#RPGADAY2020 - 22 - Rare

Day 22. 

Rare.

I rarely come out of running a game feeling bad about it, but when I do it can put me into a very self-reflective mood. I've had a couple of convention games like this. Most of them, I've just reviewed what happened and went wrong, but a couple knocked my confidence to the point that I questioned whether I should be running.

• The one at GenCon UK when one of the players arrived with a pillow and about thirty minutes in just went to sleep. Que for looks between the other players and me. We carried on. He woke up for the end and marked me as not knowing the scenario (and I wrote it).
• The one at Furnace when one of the players went off on one and started to play her character completely differently to the way the background was written, killing suggestions from other players and ordering them around. I'm sitting there wondering how to solve this without conflict, and we have a break. The other players remonstrate with me about how I could write a scenario like this. I show them the duplicate character sheet, and we agree that they will be assertive to resolve this. They do, and I breathe a sigh of relief.
• The one at Continuum when two of the players - old-time GMs and writers who I respect - really didn't get the idea of the story game scenario that I was running. It wasn't the story, they just wanted to engage with it more traditionally. One of them eventually got it, but it was hard work.
• The other one at Continuum when one of the players rocked in drunk and really made the game awkward and not very enjoyable. He made Durance an endurance test.

The reflection this kind of game situation makes you do is a good thing. Each of those games made me chose to do things differently. My perspective is that the GM is there to make the game an enjoyable experience for all the players; I don't like it when that doesn't happen. I want to continue to learn when I GM. I want it to be a rare event when it doesn't work.

22 August 2020