"Oh, you're such a good GM"

Yeah, whatever. What does that even mean?

No, wait, I got this one. I'm a good host, that's what it means. Back when I was single, if I had a gathering with a couple of folks, I sweated to make sure people were involved, having a good time, into the social flow of the thing. I dated a girl for three months once, basically because I saw she was sitting in the corner at one of our fraternity parties, not dancing, so I asked her to dance. Such was my Total Committment to being a Fun Guy.

My wife and I don't throw a lot of parties, but we've had some excellent ones. Our housewarming, for instance, we had four or five disparate social groups in one noisy, packed house, but we amped up, split off to mingle and stir the pot, and we were go. Sure, the loudest and smokinest bunch ends up on the porch and the quietest thoughtfulest people are in a small knot in the kitchen, but everybody's having a good time, mission accomplished.

So, see, I can't not do this. No wonder I don't go in for tons of social outlets, right? There's a tendency for me to, if I'm involved in something social but which I don't have much room to position or tweak the situation, I'll be like "Fuck it, not my problem". I could blog for frickin' hours on the cycle of "Find thing to fix -> Scoop up every broken piece there is -> Build in frustration -> Drop 'em and split", but I think I'm actually past that for the most part.

So, yeah, such a good GM, no, I was just being my usual party-time make-everybody-comfy self. Despite my protestations otherwise, mechanics were never much of a focus, which is made very clear by the fact that the games I've run recently pretty much go with "Okay, consult The Oracle when you think you need randomness".

Why'd I get compliments? Ignoring what people gave as their reasons, I'd say it was because I made them feel like participants. Actual participants, like "Hey, I got to play one of Stealth's games, it was different but it was pretty cool".

I do actually have a point. It's been covered by others extensively, but I'm going back to basics on this whole thing for my own enrichment. That is: The RPG rulebooks don't actually tell you shit. By which I mean, they don't tell you how to interact with other people while playing, even though that's an essential part of it. Mostly, they grant authority to the GM, and if the GM is also the Host, then they ignore or edit as needed to do their Hosting thing, only through the game. That's what happens with me, anyway. That's not an argument for freeform, and again it's been covered by folks like Ron Edwards and Vincent Baker many times, but I specifically mean that the books do not actually describe what goes on during a session. Like, at all.

So yeah, roleplaying is largely a cargo cult activity, yadda yadda, why all the negativity? Because I'm starting over in a way. I don't think the baseline for which I got a "Good job, man" from players was much more than my own social tweaks being expressed, that I had to make sure people were comfortable and engaged, and to give them whatever I thought they needed for that.

My current, short-term goal is to write a game that I and a group of friends can actually play. We use the book, does what it says, produces a play experience. I am very able to weasel out of GMing the game in the book, especially since most of them don't give you much but some flavor to begin with, so I've chosen this project to nail myself to a metaphorical wall and actually run something by the book.

"Stealth GM" is an in-joke that I won't get into, but it's also me ironically labeling my own issues. This past weekend my wife told me that I'm often too passive when I GM, that I will leave characters to sort of stew in their own juices, and I was like, goddamn, I'm not insulted, I'm just kind of amazed I am that thick. Because I'd been consciously using my 'badass GM skills" to avoid that exact situation.

So the current reason I'm the Stealth GM? Because I ran a game with (I don't even think "for" is accurate at all) my wife and a family friend who'd never touched roleplaying before, and they ran circles around me. They wore me out. I was as a babe in the woods. And as I've been spending two weeks thinking about it, it finally clicked that the two newbies, they knew what they were doing. Me, the bad-ass experienced GM, did not.

So I'm gonna try like hell to be more than Super Host Guy, the Dancing Monkey. Damn it, I will dance for a reason.