by Jay Furr (jfurr@furrs.org)
While the topic of GM-ing style is fresh in the group, I thought I might take a moment to explain my own particular views on how best to GM a game.
I am deemed by some to be unnecessarily inflexible. I feel this is an unjust criticism, in that I am very flexible within a well-defined set of parameters and only inflexible when players ask me to break common Judge practice, my own house rules in which I have codified what I believe to be reasonable standards for play, the agreed-upon settings of the game, or the actual rules of Diplomacy.
I am aware that the purpose of Diplomacy is to have fun. It's a game. But games can be taken seriously, as anyone who's ever attended a World Chess Championship can attest. As a GM, I feel it is my responsibility to protect the integrity of the game so that players who do take the game seriously can do so without having their time wasted by frivolous individuals who enter into the game after a resignation or abandonment, or who start the game in a serious vein but lose their sense of dedication and begin acting irresponsibly.
I am also a firm believer in holding people to the settings as they were set when they signed on. It causes me a great sense of irritation when, after creating a game with parameters and settings that I think will appeal to players and seeing that game get underway, suddenly have a player or players say that they can't live with the settings after all.
Example: I create a game with seven-day deadlines, explicitly remind the players of this at game start, and think all is well. The first time a turn deadline actually falls on a Saturday or Sunday, a couple of players go late and barely escape abandonment by getting their orders in on Monday morning. They then say "Oh, gee, this game has turns falling due on the weekend. I don't have access except on weekdays at my high school. Let's change the settings." When I say "Sorry, this game was explicitly advertised as a seven- day game, if you don't like it, you should not have signed on." They say "We'll overrule you! We'll get the other players to agree to change!"
At that point, I suppose the reasonable course of action would indeed be to comply with the change if all players truly do agree to it. However, I'm not always inclined to be perfectly reasonable. There's a term to describe it: "bloody-minded." When someone ignores flashing neon signs that say "This game has turns falling due on the weekends too, don't sign on if you can't handle that," and then is rude enough to mouth off at the GM and try to jam a change to the settings down his throat, I get pretty damned bloody-minded, and at that point, I'll be damned if I change those settings.
If someone politely noted "I did note that this game had weekend deadlines, but thought I could handle it, but it turns out I can't, would you mind if we asked the other players if we changed it to weekday-only?" I imagine I'd say "No, I understand, that happens sometimes" and would cheerfully go along with the decision if the players did all agree to the change.
As an unpaid volunteer who runs games because I feel it's my responsibility to reciprocate the service other GMs provide in games I take part in, I am happy to work with anyone who remains polite. Sometimes, of course, I still have to say "No," if what they want just isn't doable.
I am much less likely to deal with people who demand to have their way, who demand changes to settings that they had every chance to look at before signing on, or who try to force me into complying with their wishes by trying to get the other players to overrule me.
All too frequently, players don't have much in the way of manners, as proven by the high rate of dropouts by inexperienced players who see games start to go against them. Some players are middle-school or elementary- school students who don't understand that they're not taking part in a children's playground game with all its standard Calvinball-style idiosyncrasies. Even some adults (MANY adults, some weeks!) decide that they're going to have their way, and that's all there is to it, see?
I suppose the event in my eight years running games online that really crystallized my determination not to back down to childish players who INSIST in loud angry whiny voices that they MUST have their way was back in late 1993 or early 1994, when I ran afoul of Conrad Minshall's odd ideas regarding the meaning of "no press". In a DIAS no-press Standard game I was serving as GM of, Conrad decided that he wanted me to broadcast a concession proposal in which he proposed the players all concede to what, if memory serves, was a two-center power as far from actually winning as is humanly possible. (This is one reason I don't charitably entertain concession proposals. They remind me of Conrad.) There was absolutely no way this could be interpreted as a serious concession proposal - conceding a victory to a two-center power is ridiculous on its face. Plainly, it was meant as a form of press, just as we issue support orders or weird convoy orders in no-press games to indicate a wish to cooperate. However, when I declined to broadcast this for Conrad on the grounds that I was not obligated to help him circumvent the no-press settings, he defiantly insisted that it was a serious proposal and I had to broadcast it for him. I can't recall which made me angrier: his continually insistent, contemptuous tone or his insistence that I was required to help him cheat. He noted that nowhere in the game listing had I stated that I would not broadcast concession proposals, hence, I was required to broadcast his. I noted that in any case, it was not a concession proposal, it was press, and I was not under any circumstances obligated to broadcast a player's press.
This went back and forth between us until he finally tried to jam the thing down my throat by appealing to the judge keeper of USEF. At this point, my memory of the incident grows a bit fuzzy; I think that what made me really boil over was the fact that the JK took Conrad's side and ordered me to comply. I at this point threw a fit and broadcast a rather childish rant of my own to rec.games.diplomacy in which I gave away Conrad's name as the problem player, thereby breaking the gunboat anonymity rule and preventing him from continuing with the game. I think I also resigned him from the game at this point.
This got me in a fair bit of hot water and the JK removed me as master of all my USEF games for a period of a month or two to punish me. I wasn't happy about that, but as long as Conrad didn't get his way, I was willing to accept almost any punishment myself.
Once I returned from exile, I had come to the point of view which I maintain to this day: left to their own devices, many players will crap all over the GM, the guy who's there to help them, and will severely compromise the integrity of a game at the drop of a hat if they think it will serve their own narrow interests.
Why, then, do I continue to run games? Paraphrasing Mark Twain, I love Diplomacy; it's just the players I hate.
And I don't even hate the players who aren't always looking to break the rules or curse out the GM. Them I like.
I also came back from exile determined never again to be caught by someone who could honestly say "There's nothing in your house rules or in the game listing saying you WON'T broadcast concession proposals or under what circumstances you won't, so QED, you have to broadcast mine." There are two ways to write rules: general, broad rules, which would only work in a population of perfect individuals and probably not even then, and incredibly narrow, nit-picky rules that the rules lawyers can't find loopholes in. You always look bad when you draft a long list of narrow, nit-picky rules, but it's the only way to avoid getting shat upon by the Minshalls of the world.
I started explicitly listing my rules in the game listings. At first, I had only one rule, only needed in no-press games: "The GM will not broadcast notices or announcements of any kind for any player in no-press games."
I think the next thing that really got my hackles up were the people who were always vanishing from games and, on their way out the figurative door, sending me a message reading "Going away for two weeks to follow the Grateful Dead on tour, extend the deadline, bye." The same people would, later on, complain to me when their favorite game was taking forever to complete, little noting that the other players had just as much right to inconsiderately demand long extensions as they did. I got tired of hearing the players bitch about long deadline extensions when the same players had no compunctions at all against asking for long extensions themselves. "Do what I say, don't do as I do" isn't a valid way to work with your GM, people.
That's where my "you must request deadline extensions in advance, in polite terms, and in a level of detail necessary to allow the GM to determine if the deadline is truly necessary" rule came from. Yes, I'd rather see games completed by the original seven players wherever possible, but it can get a little absurd now and then; the worst situation I saw was where a combination of Easter vacations, Spring break, Norwegian skiing holidays, and summer break from college combined to put a game on hold from March to September, and who got blamed? Me.
Not again.
You can imagine how the last five years or so have gone - every so often, some cretin decides he's got to have his way on something that'll negatively affect the game and in any case be rude to the other players, often in a very hypocritical fashion, and next thing you know, I add another rule. The one thing I still would cheerfully banish to Hell a player for doing that's hard to really address in the house rules because I'd sound so absurd banning it is the practice of broadcasting your request for whatever goofball thing you want the GM to do to all the players instead, hoping to pull off a fait accomplit of some kind, getting everyone to chorus agreement before the GM can say "No way." A common time to do this is in the area of deadline extensions - a player wants to vanish for a month-long holiday, forgot to mention it to me until the last minute, so he broadcasts the request to everyone, leaving me in the position, when I say "No" (if I do in fact say "No"), of looking like the bad guy.
And it's really easy to wind up looking like the bad guy when you try to protect the integrity of a game.
Sigh.
Just the other day, in an NMR game that I created for those people who really like to see games keep moving, a player promptly went NMR in one of the first few movement turns, coming back after one movement turn had processed claiming (probably truthfully) to have been in the hospital and apologized for going NMR. Another player took it upon himself to offer that the turn should be rolled back so the returning player could get his orders in after all, and a third player said "Yeah, let's undo the turn and let him get his orders in!" I promptly said "No way" and explained that it went against every tradition of the Judge and the rollback command to roll turns back for anything except a serious Judge error such as sometimes happens in Chaos game build phases, if for no other reason than that the missing player had already gotten to see everyone else's orders.
You can imagine the response: "we heard you were an inflexible jerk, and I guess we heard right" and so on.
Uh huh.
You get the idea.
I think I've explained pretty clearly how I came around to my point of view regarding the role of a GM in a Judge game.
You may have your own views, but let's put it this way: run as many games as I do, for as long as I have, and you're eventually going to turn just as sour and crotchety as I have.
There's an old aphorism which applies to this: "Anyone who's a conservative at age 20 has no heart; anyone who's a liberal at age 40 has no mind." You try an easy flexibility with every Tom, Dick, and Harry who thinks rules apply to everyone but themselves and your games are, bluntly put, going to suck.
I'll work with anyone who can politely let me know what they want or need and who can listen patiently on those occasions when I have to say "No, sorry". I'll try to be polite even when the player I'm working with isn't. But when someone descends into outright rudeness or tries to actually break the rules for their own narrow self-interest, I'll become Mr. Inflexible, and if you think I'm wrong to do so, you're entitled to your opinion, but I find it hard to agree with you.