It Slices! It Dices!

There's a part of me that wants everything broken down into a kind of formula. An "if x happens, y results" that is the basis of everything I do as GM. Except...except I don't want there to be a limit to "x," the way there is in computer games, or even most boardgames. I want to shake things up a bit. I want to reveal my Bishop in Chess is actually a necromancer, and has put the dead piece of my opponent to work for me as a zombie spy. I want to crown my checkers pieces three or four times and make them hop through a 4th-dimensional axis in a space-time continuum. I want to have a Justice Department sue the LintKing when he gets that monopoly on the dark purple pieces at the beginning of the board. I want to be able to light the torch AND the mice if I want to in Baldur's Gate...

...you get the picture.

So with that, I roleplay. I run into places, like where we could not find a place in the Shadowrun rules that would count out the damage from falling at an accelerated rate. (If you can have magic deny physics in other places, why not there? Except, of course, Shadowrun actually tried to keep some rules like that...) Or how to negotiate a trade in henchmen in a Supers campaign without said skills. I joke that I had a group that, if they couldn't go through a door would go through the wall instead, only, I'm not joking. Without being ridiculous, we try to make the point, try to come up with the best way [in this case, best meaning "most satisfying to players and GM"] to get to our goals.

And that depends on a GM. The GM-player relationship is based on trust, no matter what the game, unless you don't NEED a GM. Monopoly doesn't really need a banker. AD&D hardly needs a DM as long as you're running through the standard "kill anything that moves" dungeon crawl. (In fact, there ARE programs that compute that better than many DMs I've known.) It's the other things, the social things, the surprises that need a GM, and it's the trust that the GM is going to work out something that BOTH of you like. (OK, or if you don't like it, it at least is acceptable to you because it makes sense.)

I'm in a couple of games with no GMs. (It's OK, I'm in two with two, so I figure it evens out.) That trust has to even out over the other players, or nothing can be accomplished. When I'm on stage in an improv sketch, I know a couple of my lines will just be throw-aways because something else is going to catch my other actors' attentions... but if all of them were ignored, I wouldn't have any fun, and there'd be no point in me being up on the stage with everyone else.

I scream when people say it's the GM's job to "entertain them." (Sometimes I keep it on the inside, but I scream nevertheless.) It's the producer's job to get me up on stage, it's the director's job to say "End scene!" and sometimes even give us a theme, but it's my job to keep things going. Without trying to put it in adversarial terms, it seems to me that the job of GM is to challenge the players. Not duel, not be against, just provide the spark... the players need to make it into a full-fledged flame. Sometimes it burns both of them. And sometimes, just sometimes, the GM is the one with the fire extinguisher to put it out.