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Lousy Players and Lousy GMs

Greg Stolze, who is currently promoting a tactical wargame of his design, to be released if enough people come up with the “ransom” for it, summarizes the results of two rpg.net forum threads which rated the various flaws od Lousy Players and Lousy GMs.

Well, at least I provide plenty of unchallenging sessions. And I give PCs lots of superpowers sometimes. Except I take them away. But I don’t railroad. Or prepare. And my Leadership sucks.

Strangely, although I’ve been characterized as “an asshole player”, I don’t see my flaws listed. Are they?

2 replies on “Lousy Players and Lousy GMs”

You are not a lousy player, just an asshole one.

However, if you insist, you can find a touch of “doesn’t make it possible to discern whether he is having fun” in your pocket, and maybe even some “out-of-game tension to the table”, though not exactly in the way described in the thread (though they do mention “bitchy side conversations”), i.e. revenge for burned toast, just an air of dissatisfaction which may infiltrate the game.

But really, I don’t think you qualify as “lousy”, just a bit of an asshole. In an unexpected way.

But now for the real fun:

Disconnected PC Subplots – Absolutely, for a while, but usually they end up being weaved together in a way that makes it *slurp* worth the wait.

No Slack – Ha ha. You give no slack. You make people tell you exactly how many dozens of safe houses they got, and you don’t let us reboot the universe more than twice per session without expending hero points. Slack is abundant and wisely used in our game, by you just as much as us.

Making It Too Easy – Too easy, IMHO, is just a less conscious way of saying “not interesting”. There is a misconception that game-plot must be so challenging for the characters that even the players must break a sweat. That’s bull. The challenge is in creating a thing you enjoy playing, and then playing it; not in killing monsters you can only hit by rolling 20’s.

Setting Inconsistency – You say tomato, I say Katana. The important thing is figuring out what is important, and making sure everybody has a good picture of *what* those things are. This is what we didn’t manage to do with Oren. Once this is done, consistency comes pretty much on it’s own.

And no, we are NOT too stoned to notice!

Tone Breaking – This happens sometimes. And it’s usually my fault. Maybe I become embarrassed easily.

Yoinking Away Rewards – Big time, you heartless monster! I have a trauma of not being able to fly.

Favoritism – Quite the opposite. Disfavoritism. Against me. And my ability to fly.

Poor Leadership – I don’t think we ever had any of that in our party. True, you are not a very good leader, but it’s not like you are the coachman with the whip. You are more like the horse… Our party has no leader, we’re an anarcho-syndicalist commune, and I like it that way.

Bottom line: don’t sweat it. And cool session last night. That ending line still haunts me. Oh gosh what am I going to wear?

I.

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