I have an old-fashioned approach to running RPGs, and I feel like writing about it.

It starts from what was a universal assumption in the culture in which I played my first role-playing games: the GM is god. (And at that an absolute, mind-of-the-universe sort of god rather than Zeus.) In other words, the GM has absolute power over the game.

So for example a player doesn’t bring along a book and say "the Turbo Archer is official, so I’m going to play one". They could ask, but the GM is the only judge as to whether something’s acceptable in the game. Similarly with rules arguments: maybe I got a rule wrong, and you’re welcome to ask if it doesn’t break the pace too much, but my decision is final and argument breaks the social contract.

Of course this sort of thing can go wrong. I think a lot of the first wave of "indie" games, the Forge pattern of the early 2000s, arose in reaction to poor GMs spoiling the game, so they tried to restrict the GM’s power: for example, the GM can only change things by spending a token, and each one gives the players a right to change something else in the future.

But I as GM want the players to come back! So while I have absolute power I also have absolute responsibility for the way that power is used: I’ll make reasonable accommodations to the players’ desires. My overall goal is that we all have fun.

(I think some of the Forge games tended to assume that the group is the group: maybe you’re in a small town and these four guys are the only other role-players you can game with at all, so if Dave is a bad GM who insists on doing it anyway you need a game in which the GM’s power is reduced. But I would rather play no RPGs than RPGs with people I don’t like. And these days there are online groups too.)

When a player says "is there a chandelier I can swing on" my default answer is "yes". Some games charge the player points for this; I want to encourage them to visualise and be involved with the setting. "Collaborative storytelling exercise" sounds too pretentious; for me at least it’s a suggestion and a decision rather than a democratic right to bring stuff into the game world. I remain the dictator, but I strive to be a benign one.

I was quick to discard the adversarial GMing approach common to early games. I don’t require players to list every matchstick and nail on their inventories; I’m glad to assume that the PCs are competent people who would not plan a trip through rough country without camping supplies, given the chance to obtain them. I don’t require a Standard Door Opening Procedure to be gone through step by step as I wait to pounce on any omission; the character knows how this is done better than I or the player does, so I’ll assume they did the right thing based on their training. I find the fiddly details boring when what I care about in a game is the people. Similarly, I want players to feel their characters can be less than perfect: one byproduct of the adversarial GM I’ve seen is the character as egg, a smooth surface with nothing protruding for the GM to manipulate, because (as in John Wick’s Play Dirty articles) any purchase the player gives the GM will be used to screw them over. Claustrophobic? You have to go down the sewers. Sweet old Aunt May? She’ll get beaten up while you were out fighting the bad guys. Again, I’m here for the people, so while I will sometimes tug on those handles I try to do it in a way that the player can also enjoy.

Another modern tendency is to assume that the author of an adventure or campaign setting has a defining say in how it should be run. Fine in their own games, and I’m happy to listen to their ideas, but if I bring that adventure into my game, it’s going to be filtered and mangled and what I run will be a thing I run, not just what the book says.

Of course this also means that I can’t blame the material I use: I chose to incorporate it, and I should have rewritten it better before giving it to the players.

The GM is god. Players shall sacrifice live pizza to the GM.