We all have expectations when we belly up to the game table. Sometimes, the GM delivers on promises both real and implied, and sometimes those expectations were never realistic in the first place.
After struggling with the most recent installment of the Topologia game setting (it really should have been three parts, maybe 4, but it broke so naturally into two more-or-less even pieces), I’ve barely made a dent in the next part of the Trade In Fantasy series, which is now way behind. So I thought up this post ideas as I was going to bed last night and am going to use it to steal an extra week of writing time.
Every person who sits down at the game table brings expectations with them. This is true whether this is an RPG “Blind Date” (players and GM have never gamed together before), if there is history of which the person is aware, or if the situation is more akin to old friends with an actual history of gaming together, though the expectations can be different in each of these cases.
Superficially, these can look quite simple, but as soon as you start digging into the subject, complications and nuances begin to exert themselves and situations can become a lot less simple in a hurry.
Over time, as participants in the campaign get to know both it and the other participants, expectations can and will evolve, and that’s a source of additional complications.
I’ve broken the subject down into 21 key aspects – you read that right, I said 21 – and I’m still not sure that I’ve captured everything that falls under this topic heading. Since this is supposed to be a fairly quick fill-in post aimed at making deadline tonight – a little less than 10 hours from now – I don’t have a lot of time to spend on each. Take off an hour for pre-publishing and an hour for meals and a break somewhere along the way, and I have about 8 hours to get this written. I’m also going to take an hour out as a reserve, to be used where things take a little longer than scheduled or go wrong or I get sidetracked. So, 21 topics, 7 hours – that’s 20 minutes to each topic.
Let’s go!
1 Blind Expectations – Players
A player sitting down at a game table for the first time may have no idea of what to expect or may have expectations deriving from past experiences in other campaigns with other GMs and players. If those expectations exist with no knowledge of the other participants and no prior knowledge of the campaign, they are ‘blind expectations’.
The more experience a player has, especially outside this particular group, the more of these pre-formed expectations they will carry with them. As they grow more familiar with this particular social group coalescing, these blind expectations will evolve and get replaced with a history of playing with these particular individuals in this particular campaign using this particular game system.
That last one is important, because a lot of blind expectations will be carried by the player’s sense of what the game system embodies, permits, requires, and symbolizes. What sort of adventures can they expect? What sort of characters? What sort of choices?
Bringing pregenerated characters or preexisting characters into a new campaign adds to this mixture, because players expect to be able to marry the characters with the campaign background and setting. In fact, these expectations – like all expectations in this context – can be broken into Rules, Campaign, Adventure types, Adventure Participation, Character Agency, Spotlight Share, and Social Compacts.
- Rules – preexisting house rules, rules-as-written, rule enforcement, gaming philosophy, GMing style.
- Campaign – the background and backdrop, internal cohesiveness, and how the PCs will integrate with these. In particular, if there’s a conflict, which takes priority and how can / will that conflict be resolved? The campaign is what distinguishes this story-line from every other one run with the same game system, and derives directly from the GM and what they are bringing to the table.
- Adventure Types – if you know nothing about the campaign prior to play, you have only whatever knowledge you possess of the game system and the types of adventures permitted, to guide you. That can become a problem if you expect one thing, and design your PC with that in mind, and the campaign wasn’t designed to accommodate that. It’s less likely to be a problem if the GM incorporates a session zero for character construction and background briefing, because player choices can be tailored to better fit the campaign world. I’ve participated in session zero’s (long before the term was invented) that were as short as 5 minutes or as long as three game sessions. I’ve even been involved in one where characters were entirely abstract and conceptual for the entire session zero, not being translated into game mechanics until a session 0.5 either later in that game session or in a separate game session.
- Adventure Participation – There’s a reasonable expectation that their characters will get to participate in the adventure of the day, whatever it may be. They may not be the center of attention in that adventure, but there is an equally-valid expectation that they will get their share of starring roles in the future. Some players demand attention from the first day of play, others prefer to get used to the campaign, GM, and background first, keeping an initially low profile before being put on the spot. All of this translates into the GM preparing adventures for the group of PCs that he’s got and not shoehorning them into a preexisting structure of which they were not advised during character construction. That’s why session zero can be so important.
- Character Agency – There’s a reasonable expectation that PCs will have an impact on the game world. Initially, it will probably be the case that the world has a greater impact on the PCs, but over time, that should reverse. Initially, those impacts may only be felt locally; by the end of the campaign, they may be profound, even existential. At the end of a campaign, each player should be able to look back on it and say that if their character had been different, it would have changed the story, sometimes in part, and sometimes profoundly, even if the broad shape of the skeleton remained unchanged.
- Spotlight Share – There’s a reasonable expectation that their PC will get a fair share of the spotlight during each adventure. Sometimes, GMs balance these things over the span of many adventures, giving rise to the choices discussed in the article Ensemble or Star Vehicle – Which is Your RPG Campaign?
- Social Compacts – Everyone carries expectations of how game participants will interact socially. If no-one knows anyone else, there’s an expectation of politeness, respect and tolerance at the very least – but a stiff formality is often better than an excessively casual approach, at least at the beginning. Novice players also sometimes have trouble separating character from player, NPC from GM. This revolves around expectations of fairness in decision-making and rules interpretation, too. If a GM is seen as being unfair, a campaign is almost certainly doomed. I always like to schedule in a session “1.5” at the tail-end of the first day’s actual play for people to talk about the campaign and themselves and actually draw a line between the exhibited traits of their characters and the beliefs and practices of the players. Sometimes its not needed, but sometimes it can be all-important.
Blind expectations can also stem from genre interpretations provided by media. Those may or may not be relevant to the actual game on hand. If you keep your eyes open, you can see the impact of Star Wars, of Lord Of The Rings, of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, of the Big Bang Theory, and so on – each creates a ripple effect that permeates gaming for a while and informs how participants view the content of a genre, and hence what expectations they have of that genre. And, before movies and TV were as big, there were books. How past encounters with a genre have shaped expectations of that genre is one of the hardest things to pin down, and at the same time, one of the most profound influences on an individual’s playing style and expectations.
The problem with blind expectations is that they are often inchoate and unstated. They can be fuzzy and undefined. They can be baggage from the past, which makes them more clearly-focused and defined. They can be reasonable or unreasonable. None of which makes them any less real.
2 Reputational Expectations – The GM
If the GM has been in that role for a while, even outside of this new group, that creates expectations based on their history and reputation. “GM for 12 years” – or “20 years” – or “44 years” in my case – definitely creates expectations. That may or may not relate to any particular game system, but the longer it spans, the broader their expertise is likely to be.
Imagine that your entire history as a GM is archived on the internet somewhere and you were to ask an AI – with a reference link to that history – “what is my reputation as a GM?”
The results are likely to be ‘as viewed through rose-colored glasses’, though I’m fairly open about past mistakes and misjudgments. If I were to use Campaign Mastery as my reference source, the results of such a question would be very much an idealized version of myself as a GM – I know because I ran just such a search for the purposes of this article. The practical reality is likely to be somewhat less perfect and idealized than expectations if this is the foundation. They would not be completely wrong, but the reality would be less perfect than expectations might hold.
And the same holds true, to some extent, regardless of the information source, though sources outside the direct control of the GM in question are just as likely to amplify negative traits and events, and those are also going to influence expectations while comprising only a small part of the GM’s actual ability. Anything that creates a false expectation, either good or bad, is a potential problem, because those expectations are extremely unlikely to actually represent the reality of the game experience..
3 Promises – The Campaign
Any campaign briefing carries with it promises both explicit and implied about the campaign, the adventures, the style, the genre, and so on. I often preface mine with a statement that the briefing represents the game world as the PCs understand it – giving me the freedom to expand on or depart from that blueprint. I can also incorporate deliberate ‘errors’, giving the players the opportunity to uncover ‘secrets’ about the universe their characters inhabit, and ensuring some surprises along the way.
I went a step further with the Fumanor campaign – there was a group of common pages of text, but those with extensive theological training (clerics etc) got additional information (not all of it accurate), mages got different information (not all of it accurate), and so on. And none of it was, therefore complete.
A lot of GMs spend a lot of their time and effort in making their campaign plans exciting and interesting with lots of plotline potential. That’s great,. and to be encouraged. Others put all of that effort into campaign backstory generation, under the premise that it doesn’t matter where the PCs choose to go and what they choose to do, there will be something interesting for them to do and find – but that can also imply a lot of development work that never sees the light of day.
This can be both bad, and good. It’s bad if it’s wasted effort, it’s good in that it means there’s content for a sequel campaign to pick up on.
Very few GMs take the time to think about what their briefings are actually promising potential players, and what scant attention is paid usually focuses on the explicit promises. The implied promises are poor second cousins in comparison. Partly, that’s because it’s hard, and partly because the GM is not omniscient and hasn’t encountered every possible combination of media inspirational source material. But it’s worth spending a little more time on it than most people do, and asking yourself about the expectations of those participants with a media consumption profile that includes the dominant sources of the day – just so that any false expectations that might be generated get headed off at the pass.
4 Promises – GM Skill-set & Infrastructure
At first glance, this might seem to be inherently derivative of the previous section but that’s because almost everyone will misinterpret the meaning of “GM Skill-set”.
I richly illustrate my adventures. Sometimes with the results of deliberate image searches, sometimes with hand-drawn or digital illustrations. I’m fairly good at editing and compositing image elements into a whole utterly distinct from the source material. I’ve made explorations into using AI generation for images (which is a subject for a whole other article). A current adventure I’m working on employs sound effects for the first time (harmonious and discordant Gregorian chants, back-masked, plus various mechanical sounds and violent sounds. Those are all about creating atmosphere). For only the second time ever, another adventure has relied on the creation of custom animations, like this one:
Because it’s been reduced in size to fit the screen real estate at Campaign Mastery, here’s a closeup view that’s closer to how it will appear when used in play:
Okay, so back to the point: The “GM Skill-set” refers to everything else that the GM brings to the table outside of his ability to deal with rules and craft campaigns and adventures and encounters. It?s whatever personal resources the GM has to bring the game world to life. It might be voice acting, with several different character voices on tap; it might be image creation / manipulation; it might be poetry or song, or 3D battlemaps or custom miniatures or just well-painted miniatures. It might be having access to a vast library of sound effects and the ability to mix and compose them on the fly.
And yes, it can include tools for interaction with the game mechanics – how you track initiative, for example. It can be mandating a particular character sheet, or even a bespoke one specifically for this campaign.
It can even be homework: “Jim, you’re playing an Elf. In this world, they have a very lilting speech pattern, a little like Irish. Here’s a link to an interview with an Irish comedian, I want you to watch it a couple of times, practice saying the same words the same way he does a couple of times, and then practice saying things your character might say as though he were saying them. Marty, you’re playing a Dwarf, they have a far more guttural speech pattern and one that lacks the expression even of German. Here’s a link to speech by Londo Milari, a character from Babylon-5; the actor based his accent on Hungarian which I think would sound just about right. I want you to do the same thing for your character, but with this voice. One hint: the character has a very particular way of naming another character, sounding out each syllable – Mis-ter Gar-a-ball-di, which the actor found was a ‘touchstone’ for letting him get immediately into character, even sub-vocalized. You might find it works for you, too.”
My players know what to expect – that I will carry part of the load of the suspension of disbelief and a lot of narrative description through images and the occasional extra – from my campaigns. It only takes a single session for new players to get used to it, and another for them to come to rely on it. It’s a key part of my game prep.
It creates expectations – the more complex a scene, the more I will have found some way to represent or depict it. It might be as simple as drawing parts of the map only when they come into view, with the players adjusting their positions as crosses on the map each time they move, or covering part of a map with post-it-notes so that they can’t see what’s underneath. But there will usually be something. If ever there isn’t, they feel a little short-changed, even though they don’t make a fuss about it – and the strength of those feelings can differ from one player to another.
It’s all part of my GMing style, and the players have an expectation that I will deploy my full armory of tricks to execute that style, even in a new campaign, unless I’ve deliberately told them to expect something different..
5 History & Implied Player Expectations
Every GM has a history that leads them to expect certain things from players. Every player has a history that has taught them to provide certain things in play. The two may not match, in fact they probably don’t. The GM needs to be upfront about the minimum engagement that he expects from players – but that necessitates his being clear on what his expectations can reasonably be, in the first place.
Several of my players, for example, have a great deal of trouble shifting gears from talking in character to a more omniscient perspective in which they represent their characters thoughts and words in the third person. As a result, it can be like pulling teeth getting them into first-person mode for roleplaying immersion. Unless it’s absolutely critical to a scene, I don’t even try, most of the time.
And, when it is critical, I make efforts to sustain that mode of interaction without forcing them back into the world of game mechanics. There have been times when I’ve even had them roll a series of results (writing them down) which I then commandeer and interpret whenever a roll might be needed in-game – because I’m better at shifting back-and-forth than they are, most of the time.
I will even break a scene into two parts and spend time interacting with another player to keep the immersed-roleplaying part of their sequence whole and intact, or to give them time to reset their mindset before going back into character if for some reason they do have to break character and go into ‘character-narration’ mode.
When I first started as a GM, my expectations in this respect were framed by the experience I had with the players in other games, and were a lot higher than this current group could readily meet. It took time and experience to ground my ‘minimum levels’ at a more reasonable standard, resetting my expectations. Anything now delivered in excess to those expectations is a bonus. (The illustration-rich aspect of my GMing style was also founded on the principle of forcing fewer breaks in perspective onto the players, at least initially).
6 Implied Promises – Adventures
If your campaign briefing talks about the sort of adventures that the players will experience – and it should – that carries an explicit promise to deliver that type of adventure to the game table. If it doesn’t, something that happens all too often, players are left to surmise on the adventure types they will ‘enjoy’ from what is implied by what briefing is provided in advance, by reputations, by media-driven perceptions of genre, and by their own past experiences. All of the latter are Implied promises, and they can be viewed by players to be just as binding as explicit statements.
What you deliver will rarely match the resulting expectations. Sometimes they will come close enough, and sometimes they will be worlds apart.
I get why GMs don’t want to tip their hat in this respect in the briefing materials. Doing so invites the construction of characters designed to interact with the game world in the specified manner, rather than being ordinary people caught up in extraordinary times – which is often what the GM is aiming for the campaign to be. So I have two different bodies of advice for dealing with this situation.
6.1 Avoid Implied Adventure Promises If You Can
If it’s at all possible to do so, be explicit about the types of adventures that are to take place. Any surprise factor won’t last long anyway, and most players are capable of separating player knowledge from character knowledge for long enough that the real focus of the campaign becomes clear to them.
I’ve had some success – and some failures – running little slice-of-live vignettes or micro-adventures taking PCs through key formative events in their childhood in play as part of a Session Zero. So that’s an alternative to consider. But the failures have convinced me that the first approach is the better one – be explicit and up-front. MAYBE you can justify delaying this until after characters are generated. My experience is that this just creates ill-will amongst players, because their expectations get derailed immediately.
6.2 If you can’t, pay extra attention to the implied promises – and construct a campaign plot arc that transitions slowly from those base expectations to the endpoint
My, but that’s a mouthful. If, for any reason, you don’t feel you can be explicit about the types of adventures to come, this is the advice to follow. DO put in a statement of the “ordinary people adventurers who find themselves living in extraordinary times” type, just as a hint – and a note of forewarning.
More importantly, study what you have prepared to tell the players, looking for any hints or ways of interpreting it that suggest a particular type of adventuring to follow. Tweak what you are going to give them until it’s not incompatible with your plans, and that you can reasonably forecast what the players will expect in response to the content.
Then, deliver that content – at least at first. Make the transition to the ‘true shape’ of the campaign a gradual one that begins only after those expectations have been met. I don’t care if it adds 5 adventures or 3 character levels or whatever – that’s better than the jarring that can otherwise result. Insert events that naturally and gradually reshape the campaign and the adventures of which it is composed.
But there’s a downside to be wary of, too – if you spend too much game time constructing plot elements that will eventually come together, players can feel like the campaign is stagnating and nothing big ever happens. You need to balance the resolution of some plot arcs with development of the big picture – even if that means deliberately inserting plot arcs for that specific purpose.
Six sections done, how’m I doing for time? Midnight minus an hour is 11 PM. It’s now 5:36 PM – so 5 hrs 24 minutes from now. Take off the hour in reserve and the hour for meals and that leaves 3 hrs 24 minutes. With 6 out of 21 sections done, that leaves 15 to go – at an average of 13.6 minutes each, not the 20 minutes originally scheduled.
To be fair, I have used a little of those breaks already – but not that much. 15 x 20 = 300 minutes; I’ve only got 204 left – so the six sections written have used 96 minutes more than expected, less about 10. And 86 / 6 = about 14 minutes too long, each, on average.
That says I’m not gonna get there, not without picking up the pace. But if I have to, I’ll publish a day late rather than splitting this into two pieces.
So let’s carry on.
7 Implied Promises – Campaign Backstory
The Fumanor backstory included the Godswar, in which whole pantheons were (mostly) slaughtered, the Kingswar in which the conflict in “heaven”” was mirrored by political conflicts on Earth, the consequent economic and social and political collapse, the Reformation when the surviving gods founded a new, blended, pantheon, and the beginnings of a slow recovery on Earth. Clerics blamed Mages for unleashing the events, and came this close to having magic banned entirely; it was very much driven underground. That’s the backstory, in a nutshell.
It carries within it certain expectations and implied promises. Were mages to blame? Maybe. If not, could they be reformed in the eyes of society? Maybe, just maybe. if theology was shown to be wrong or incomplete or inadequate, there would be social consequences for the churches, who were becoming so dominant socially that the political reality was verging on a theocracy. Not all the temples and chapels dedicated to fallen deities had given up hope of a miraculous resurrection, if they just prayed hard enough, a hope buoyed by the fact that none of those clerics dedicated to the fallen had lost their powers. Was their faith enough on its own? Or was something more going on? Heck, no list of ‘surviving deities’ had been compiled or generally accepted, and all the old religious conflicts and rivalries were still going full tilt. Obviously, there would have to be a reckoning. So there were strong implications for mage characters and for cleric PCs.
The initial PCs included a mage and a cleric. The mage had the choice – be open about their status (and hence controversial) or secretive – the player chose the first. the cleric had a choice between being open-minded and willing to evolve, or theologically hide-bound – the player in this case also chose the first option. So the pair of them deliberately put themselves on a path to confronting the errors, misjudgments, and lies of both commission and omission implicit in the background material.
They correctly deduced the implied promises of engagement with significant plotlines for those character types and chose to take them on, which would reshape the campaign world in the process, rather than letting it define and confine them. Either would have been valid character choices, but the chosen paths promised greater and more significant adventures.
A third arc revolved around the restoration of Elves and their place in society. The player who chose to take on an Elf paid lip service to the different foundation, but found translating that into an atypical mindset much harder than they expected, falling back on familiar tropes and attitudes all too often. Eventually, this led to them leaving the campaign, their burden of social reformation incomplete. I had the choice of letting the arc continue with an NPC as the focus, letting the arc die, or letting the character die and placing the burden on the shoulders of one of the other PCs. Because it was critical to the endpoint of the campaign, I ruled out the first two options – one would have derailed it, and the other would deny critical elements of PC agency that were crucial to the plotline. That left only the third choice, and the Mage-playing character (who had already completed a lot of making Mages respectable again) stepped up.
Adventures should be shaped by player expectations – you should always give ‘the paying audience’ what they came for. That gets a lot easier if you have shaped those expectations around the plotline that you want the adventures to deliver, in the first place.
Either your campaign should be a natural outgrowth of the backstory, or the backstory should be shaped around the campaign that you want to run. Anything else subverts expectations and can lead to campaign collapse and failure.
8 Blind Expectations – GMs
I talked in the first section about the blind expectations that players can have of a GM they have never gamed under. The converse is also true – the GM will have expectations of players that they have never shared table space with, too.
You can have a lengthy debate about which one is more important. It really depends on what those expectations are and how reasonably the person holding them can expect them to be fulfilled. A GM can, for example, reasonably expect players to commit to the campaign, attending as often as they can, being on time, and following the social contract of the group – I’ll talk about the latter a little later.
Attendance in my campaigns is mandatory – with a lot of reasonable exceptions. I want my games to be beloved social activities – less important than real world emergencies, subject to real world problems like employment demands and health, and even overridden by the occasional major family event. I work with regular schedules in an attempt to let players schedule other events around their commitment to the game, creating the maximum opportunity for the two to work hand-in-hand with each other.
Committing to the campaign also means accepting the premise and central philosophies on which the campaign is built, regardless of personal feelings on the matter – see Moral Qualms on the Richter scale – the need for cooperative subject limits – if you can’t do that, don’t sign up for it. And if you aren’t sure, talk to me about it before it becomes a problem.
It means accepting the occasional bit of homework – be it reading some briefing materials in between game sessions, or developing a key NPC deriving from your PC’s background, or writing up part of that background, or revising a character’s abilities (that doesn’t happen often).
GMs can reasonably expect players to implement the PC that the GM agreed to in prior discussion, defined within the context of the game world, and not some other character. They can reasonably expect players to try and play the character that their character sheet describes, which should also match that conceptual agreement.
Most of the time when this doesn’t happen, it’s “Magpie Syndrome,” where an immature player becomes captivated with a “newer, shinier” character construction. But I have met at least one player who deliberately reinvented his character before game session 1 to demonstrate that they had power over the campaign, believing that the GM had to accept the revised character or the campaign would fail. Well, there’s an old saying about paying the danegeld…
For anyone who doesn’t recognize that reference, it’s “Once you pay the Danegeld, you NEVER get rid of the Dane.” Originally attributed in somewhat different language to Rudyard Kipling and also referenced by Shakespeare, the premise is that once you pay blackmail or extortion, you will never be rid of the blackmailer, who will return regularly with a new demand for more.
In this case, it means that once you let a player hold the campaign hostage, they will do it again whenever they want something you don’t want to give. And you had better believe that the other players would be paying close attention, too.
When something like this happens, you have only two choices: Come down on the character, hard, immediately, and figure out how to deal with the consequences afterwards, or let the player think they have gotten away with it for a while – until you’ve figured out how you’re going to deal with the fallout – and THEN lower the boom on the character, maybe with an encounter that would have had a completely different outcome if the character matched what was originally promised.
A different variety of the same sort of thing was a player who kept reinventing their character mid-game, and cheating (badly) to improve it. This was in a points-buy game system and never seemed to understand that paying points for something meant that the GM couldn’t take it away from the character permanently – at worst, they would get the points back, more commonly they would get back what they had previously had, possibly in a variant form. But if you rort the system to get something for nothing, the GM is under no obligation not to take it away from you or reinvent it to make it a poisoned pill. I walled the character off in a side campaign and let them do their worst, because they never came up with anything that I couldn’t turn to my (plot) advantage. That campaign was more like a chess game than a traditional RPG, but – as a solution – it worked well, and kept everyone happy.
But I have also seen that same player exhibit some behavior that was even less commendable. He was providing transport to and from gaming for his GM of the time, with whom he had been friends for well over a decade, and (for most of that time) had been a player in that GM’s D&D campaigns. Almost always with a variant on the same basic character, but that’s neither here nor there. But at one point, he threatened to leave if the GM didn’t give the character something he badly wanted the character to have. Or maybe it was ‘didn’t do something to the character that he didn’t want to happen’, or some other variant – I was busy running my own game at the time. This goes beyond trying to take the campaign hostage – he was confident that since the GM had no other way to get to gaming, the GM would back down. The GM didn’t back down, and called the players’ bluff, so the player walked out and left. It was years before there was peace between them after that.
Before you get too sympathetic to the GM in question, though, there is another war story to relate. At one point, both the player and this other GM decided to join my campaign, which was insanely popular at the time in terms of attracting most of the best players in the group. I told the tale of what transpired in the preface to If I Should Die Before I Wake: A Zenith-3 Synopsis but – in a nutshell – the GM/player in question decided to actively sabotage the campaign so as to pry players loose from it so they could join his campaign, which had been shut down when the other player in question joined mine – and who he then blackmailed / bribed into helping him.
While there’s no ill-will between any of us these days, I would never have either of them back in one of my campaigns, and none of the other players who witnessed all this unfold would ever join their campaign either.
He did later admit that he was not in his right mind at the time for personal reasons, and that was why he didn’t simply approach me to try and sort out the problem like an adult.
Of course, since I knew both of them already, these weren’t blind expectations (maybe blind-spot expectations would come closer), but they do reveal what sort of problems can arise from blind expectations not being met.
9 Reputational Expectations – Players
And that feeds straight into the next topic, which is also the mirror-image of an earlier section. If a player claims to have 5 years experience at gaming, you expect a certain level of expertise from them. If they have a claimed 5 years at playing a different game system, some of those expectations change, but either way, there’s a certain level of ability that you expect to result.
There’s one colossal problem with that, right off the bat. How many times a year did this person play, and how many hours at a time?
I was once approached by a player who claimed umpteen years of playing experience – but who didn’t seem to know the basics when engaged in conversation. It came out that they played once a year at a convention for about 10-15 hours total a year, and had always used pregenerated characters provided by the convention GM. Hence the puzzlement when I asked questions about what sort of character they might want to play. “You mean, you don’t tell me what to play?” – “Anything you like that doesn’t step on the toes of an existing character is fine,” I answered.
When I started playing, the day started at Noon and went until 2-4 AM – every week – plus the occasional game session outside of that. And then I added a Friday night from about Six PM to about 2 AM on top of that 20-24 hours a week, 50-51 weeks a year. Around 1200 hours a year. It only took me a year of that to be more than ready to GM; to get the equivalent level of experience in sheer hours, it would have taken this player around 74 years.
As a popular advert on TV said when I was a teen, sometimes “Oils ain’t Oils” – meaning that there’s a difference between generic and premium quality.
And there’s a second problem, too: how many GMs have they played under? If it’s the one GM for say, 1000+ hours (even spread over multiple years), they will be used to what the GM wanted and the way he handled the role, and will be fairly firmly set in their ways. If there has been a variety of GMs, is there some problem that caused him to continually shift from one campaign to another? Either road can lead to trouble.
Some GMs and sites recommend a questionnaire to get to the bottom of such things. I prefer a conversation. You aren’t really looking to triage players, you trying to assess what’s going to be needed to get this prospective player to fit – assuming there’s room in your campaign for one more, and a conversation is less formal and less judgmental.
10 Implied Promises – Players & GMs
The previous section, in turn, flows into things the GM should expect from players that they do accept into the game. I’ve covered a lot of this already, so I’ll tip my hat in the direction of the earlier sections and move on.
What hasn’t really been mentioned so far is the expectations that players should have of a GM.
They should reasonably expect that the GM will be close to being ready-to-run when they arrive. At absolute worst, no more than an hour before play can commence – most of which can be consumed by the players eating a meal or talking between themselves.
They should reasonably expect that the GM will not play favorites, and that if a PC gets more of the spotlight this time around, it will be someone else’s turn next time – and that the other players were engaged enough, often enough, that they don’t feel completely left out.
They can reasonably expect that there won’t be one rule for the PCs and another for the NPCs – and that the NPCs will rarely, if ever, be better at the adventure than the PCs are. That can get tricky with some campaigns, in which the PCs are juniors or subordinates to the NPCs.
That was one criticism of the Adventurer’s Club campaign before I started co-GMing it. My now co-GM had created the NPCs based on the famous archetype characters from Pulp novels and movies and what they were capable of – which meant that each of them was capable of solving most adventures on their own. His notion was that these would backstop the PCs, be a resource that they could turn to if they became stumped on how to proceed, but that they would otherwise stay in the background. But they still cast a long shadow and there was the continual inference that the GM loved his NPCs more than he loved the PCs who were supposed to be ‘the stars of the show’.
Three of the first changes that I made to the campaign, after discussion of this perception with the GM, were:
- The PCs may have been less-capable individually than the NPCs, but collectively they were just as good and – with their capability of doing multiple things at the same time – potentially even superior.
- The NPCs had problems of their own that were scaled to their capabilities and they never worked together to solve these problems, they were too busy being solo stars. In fact, if any of them found that they had bitten off more than they could chew, they would call on the PCs for help – because the PCs were used to working in a group, and their compatriots of similar vintage were not.
- The NPCs were to become increasingly aware that they were aging – slowing down just a hair, just enough that trying to live up to past glories would place them increasingly at risk – and that they needed the PCs to pick up any slack.
You can see how this trio combined to solve most of the problem. It took a while for perceptions to change, but the above – combined with throwing adventures the PCs way that were WAY bigger and more complex than what the campaign had been delivering before – the difference accumulated until it became profound. The bottom line was that the PCs were the stars and the NPCs were enablers and backstory supplements – perhaps better than the PCs in one particular area, but far less capable in several others. Where the NPCs sometimes excelled was at managing to force events to play against their strengths – but this didn’t always work, and sometimes got the NPCs in deeper trouble than they already knew they were in. (Hmm, it’s about time for us to reinforce that lesson with an NPC needing the PCs help – and probably one outside our ‘usual suspects’).
The GM can’t know what the players are going to expect of him unless he’s gamed with them before, and those expectations can be further colored by genre. He has to make his best guess, relative to what he would expect if he were a player, be prepared to make mistakes and adapt to them, as each side gets more comfortable with the other.
11 Social Contracts – Explicit Table Behavior
There are three related aspects to the question of social contracts. The firs governs explicit table behavior. Eating at the game table. Eating during play. Requesting breaks. Breaks being time out for one, or for all. What constitutes a ‘cocked’ die and what’s the procedure to be for handling one. What happens when a die goes off the table. Can a player ask for Divine Intervention and how is it handled if he does?
(A quick side-story – I once had a player seek Divine Intervention. Beelzebub showed up instead, saying “God’s on vacation, I’m filling in. What can I do for you? Just sign here….”)
Other elements of social contracts that govern at-table behavior – interrupting or talking over others; interrupting or talking over the GM; mobile phone usage; touching another player’s dice; lending another player dice; moving another player’s mini; the list just goes on and on.
Here’s a biggie that most people don’t think of: passing notes from one player to another without funneling them through the GM.
There are so many situations and possible situations that even if your group has evolved specific approaches to each of these questions, these are better not written down. Things can get even more complicated when you are hiring hall space and have to provide your own insurance – that was the governing force that led our group to formally structure, back in the early-to-mid 80s.
The problem that sometimes come with putting such things in writing is the mentality that anything not forbidden is permitted. That’s asking for trouble. A better approach is to employ general principles and peer group pressure – and the first time a situation occurs, the GM explains how he thinks it should be handled and lets the group find its own way forwards on that basis. Over time, an accepted “acceptable standard” of behavior will emerge.
12 Social Contracts – Explicit Social Behavior
The same applies to the second tranch, which governs non-gaming social behavior. If bring snacks or drinks, are you expected to bring enough for everyone? Is one person designated responsible for such? Is everyone expected to chip in, i,.e. to share some or all of the costs? What about expenses incurred by the GM in prepping for the day’s play – should they be expect to be compensated?
As a general set of rules, a starting point for discussion, at my table, everyone brings their own snacks and if they offer them around, or to the GM specifically, that’s their prerogative. DON’T take unless offered. Everyone provides their own drinks. People should make some effort to clean up after themselves at the end of the days’ play – unless the GM pushed the session later than usual, in which case that’s on him. The GM covers their own costs of GMing as a general rule, unless discussed and agreed-to in advance. If there is some shared expense – hiring a venue – then everyone pays equally EXCEPT the GM.
But there are other approaches. I’ve heard of a group which includes one player who loves to bake; they provide snacks for the whole group, every time, and in return, gets an automatic success on their first save of the day – which the GM agrees to hold until it’s a significant save, not something cooked up just to get their “immunity” out of the way.
And another group, where each person takes it in turns to provide snacks, and another person takes it in turn to provide snacks – and if there’s an absence, the roster is permanently re-ordered, so you can’t simply not show up when it’s your turn and get away with it. The snacks person always precedes the drinks person by two on the rotation, it can never be the same person responsible for both.
That only scratches the surface of the many possible configurations of social contracts in this space.
If you’re always gaming with the same people, you probably don’t need to write these down anywhere. That can change when someone new joins in.
13 Social Contracts – Implied & Evolving
It’s the habits that come to be accepted norms while never being explicitly stated – sometimes. not even noticed – that are the most problematic. The previous social contract elements have evolved and been recognized as the way this group does things. It’s the etiquette of the game. A lot of the time, though, things will become habit that don’t even draw attention to themselves. And sometimes, an existing ‘rule’ will be varied for practicality and usage reasons.
There are occasions when I’m GMing where I will need to take a player aside for a private briefing, some private role-play, even a die roll or two that the others aren’t to know about. I work hard at keeping these brief and succinct. It’s often the case that if they really tried, the non-participating players could listen to parts of the conversation, even if they don’t hear it all – but the expectation is that they won’t do so, unless I deliberately locate the conversation so close to the game table that the others can’t help but overhear (I only ever did that once, and the reasons became clear almost immediately – it’s hard to keep secrets when there’s a telepath in the team).
14 Realistic Expectations
Some expectations are realistic, meaning that they are practical, and fair, won’t step on the toes of anyone in the playing group, and will achieve the desired results almost all the time.
All four of those criteria have to be met in order for the expectation of behavior to be considered reasonable..
- Practical – is the expectation something that a person of the type to whom the expectation will apply will be able to carry it out? If you’re all struggling students without two coins to rub together most of the time, a swear jar or penalty fine for misbehavior is not practical. With a different group under different circumstances, it might be entirely practical.
- Fair – even if there’s only one participant who is likely to offend against the expectation, it still has to apply to, and restrict, everyone equally – including the GM who is setting the expectation. The way expectations become rules is pertinent – everyone brings their own way of doing things to the table, and – when there’s a problem or a conflict – the group decides whose approach is going to be The Rule from now on, usually based on the fairness and practicality. Another GM I know once had The Black Chit – a home-casino-kit plastic coin that he had spray-painted black. Especially grievous behavior at his table led the black chit to be bestowed for a range of time frames – 30 minutes, an hour, a game session, two game sessions. Holding the chit meant that for every roll the character made, the owning player had to roll twice and take the worse result. The only parole came if someone else committed a felony of equal or greater measure – when the chit would get passed on and the clock restarted. The GM also warned that there were 49 others still in the kit and he could spray paint as many of them as he needed – a threat against too many such ‘paroles’. Is this rule ‘fair?’ – only if it also applies to GM misbehavior, which can take many different forms and only partially overlaps the pool of player offenses.
- Won’t offend – This is usually a fairly low bar to jump, but it can catch you out when you least expect it. A trivial example – expecting everyone to offer a christian prayer before play each session, regardless of their faith (I don’t know anyone who actually does this). There are plenty of more subtle examples, too – expecting people to discuss adult situations in a PG13 rated game, for example, regardless of individual moral stances that may be wildly at odds with the morality of their characters. Or requiring a vegetarian to eat meat or someone with an allergy to eat peanut butter, just to stay in character, though you could argue against those on practicality grounds.
- Will achieve the desired results most of the time – This is often where the rubber meets the road. I’ve seen countless examples of social rules that weren’t fit for purpose (mercifully few of them at the gaming table) – dress codes come to mind, immediately. I once knew someone (a non-gamer) who claimed to be so sensitive to smoke that she demanded all smokers who visited to shower and change into clean clothes for the duration of their stay – yet burned incense at regular intervals.
Any expectation of behavior has to pass all four of these tests, but they often don’t get explicitly tested against them – which means that the failure to pass one of these tests results in an unrealistic expectation being fostered upon the group.
15 Unrealistic Expectations
A certain level of exposure to unrealistic expectations will often be tolerated – for a while. Then it will generate complaints, then arguments, then ultimatums, and finally, group disintegration as a cohesive entity. When that happens, people start dropping out, or finding excuses not to attend. The situation becomes toxic.
During the ‘tolerated’ phase, there are few indicators of trouble. That means that the process is already well underway by the time actual complaints start – I’m talking something more serious than table bellyaching. When there is a serious complaint made, however informally, and even if the party making the complaint is smiling at the time, dig out the four criteria of ‘Reasonable’ and give the ruling a fair-dinkum test against that standard. ‘Fair Dinkum,’ in this case, means honest and without preconceptions.
It might be that the expectation passes the tests and the complaint is unreasonable. It might be that the expectation seems reasonable to you but is failing the third test for some reason you aren’t taking into account. Or it might be that what seemed like a good idea at the time is no longer fit for purpose, if it ever was; that can happen because of changing economic circumstances, for example.
When anything but the first is the judgment, the rule has to be changed or voided. This is especially true if the rule fails one of the first two tests – practicality or fairness.
Things get a little stickier when the problem lies in the third rule, because now you’re dealing with personal opinions, with which someone can reasonably disagree. It can be considered unfair to force conformity on someone, for example. Some people will be happy if you find a way to meet them half-way; others will insist on their own standards of behavior as the minimum tolerable level.
By the time you get to the complaints stage when there is a conflict between standards of offensiveness, it’s often the case that positions have hardened, and it can be too late for a compromise to be acceptable. That’s when trouble is most likely to escalate, so solving such problems has to be a priority.
16 Recognizing Expectations
Most expectations evolve naturally, without anyone really noticing until a newcomer arrives who wasn’t part of that evolution and the only explanation offered is, “that’s just the way we do things around here”. For example, a dropped die doesn’t count, it has to be re-rolled – at my game table. It’s completely acceptable to handle someone else’s dice – if it has been dropped and ended up closer to you than to them. It’s usually acceptable to borrow a die for a roll, so long as it is then returned. Cocked dice have to be re-rolled, and the test is to place a d6 that is smaller than the die being tested on the top of it; if the d6 will stay there on its’ own, the roll is valid, if not, re-roll.
Other groups have other expectations, other rules, that have evolved from their past experiences. I once visited one such group where the GM insisted on eyeballing every roll for himself – the result of catching someone cheating, I expect.
That means that it can be tricky to recognize uncodified expectations. Your best guide is to watch for ‘habitual ways of doing things’. When you see one, you then need to ask yourself whether you need to formally codify it into a social house rule, or if it’s fine being left as a voluntary practice. What will your tolerance level be for someone who has a different approach? What will the group’s tolerance level be? Those are the questions that will guide you to an answer about codification.
17 Assessing Expectations
It’s fair to expect that most people reading this already have some expectations in place, recognized or unrecognized. The first doesn’t represent a general problem; individual rules can be assessed as necessary, but until there’s a problem, the group has accepted the restrictions imposed so there’s no problem (yet).
It’s the unrecognized etiquette rules that are where the real dangers lie, waiting like land-mines to go off underfoot. It can be hard to observe these after the fact; after all, you were busy running the game, or playing your character. The time to pay attention to the way things are done is when the example is right in front of you.
If the subject seems serious enough, take a minute or two for a discussion of the subject. If not, let it slide. You’ll generally find that once you notice one, you’ll start to see others intruding into your awareness, as yo become more sensitized to how others are doing things.
Your opening question – to yourself, if not to the group generally – is why is that person dealing with that situation in that way? Once you have either an answer, or a working theory, you can assess the expectation that has manifested in the practice in question. Critical to this assessment is the question of tolerance for other approaches – but, unless the group have only just come together for the first time, it’s likely that this is fairly high.
I can’t stress this strongly enough: If you don’t need a formal rule about something, don’t impose one. Too many rules end up getting in each others’ way, and distracting from serious concerns with trivialities. If the situation changes and a practice becomes offensive or permits behavior that is unacceptable, a rule can always be imposed – but it’s often better to let sleeping dogs lie.
18 Communicating Expectations
So you’ve noticed some practice or habit spreading amongst the group, and you either find it acceptable or not. When that happens, it’s time to communicate your expectations and discuss reasonableness. This can easily be misconstrued as criticism of the individuals employing the practice, so you need to be very clear from the outset about what the problem is and whether or not the practice is a solution. If you have objections, make them clear, and grounded in dispassionate reality, not in personal judgments.
The other times that expectations need to be communicated is when someone is joining the group, or the group is gathering for the first time. For the most part, you can let group practices evolve on their own, responding to specific issues as they arise. But there can be exceptions, and they need to be announced up-front.
There are four that seem to come up more often than most, generally because they are imposed from the outside.
- Smoking – There was a time when smoking restrictions were unheard of. Now, they sometimes seem ubiquitous. It’s quite common to require people to go to a designated area to smoke, even in a private residence – it might be a balcony, or a back yard.
- No Food Or Drink in common areas – This used to be quite common, where a facility made premises available for social use by groups. My first regular RPG groups were in such an area attached to the University Of NSW; we would play from Noon on Saturday until 1, 2, 3, sometimes even 4 or 5 AM Sunday Mornings. Fortunately, they didn’t have this rule. Unfortunately, the bins provided by the university were entirely inadequate for clean-up afterwards, and campus security hated having people active on campus so late at night. Their complaints eventually led to us being denied permission to assemble in those premises, forcing our relocation (the first of many over the years). But this was the rule at the apartment building I was living in at the time, and it was strictly enforced – even eating an ice-cream as you passed through the lobby was grounds for possible eviction. It’s all about how much work you create for the cleaners, and how much it will cost to have that work attended to.
- Post-activity cleanup – The gaming group in question moved to the MLC Insurance Building in North Sydney. Government regulations then required groups such as ourselves to carry our own public liability insurance, and the providers of such insurance demanded formal structure within the group – so we had to get serious in our organization. Eventually, we had to relocate to the Institute Of Technology in central Sydney (now the University Of Technology), then moved again within that complex a couple of times, and finally to a Council-owned building in Burwood, where we gamed for many years. In those earlier moves, we were very conscious of the basis of the complaint which led to our initial move – inadequate capacity for clean-up – so we were careful to always meticulously clean up after ourselves, and this became a recognized benefit of the group – we tended to leave areas spotless, even cleaner than we found them. That, perhaps, is more extreme than is needed for most groups – but expectations about post-game cleanup are one of the most poorly communicated and implemented social rules, in my experience outside of the organized group.
- Noise restrictions – If you’re playing in a public space, these apply as soon as the noise of multiple conversations intrudes on other patrons. If there are no other patrons to consider, if you have exclusive use of the space for a period of time, then this is usually not an issue. In a private residence, the story can be quite different, depending on local laws. In general, you’re good until some point in the evening – it’s been 7:30 at times and 10:30 at times and Midnight at other times, here where I am. Beyond that, you have to keep the noise down. I once had a neighbor call the police to complain about the noise and concern about the content – typical gaming banter about hacking people up, beaning them with a mace, and so on. Police knocked on the door at about 1 AM to advise that there had been a complaint about ‘terrorists having a wild party’. RPGs weren’t well known at the time – this coincided with the Satanic Panic of the 80s – but once we explained what we were doing and promised to keep the noise down, everything was fine. The next day, I made it a point to apologize to the neighbor for disturbing them, explaining again what we were doing and that there was no real mayhem involved, and patched things up on that front. At a different location, I once had a neighbor who was not so easily mollified; he thought RPGs were dangerous and subversive, and complained so regularly that the police no longer took his calls seriously. So rules in this area depend massively on factors completely outside your control – but they are a community and legal standard that you have to accept and obey.
19 Communicating Explicit Promises
Anything that qualifies as an explicit promise by the GM, or an explicit expectation that the players need to promise to adhere to, should be spelled out in writing in the campaign briefing materials. Some heavily sandboxed groups may find that this is the totality of the notes made available pre-game to the players!
It’s often a good idea to have a serious review of your explicit promises before making this list public.
Is there anything by which your campaign would be better served if it were implied, and how can you make that switch?
Is there anything that will only apply in the latter or mid-parts of the campaign, and if so, is it appropriately ‘fenced off’, i.e. wrapped around appropriate limiting language?
Is there anything in those lists that should catch the players by surprise as it develops – if that’s the case then your explicit promise should be more general and vague, even though you know precisely what interpretation you are going to place on it.
What about explicit promises that are only going to apply in the early campaign – these are the ones offering guidance to the players as to what kind of characters to create. Are they appropriately restricted, and are some going to be more dominant than others?
Are there any that synergise, that – in combination – say more than either does alone?
What expectations are you seeking to create in the minds of the players and why?
20 Communicating Implied Promises
This is a lot trickier. First of all, you need to recognize that there is an implied promise. Second, you may have a specific interpretation in mind, but all possible interpretations are equally applicable – if anyone builds toward the wrong interpretation, will they be put out? Or is there scope for you to enlarge upon your basic plans to accommodate the interpretation of the player and his character – a way to play to the PCs strengths?
The answer is usually yes, with a bit of effort. If you need to revise your campaign plan to accommodate the actual PCs you’re being offered, the time to do so is now, so that any hints and plot seeds that you plant (intending them to bloom later) will be consistent with that eventual manifestation.
Probably the hardest thing for any GM or writer to do is look at their text critically as though they have never read it before, looking for the nuances and textures and implications, for what is hinted at but not stated outright, for what is implied by the actual text and not what the GM / writer intended to foreshadow. It’s incredibly hard to separate what you know or intend from what is actually on the page. But it’s necessary to find a way to do it.
One approach is to let an experienced player review it – one who is not going to be part of the campaign. In return, you can at some point perform a similar service for them. Get them to generate a summary paragraph outlining what they would expect from what you have written, edited to conform to your actual intent and not to any false impressions – unless you want to reserve the accurate foretelling as a campaign-level plot twist.
Some people can achieve the right frame of mind by letting the campaign briefing sit, unread, for a couple of weeks while you work on something else completely, doing nothing regarding the campaign in question. It can also help to be reading something else for 30 mins to an hour before you start reading the campaign briefing.
One technique that works is to copy and paste the whole briefing to an AI like ChatGPT and ask for the implications it can perceive concerning the overarching narrative that is to emerge from this foundation. Sometimes, it will get things wildly wrong, sometimes it will be close enough to the mark to be useful, and sometimes, it will reveal things to you that you never realized were there. Those light-bulb moments make the effort of reading and assessing the resulting review line by line, item by item, worth the effort ten times over.
It’s usually helpful, when doing this, to explicitly define the copy-and-pasted text as the outlines of a series of fictional stories that will combine into a broader narrative. And mention that it’s for an RPG, so there will be character-driven elements that will only emerge from actual play and decisions by others, and which can’t be predicted in advance with any certainty.
You can also ask what character race and class combinations would be best served in the broader plotline, and how can the text be improved to better serve them? Again, most of this will be exactly what you expected to be there, but sometimes there will be a surprise or two.
Are there any character race and class combinations that are served particularly badly by the plotline that is implied? You can consider warning players explicitly that these combinations may not work well in the campaign.
- Here’s a valuable tip I haven’t seen elsewhere – if you bookmark the actual chat session in which these things are discussed and then return to that bookmark when next you have a question about the campaign or something you want to develop with AI assistance, it will be a continuation of the same session with the AI remembering everything that’s been said on the subject as though it had just been said. This saves you from having to repeat yourself. As preamble to further discussions and planning, copy and paste an updated version of the briefing materials, especially if it’s now in its final form.
Once you have recognized the implications of what you’ve said, the next question to be answered is, “is this what you meant to imply? If not, is it better or worse? Will it create false or misleading expectations?”
Revise the text accordingly. And, if the changes are radical, review it again (which is even harder to do, but necessary).
There are certain things that you want to communicate explicitly to the players before character construction begins. Things like variations on races, and social attitudes toward specific classes and adventurers in general. A few highlights of the things the characters would know all about from growing up in the cultures of their birth / childhood, like societies and economics and recent history and so on. And there are going to be other things that you only want to hint at or foreshadow. You communicate the latter through implication, saying things that suggest them without coming out with a declarative statement. Those are the implied promises that you need to communicate.
21 Communicating Failures
No plan, no campaign, no adventure, survives contact with actual PCs and their players, unscathed. They will all misinterpret something at some point, they will shoot off on tangents, they will decide they aren’t interested in the adventure premise the GM is holding out in front of them.
So it is, too, with created expectations. There will be pathways that you intended to explore, but that don’t fit the mix of characters with which you have been presented – if you were to actually go down those pathways, the PCs would be fish out of water, and while that can be occasionally fun if that’s what’s to be expected, it can be problematic in the long run.
There will be social contract elements that don’t work or that fail under particular pressure. Handling these is as much an element of administering the campaign as is the handing out of experience. YOU have to lead the discussion of what failed and what should be done about it.
That can be awkward when it’s a failure on your part, an inability to deliver on a promise made or implied, but that doesn’t abrogate the responsibility; it’s your campaign, and you have to manage these things, setting aside game time if necessary.
Be dispassionate. Don’t make it personal. Be self-critical to the same extent as you would criticize others. Treat every failure as an opportunity to improve, to do better or make the campaign better. Roll with the punches, as I had to do in the case of My Biggest Mistakes: Magneto’s Maze – My B.A. Felton Moment, one of my greatest failures – and an object lesson for other GMs.
Every cloud has a silver lining, but sometimes you have to look for it. Doing so makes you a better GM and a happier person. There are no magic bullets when it comes to relationships, and those include the GM-player relationships, the Campaign-Character relationships, and even the Player-Character relationships. Failures can happen in any of these spaces. It’s up to you to communicate them, articulate them, offer up a proposed management plan for dealing with the problem, and lead a review of that plan, knowing that it could be rejected by the players.
Afterword
I’ve seen a lot of suggestions over the years regarding player survey forms. They often sound good, a way to get players to articulate what they like and don’t like about the campaign. My experience has been that they only work well if the players take them seriously, and only work at all if they have sufficient critical facilities to analyze the campaign properly. And sometimes, they will say things that the player didn’t intend to say, or to make a fuss about, “but I had to write something”.
Whether you use them or not is up to you. But my experience is that if you provide players with a forum, you had better act and act quickly on whatever issues they raise. By offering up the form, you are making a binding and implicit promise to act on the feedback that you receive. The worst thing you can do is nothing.
If you don’t change something the players don’t like, it might be that they aren’t seeing the implications and consequences that are intended to develop as a result. The path of development of the campaign can be lost in white noise. It doesn’t matter how random an event is – it still has to factor into the broader story that you and the PCs are telling, and give players a space to express their own creativity. Forging those connections is up to you, an essential part of being a GM. But something has to change in response.
That’s why I like character-driven plot arcs so much – they provide a definitive pathway, a road-map to a resolution, and that can be as definitive or profound as the player wants it to be. There are other solutions, but that’s one that works for me – far better than player surveys.
