Why does the stigma of the "jerk GM" still persist in our hobby?

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MNblockhead said:

That's a strange ask. Multi-quoting has been a common style in bulletin boards, e-mail, and forums since at least the 80s. I appreciate it when folks take the time to do this as it keeps responses in context. I figured that more people don't do it because it takes a bit more work.

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It's only the second time someone I've seen someone around here get indignant over the use of quote tags.

Maybe it's my gnarled UseNet roots, but I don't see either the problem anyone could legitimately have with it (the opposite, quoting a whole post for a brief reply was annoying back in the day, because dial-up modem bandwidth, but I understand it should no longer be an issue worth complaining about).

::shrug::

I didn't mull over my reply long. My initial impulse was to ignore the complaint, and reply only to the interesting bits.

In retrospect I shouldn't've mulled it over, at all, and just gone with that.

I don't have the greymatta resources to keep track of every posters' personal list of peeves, let alone conform to them, even if I were consistently paying attention to who posted what when I read something that sparks an idea, quote it and dash of a reply.

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Doug McCrae said:

Not just online. Early D&D texts, including the 1e DMG, were very concerned about the Scylla and Charybdis of Monty Hall and Killer DMs. From the foreword of Supplement IV Gods, Demi-gods & Heroes (1976) -

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Also in the 1e DMG, IIRC, EGG goes on about the need for the DM to maintain superior knowledge of the rules relative to his players, which'd also contribute.

For the first 25 years of it's history, D&D was a very DM-driven game, great DMs ran great games and jerk DMs tortured their players - both extremes did so because they could.

It really seems an ingrained stereotype at this point, with it's roots in reality, of course. You'd expect it to continue even if it were solved by a subsequent edition.

And it has, the same abuses of system mastery that let 3.5/PF players be total jerks, also worked for DMs. They were just a step down from the good ol' bad ol' days. But nothing to counter the existing stereotype

OTOH, there didn't seem to be a lot of jerk DM complaints about 4e. Mind you, h4ters had a full court press going against 4e, pushing every real, imagined, and out right fabricated criticism they thought could get the least traction...
... and jerk DMs weren't exactly a prominent talking point for them.

4e did arguably cramp the style of jerk DMs a bit on two levels: 1) The system was clear, consistent, and played best 'above board,' so a lot of jerk DM tricks, while you could still do them, were more obvious, even to relatively innocent players. 2) 4e, especially in the newbie friendly Encounters program, was embarrassingly easy to run, so players burned by a jerk DM could jump tables or take up DMing, themselves, offering an immediate alternative.

It's a flaw of rpgs that running games that don't suck is a skill that has to be learned. That's why I think people like Youtuber Matt Colville are doing an extremely valuable job given the influx of new GMs in the 5e boom.

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There's both a skill and a will to running a non-sucky game. You can use DMing chops for good or ill, just like players can use or abuse system mastery. Perhaps part of the problem is not just a game is flawed or merely imperfect, so if you're not careful, you can make it suck, but also that there can be 'flaws' in the game that can be leveraged (and/or used to obfuscate) when not participating in good faith, whether as GM or player.

Another possible genesis of the jerk (hey, that'd make a bad movie title) stereotype could be the way we can view games. I'm sure we've all heard '0 sum' vs 'positive sum' followed by "game." You usually hear it as an analogy for something more serious than a game, but it can apply to games, too. And, games can be negative sum, as well. Jerks approach an RPG (or almost anything else) as a negative sum game: in their view, to maximize their own experience of the game, they must not only divert a finite supply of fun from other players to themselves, but actively ruin the fun of other players to enable their own.

Contrast that with a paradigm in which each player takes turns of equal length and enjoys their own turn as much as they can, while patiently enduring those of everyone else without complaint (0 sum, but equitable), or (if you can imagine, it's maybe a little Pollyanna) one in which every player stays engaged with and enjoys each other player's time in the spotlight, enhancing everyone's fun (positive sum).

Tony Vargas said:

[sblock="off-topic: posting styles"]
It's only the second time someone I've seen someone around here get indignant over the use of quote tags.

Maybe it's my gnarled UseNet roots, but I don't see either the problem anyone could legitimately have with it (the opposite, quoting a whole post for a brief reply was annoying back in the day, because dial-up modem bandwidth, but I understand it should no longer be an issue worth complaining about).

::shrug::

I didn't mull over my reply long. My initial impulse was to ignore the complaint, and reply only to the interesting bits.

In retrospect I shouldn't've mulled it over, at all, and just gone with that.

Not that any of this is meaningful, but the cost I'd be concerned about would be that he'd pull that wounded bit again and again if he saw it worked the first time.

I don't have the greymatta resources to keep track of every posters' personal list of peeves, let alone conform to them, even if I were consistently paying attention to who posted what when I read something that sparks an idea, quote it and dash of a reply.

I'll continue to be as polite as I can given the context & gravity of an internet TTRPG forum, hopefully staying more or less inside the lines of the CoC, but it'll have to be in a generic, one-size-fits-all way.[/sblock]

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You’ve been here long enough to know better. Even when using spoiler tags and being somewhat polite about it, commenting in-thread about moderation isn’t OK. Don’t do it again, please.

Also, generally speaking to everyone: nobody gets to dictate the formatting of someone else’s posts or responses. If you don’t care for the way someone is formatting just don’t respond.

Tony Vargas said:

or (if you can imagine, it's maybe a little Pollyanna) one in which every player stays engaged with and enjoys each other player's time in the spotlight, enhancing everyone's fun (positive sum).

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Well that's my default expectation. If the group are suffering through other people's turns it's a problem.

There's another bit of an issue here too.

There's a significant difference between jerk DM and bad DM. Although, true, they overlap, they are not the same thing. I'm pretty confident in saying that everyone reading this right now has, at some point in their DMing career, been a bad DM. I know I sure was. I sincerely hope I'm not anymore, although, to be fair, I'm never really sure and there's always room for improvement.

A jerk DM though is going beyond the stupid crap that a bad DM pulls. DMPC? Well, that's just bad DMing. Deus ex machina stealing the party's thunder? Yup, bad DMing. Bad judgement calls on situations? Yup, that's bad DMing.

To be truly honest, while I'm very critical of DM's (myself very much included), I can honestly say that I'd only really met one DM I'd characterize as a jerk DM. But, this guy was a jerk out of game as well. It really shouldn't have been a big shock that his DMing turned into personal power trips and behavior that was really beyond the pale.

So, to roll this back around to the OP, I think what people are actually saying is that they have run into bad DM's. Which is entirely possible for any number of reasons ranging from an honestly bad DM to a simply mismatch in playstyles to a bad player. There's a million and one reasons why a DM/GM might be "bad" and what makes that DM bad for me might not be true for you. It's not so much a "jerk DM" problem as a "I had a bad time in this game and I'm going to blame the DM" problem. It might be true, it might not be. But, it is pretty widespread.

Hussar said:

There's a significant difference between jerk DM and bad DM. Although, true, they overlap, they are not the same thing. I'm pretty confident in saying that everyone reading this right now has, at some point in their DMing career, been a bad DM. I know I sure was. I sincerely hope I'm not anymore, although, to be fair, I'm never really sure and there's always room for improvement.

A jerk DM though is going beyond the stupid crap that a bad DM pulls. DMPC? Well, that's just bad DMing. Deus ex machina stealing the party's thunder? Yup, bad DMing. Bad judgement calls on situations? Yup, that's bad DMing.

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I don't personally equate making mistake or bad decisions with being a bad DM. If you are the kind of DM who will eventually realize that DMPCs are a bad thing, then running one is a bad decision or mistake, but you are not a bad DM. To be a bad DM you need to rise above and know what you are doing is wrong, not care how what you do affects the players, or both. In short, you really do need to be a jerk.

DELETED as I posted it before seeing the two relevant moderator posts.

innerdude said:

I began reflecting on this while authoring a reply in this thread, and it's stuck with me since then.

Why is it that this particular hobby is so prone to producing narratives that involve having to put up with / get away from dysfunctional, misanthropic GMs? Why does this remain such a broadly-familiar trope in our hobby?

The obvious, easy answer is to say that it's no more prevalent than in any other hobby, that the world is filled with jerks in all walks of life, and that RPGs are no more prone to having jerks within our ranks than any other sector or leisure activity.

But it feels to me that there's something more to it than that.

If you've never read the book Code by Lawrence Lessig, I highly recommend it just on general scholarly principle. He's a former dean of Stanford Law who's argued numerous copyright and IP cases within the United States Supreme Court.

In the book on page 123, he essentially lays out a set of four basic constraints that tend to regulate individual behavior.

• Legal constraints --- systems of laws and statutes with prescribed punishments for breaking them (fines, incarceration).
• Social norms --- the socially constructed norms that outline good behavior, polite behavior, moral behavior, etc.
• Architecture --- physical, real-world constructs that either serve to disincent or outright prevent certain behaviors (example: locks on doors don't prevent all thefts, but they do disincent thieves who go around looking for "easy pickings").
• The Market --- economic incentives or disincentives that drive certain behaviors (Lessig's example is taxation of cigarettes---make something more expensive, it impacts buying behavior).

<snip>

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As you noted, the primary pillar of control available is the social one. Some designers have tried, with limited degrees of success, to design games to minimize jerk DMs (architecture).

The primary thing that keeps the jerk DMs around? The market constraint is more than lacking - it swings the other way!

There are more potential players than available DMs. Some of these players are willing to put up with jerk behaviour -- either because they don't know better never having had a good DM or because the behaviour is less annoying than not playing. So the jerks get players which keeps them in the hobby.

No designer has really come up with a system where the pool of DMs is much higher than the pool of players can support and ended up with a game that penetrated the player pool at the same time.

Nagol said:

There are more potential players than available DMs. Some of these players are willing to put up with jerk behaviour...

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Also note - bad behavior often creeps up over time. Player may not recognize how problematic the behavior is, as it began small, and got larger over time. Like easing into cold water, each step is not so shocking, and you grow accustomed to it...

Maxperson said:

I don't personally equate making mistake or bad decisions with being a bad DM. If you are the kind of DM who will eventually realize that DMPCs are a bad thing, then running one is a bad decision or mistake, but you are not a bad DM. To be a bad DM you need to rise above and know what you are doing is wrong, not care how what you do affects the players, or both. In short, you really do need to be a jerk.

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Well, I disagree. Bad DMing doesn't become good DMing just because it happens due to lack of experience. It's still bad DMing. Thing is, it's not a fatal flaw, nor is it even really a bad thing. Just something we all go through on the path to becoming a better DM.

Once you fix your mistakes and learn what you did wrong, then you become a good DM.

I agree that it's mistakes from inexperience are far more forgivable. I just disagree that somehow inexperience renders the mistakes not mistakes. It's no different than anything else. You were a bad driver once upon a time. You were a bad basketball player once upon a time. You were a bad pretty much everything once upon a time.

But, you (not you [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION], the generic you, which is what I meant this whole post) learned from your mistakes and got better.