Splitting the Party

From How to Run: An Advanced Guide to Managing Role-playing Games, 2nd draft.

"Within just a year of starting to play role-games, I could not help noticing that there were certain players who were willing to invest one-hundred-percent into an adventure or a campaign.  These were people who desperately needed to play, who would bend over backwards in order to play—and who rarely, if ever, disagreed with any ruling or statement I might make.  They never missed a game.  They never forgot their characters.  They obsessed over small things, like their dice or the miniature figure that represented them, or the ornamentation of their character sheets.  These were people who loved the game, and could absolutely be counted on to show up when it was time to play.

"I was not the only one to recognize their phenomenon.  In the early of the game, it was something parents tagged onto when seeing this behavior in their teenage children.  Because the game was new and unfamiliar—and difficult to explain—the degree of fanaticism that some players expressed created a sense of panic in small communities and the local media.  This would spread briefly into the general consciousness, culminating in a notably unfortunate film starring the actor Tom Hanks, and then it would fade away over the next decade as more people had experience with role-playing.  Video games aided considerably in making role-play ‘normal.’

"Still, however, there are players who need it.  And they sit at my table on game nights.  If I have to cancel a session, these are the first people who indicate their disappointment.  If I offer to play past the normal time of quitting, these players are always exuberantly in favour.

"What that means in terms of my personal power as DM is that if I’m in a dispute with a player about my interpretation of a rule—and I encourage such disputes—and I want to increase my authority by calling on other players to support me, I can always rely those players who need very badly to play.  That is a resource that I have in my pocket.  If I am the kind of person who has to be right, who isn’t willing to acknowledge that I might be wrong, or I just very badly want to win the argument, then I’m free to take advantage of that peer support.  If the player I’m arguing with is susceptible to peer pressure, I’m going to win my argument.  If the player isn’t susceptible to that ploy, and I’m the sort of DM willing to push my position of strength, then I’m going to divide the party between those people who unconditionally support me and those people who either recognize what I’m doing—and resent it—or simply despise or tend to resist group-thinking … and I am forcing group-think upon them because I am accessing that option.

"The result is going to be a split party, in which my authority has now become the crux of that split.  It is going to become harder and harder to motivate the party to act cooperatively in the future.  Some of them will feel ‘important’ for having supported the DM—and this support will lend itself to feelings of superiority over their fellow players.  Others will feel corralled, dismissed and even somewhat misused so long as they continue to play.  Eventually, even if they like me and my game, they’ll go, leaving me with nothing but players who agree unconditionally with all that I say.  These in turn will oppress anyone new who enters the campaign, styling themselves as the ‘old guard,’ who believe they’ve been in my campaign long enough to earn them special status.  This situation will continue until I quit running, I get rid of all my players or I severely change my opinions about how to handle power."

From Part III, Managing Your Players, Chapter 9, Power Politics