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Miscommunicative Game WISH

Gaming requires the GM and players to communicate a large amount of information about system, plot, setting, character, and actions (among other things). 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. How do you deal with miscommunications and invalid assumptions as a player and a GM? Give one or more examples of situations and how you resolved them or how you are avoiding them.
This is a tough one to answer, for a number of reasons.

I haven't had too many problems with this overall, but when I have had problems, they've been big ones.

Since I've only GM'd three games in my life for any extended period of time, and two of them were Amber games, that's where most of my experience lies.

My first experience with miscommunication came with the roommate of another player in the game who wanted to join. I had no idea of this person, having never met him. Though he was online, as were most of my players then, I'd never had any experience seeing him play or knew anything about him.

This was my first mistake. I let him into the game and it took years of playing before I finally realized (or maybe we both did) that our styles just did not mesh. He wanted a more action-oriented game, I think. I was (and still am, really) a GM who loves to spend a lot of time talking in character, and plot-be-damned. He may have been more of a powergamer, as well.

I suppose I should have realized this in the beginning of the game, when he approached me with the idea of his character being Oberon's personal assassin. Then he proceeded to put very few of his points into Warfare (as compared to other characters), and then walked around telling everyone that's what he was.

We finally decided that we needed to stop being GM and player if we were to continue to be friends (which we had become over the years), so we parted amicably.

There are probably others, but I'm two weeks late answering this, and this is still the only thing I can come up with for a reply.

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on July 31, 2002 1:09 PM.

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