke your game. It’s not yours at the moment you hand it to the players. The ownership transfers to them and you then need to hang on for the ride and see where they take it. No plan survives contact with the enemy. Don’t have a hissy fit because they didn’t play the characters the way you wrote them. I am not very good at this one.
11) Thou shalt read the entirely game if you are running someone else’s. It doesn’t get absorbed by osmosis you know. It is a courtesy to the players that you at least have read every word.
12) Thou shalt not break players. Players are people too you know. Make sure they have the basic human needs of food, liquids, warmth unless you have put some contract in place to say that you are ignoring all human rights legislation and are out to break them specifically, and not their characters.
How not to be a bastard GM - some shalls.
Think about every character and how they are a hero or an antihero in this game. Ask yourself what are they going to do. Remove non goals like prove you are not dead. If they are the baddest person in the game tell them why and how. If they are a healer find ways to make sure they don’t get shut out of the action because they are too valuable, and for gawd’s sake don’t shove them in a sick bay upstairs by themselves all night! Watch the game as it unfolds. Use your AGMs effectively.
You do not want to be the author or GM of a platinum plated turd, a fruit tea game, a bring your own spoon game. Do you want to walk past a group of people saying “I was so bored, what a crap game.” especially if you gave them nothing to do and then guaranteed that they would have fun? I think not.
Here are a whole bunch of notes that I took in the war stories section of the panel
Continuity check
Spelling grammar check
Pronouns
Don’t have characters who are a mechanic, e.g. a researcher who spends their game looking things up for other characters
Don’t have characters who are an Item card
Be aware of triggers
Make a character someone who no-one wants to talk to
Trusted - betrayal in the first five minutes so that no-one wants to talk to you
If the Character not the same as the TV show / Book / Video game then make it clear (Sue says I think you should make them different and TELL THE PLAYER!)
Not rob your players - GM taking away their item cards
Do not throw bugs at players
Send players everything - don’t expect them to go and find the stuff you have hidden on the web
Being pregnant is not a plot
Blackmail not a plot
Don’t cast your friends in all the cool roles
No colour characters - everyone needs stuff to do.
Don’t kill people in the first half hour
NCPs grandstanding
Give people leverage if they think they have leverage
Gms should not spills secrets
Cut and paste mistakes
Learn from things
Don’t hover
If they change things from what was emailed then you need to know when the characters are handed out
Don’t take all the important people away
Trials and auctions not very exciting
Gods should not show up in your game - unless it’s a game of Gods
Pickpocketing never works
Cast all the members of a plot or let them you haven’t
Tell people that a character is not being played
If something is a map/puzzle etc then players need to know
Locking a player in prison
Named character in Star Trek
Don’t give a really really important bit of information to just one character
Don't get players to spend loads of character points and in game money on stuff you will never let them use
Feel free to share - It would be nice to have things pointed back to here so I can read what people think