Five, Five Game WISHes
There are a lot of places where a failure to communicate on the part of the GM and the players leads to disappointments for the GMs and the players...
Well, my main tact for avoiding such misunderstandings is to mostly stick with a GM who's been with me for more than a third of my life now. This works pretty well, actually - we still have disagreements on occasion, but rarely serious misunderstandings - so I highly recommend it. If you find a really good GM, nail her. Down, I mean. Er. *ahem*
I was in a Throne War at a convention, in which I was, to my shame, the first one killed. I do think this was at least in part because the device I'd based a lot of my character on was a little over-complicated for a Throne War, and required the GM to do a lot of "keeping-in-mind". It had (among other things - I'm not giving *all* my secrets away) the `extraordinary psychic sense' which included sensing hostile intent directed towards my character, and it had the ability to pulse out a variety of negation-style Power Words over a broad area if it sensed such...which, in a perfect world, would have seriously messed with the guy laying in ambush for me. Of course, I don't know that HE didn't have some kind of psychic neutral hat on that kept it from working, but I DO know that what I was asking the GM to keep constant track of was a little hefty for the five minutes you have to explain yourself before a Throne War.
My way of dealing with these things is, frankly, to get over it. In that instance, the GM was a good one (I've been in several of his games, and hope to be in more, which is about the best anyone can say of a GM), and I don't have a problem with his calls...at best, I think of it as the gaming (especially diceless-gaming) replication of a realistic risk of mechanical failure. The more complicated the device (eg. the more the GM has to do, especially without player prompting), the more likely it is to malfunction. At worst, I have an idea how much GMs have to keep track of. I don't GM because I don't have the knack, which leaves me in a pretty poor position to criticize someone who's at least making the effort. Not that I don't think there are some lousy GMs out there, but you know what I mean. (Nudge, nudge, wink, wink...er, nevermind, that's not at all what I mean.)