GM Fiat sucks

We've made a lot of changes to our gaming. Last week one of my alpha players made a point of exclaiming, several times, that the past session was the best he had ever had. Like me, he's prone to hyperbole so while I believed him (cause it was the best gaming ever) we had encountered a grievous social conflict which he choose to blow up at. He made a choice to drag the rest of the group into it. He was very angry and defensive, pretty much on par with what I’ve seen from him in the past. He and I have always had social difficulties but for the first time I found the event to be something that baffled me. I was able to express myself pretty calmly I thought and let him know.

One of the things that I’m trying to do away with is GM Fiat. Not because I think the concept is evil or broken, I just think I want to move towards a healthier model of socializing. When I read this article above I was struck by the lines:

I mean tell me, how many of you have had to sit there while some asshole in the group role-played through buying shit or had to listen to someone’s long winded soliloquy while the rest of the group had to sit and watch. See, when a game has rules to govern this shit, it doesn’t stop it from happening. All it does is constrain that bullshit so everyone at the table can have fun, including the poor bastard who is tongue tied but likes the idea of playing the snarky diplomat.

We had a social train wreck because I was still stuck in GM Fiat mode. I had strong ideas about what was happening in a scene and was not clearly making room for the players to set it up as they envisioned. It’s the very thing that every GM I know fears about giving up Fiat. “What if the players want to go ‘off map’ or want to something that just doesn’t work with my current plot?” they ask. My alpha player became very agitated and assumed that my desire to move the scene in a specific direction was a desire to block his creativity and expression. Honestly my fear centered more on a desire to avoid what I feared would be juvenile wish fulfillment. After all we had just had an amazing session with realistic character development and story driven events. It seemed like he was falling back to a “must win” situation and I was falling back to a “here is how the story should go” angle. Neither of us was right, but by the time there was conflict we were both pretty emotionally invested in our personal outcome. After he expressed his frustration I was able to see where I had gone wrong. It didn’t matter where my ideas were going or how good I believed them to be, I couldn’t just shift my promise to cut back on GM Fiat.

Good GM Fiat is going to continue to be a simple matter of providing tools to the players so that they can get their stories told. I’ll take care of the world building and kickers. Otherwise nothing is off limits or out of a player’s reach. It’s my promise to my group and my development as a GM.