Thread by @rdonoghue

Sidebar: I have 100% been the GM who would kill a player because they spit in the mob boss's face.

I'm not anymore, but at the time, it was 100% logical. An NPC is very vibrant in my mind, and responding with lethal force was entirely "what my character would do", just as a GM

Spoiler #1: that's as much or more of a red flag for a GM as it is for the player.

Spoiler #2: There is no way to pretend this wasn't also about the player failing to RESPECT this NPC, and that I WOULD SHOW THEM. No way I'd have admitted it, but that was totally in play.

The thinking behind this is not malicious, or even explicitly anti-player. It's just the narrative logic of the game carrying forward. As long as you buy into this logic, it's easy to be an utterly monstrous GM with neither guilt nor shame.

"They should have known..." is something that you can say with zero sense of irony when you cannot separate yourself from this role as renderer of the universe. You're explicitly NOT in it for the power trip. You're explicitly NOT using your power to alter "how it would go"

Through this lens, your GMing is selfless, nigh-heroic hard work. You are representing the whole of a setting to deliver the most vivid, realistic game possible to people. Why can't they appreciate how much work that is?

I say all this to call out that this is not a matter of "some people are assholes who look to GM in order to be petty tyrants", as satisfying as that narrative is. It is much more commonly a result of good intentions backed up with a lot of hard work, with a dose of imperfection

The "it's what my character would do" comparison is especially apt, because it's so harmful, but that harm is more often *thoughtless* than *malicious*. And I do not frame it that way to excuse it or suggest it lessens the harm, only to help make it more clear.

(And, critical caveat: yes, there ALSO are straight up assholes and predators in the mix too. But I hope/think they are not the norm, and their patterns are more predictable)

Anyway, here's the thing: Having the GM on the pedestal makes it really easy for them to get wrapped around the axle. If the table doesn't have shared accountability, the GM easily ends up in a self-reinforcing cycle of killing the fun for the sake of the game.

Because if the GM is at a total remove from the rest of the game, who is going to *challenge* their decisions? And how?

Yes, this formula results in a lot of terrible GMs, but it's the underlying model of isolation that pushes us towards it with steady inevitability.

To come back to the mob boss example, I am confident that many of you have half a dozen or more ways to handle that which are better, more fun, and more play-driving than "kill the PC, that'll show 'em".

But I point out that many GMs, especially new GMs, don't even know that they *could* have the conversations where they could learn this, much less how to go about it. They don't know what they don't know, so they build on what information is available.

And while there's ABSOLUTELY great information out there, a newb has no particular way to filter the good from the bad. Which puts them at risk of confirmation bias, and now the original problem just gets bigger.

I guess I'm looking to humanize the apparent assholes a bit. A lot of them are trying to make a fun game for their friends as best they know how. This does not mean we need to tolerate or be silent on the *behaviors*, but sometimes we can afford some generosity as to motives.

Being right remains a great way to win, and even when we escape that in our games, it still sometimes finds ways to creep up on us elsewhere.

I confess, I am wracking my brains trying to figure out when I rounded the corner from "Maintaining fictional integrity" to "The fiction serves the game" and there's a non-zero chance it was either 7th Sea or Donjon.

Or PrimeTime Adventures maybe? Probably some mix of all of the above, with a dash of Feng Shui & ADRPG mixed in, creeping up on my over time rather than in one big reveal.

BTW, if you want a less charged example, a great one is trying to jump *anything* in a car.

Suppose a player declares they're going to jump the crick to escape pursuers. There are many ways a GM might respond.

Including "Ok, let's roll to see how badly you get hurt when your car crashes, because physics".

I like this example a lot because I think it makes the mismatch in expectations *much* clearer, because I think we can all see what they player imagined.

Which in turn makes it more obvious is that the breakdown occurred in a conversation which did *not* happen about expectations.

(And also steps us away from the more meta question of character death and how it should be handled)