GM Types

This is a roleplaying community blog post. 

Types of GM: The RailRoader

“For the good of the story...” 

“I own everything, even your decisions.”

Significant red-flag sociopathic, dominating personality.

The last time I encountered this guy several years ago online. 

I saw an online advert; 

“new players wanted for established campaign world.”

One of the players had quit and had left no forwarding information as to why he had quit. No mention was made of any other players. In retrospect I concluded they had already quit several weeks previously. The gamesmaster had been running the game regardless, using the player characters as NPCs to continue the adventure. 

So he was running that last remaining Player Character as an NPC ‘for the good of the story’. Fair play, He’s invested a lot of mental and emotional attachment, a lot of time and work into developing this adventure he wanted to see it through to its conclusion.

What he needed was another player to come in to play another character who it turned out was an NPC for the main character, who was now an NPC.

So we had a situation where the only existing player was playing a disposable NPC while the Gamesmaster was playing technically an NPC as a main protagonist.

That’s not a good situation for a role-playing group because it does not put the players at the heart of the action.

It delegates them to a secondary place to the NPC‘s which puts the gamesmaster in a situation of power and control.

Most people would have conceded defeat and shelved the project for lack of interest. Not this guy. His Obsessive score rates too damn high for that. 

It was when I realised this that I recognised the probable reason the other player had quit was to do with the gamesmaster investing more heavily into the story than into the players enjoyment. 

I suggested “Why don’t you start a new game with the new players?” He told me that would be happening later after ‘I’ have finished this story to its conclusion.

I mentioned I have no idea what my character was supposed to be doing as I had no leeway to make that decision for myself, or who these are other NPC’s / ex-PCs were in relation to my character. The Gamesmaster did not explain it to me. Simply that my NPC was a surprise element of an old adversary returned, to be thwarted by the main character before the build-up to the final scene. 

I was berated for not having read the backstory. I had read the games overview but I had not read the many excruciatingly detailed pages of previous adventure sessions yet. There are several hours of work to do in reading all that. I did not know if I wanted to heavily invest my time into this guys writing simply for the task of playing an NPC for a couple of scenes.

Bearing in mind I had been told my character had a specific type of task to do, which me made it feel like 

“Why not run that character as an NPC?” As I have not much if any at all player-input into that character anyway.

I did two sessions during which there was very little back-and-forth between myself and the Gamesmaster. 

I was expected to step in after he had finished writing a certain lengthy descriptive paragraph and complaining about how he was having to play everybody else’s characters because none of them have turned up this session either.

At that point I made the decision there are much better roleplaying groups and much better things to do with my time.

That type of gamesmaster is sociopathic. While it is admirable to invest a lot of focus and attention into the story, it’s also admirable to invest a lot of focus and attention into the people, the players who you are playing the role playing game with.

Sucking people in on the pretence that it’s a role-playing game only to dictate to them that they must write lines in your novel which you are writing anyway even without them, does generally tend to make people stop wanting to play with you.

We call them Power-Gamer Games-Masters. 

The mentality is such that if anybody is running a gaming group in the region and they find out about it, they will take over and assert their domination. They know the rules better than everybody else and their imagination is better than everybody else’s imagination. They tell other people what to think, what they must do with their characters ‘for the good of the story’.

They gravitate towards positions of authority. Games-mastering is a creative endeavour and does have a level of authority. 

However, authority is based on respect. Respect is earned. Respect is earned by respecting the people who you are involved with. 

When significantly high number of your gaming group drop out, not because they don’t want to play roleplaying games anymore, but because they do not want to play with sociopaths. That is when it is time to reassess the value of other people existing in the world and the relative value you bring to their lives. 

What happens with this type of Gamesmaster is social isolation further entrenches them towards their supremacy complex because it validates to them how everybody else is clearly in the wrong by not understanding their genius.

Such people are better off honing their skills by writing a masterwork of epic fiction which perhaps somebody might read someday. At the very least the time they dedicate to sitting in a room alone with a typewriter and their imagination cuts the rest of us a much needed break from having to deal with them face-to-face in a controlled environment. 

There are literally numbering into the thousands of people looking for role-playing gaming groups to become involved with.

A healthy ecology has biodiversity. Not all Gamesmasters are as the Railroader type. Because of their nature, you are likely to encounter these more often.

Attaining validation through critical control of those you seek validation from is abuse. 

Check out  THE +O+TH TUNNEL blog! 

 

ADDITIONAL 13.11.2022 

Since posting this blog I discovered the following relevant quote: 

“How are the Players going to do that? 

Thats not my job. 

That's their job. 

A lot of GamesMasters think of themselves as Story-Tellers 

but I prefer to consider myself a Conflict Designer. 

I create conflicts but I don’t need to know how the Players figure their way out of the conflicts. 

That is where the story emerges and that is their department. 

My job as I see it is to provide an objective, location, antagonists and time-limit. 

Players drive the action with their decisions. 

I never know what my players are going to do. 

Maybe they’ll kill the villain, maybe he escapes. 

Maybe they’ll live, maybe they’ll die. 

That’s up to them and the dice. 

So why plan further than the next session? 

If I did I might be tempted to steer the game toward my preferred conclusion. 

But I don’t want to do that. 

I want to be just as surprised as the Players.” 

Professor Dungeon Master, 

Dungeon Craft, YouTube

The Reviled Society, Part 1 (Ep.291)