[MENTION=78752]DMZ2112[/MENTION]
I'm posting that I don't have disappointing sessions. You either seem to not believe me, or . . . be angry about it? (I'm not sure.)
I'm sure my players have some sessions that they enjoy more than others. I have sessions that I enjoy more than others. For instance, I enjoyed
my second-to-last Classic Traveller session more than
my last one. But neither was
disappointing.
I play with my friends - depending exactly how you measure
same group it's been the same group for either ten or twenty years. Most of us in the group started playing with Moldvay Basic in the early 80s. One started playing with Rolemaster, in our group, in the late 90s.
There are some things you have posted about GMing that don't describe my approach to RPGing. Whether or not they have any bearing on my failure to have disappointing sessions I don't know:
I've never for a moment bought the line that the gamemaster is ever not a storyteller. We wear a lot of hats, and some are more ostentatious than others, but the skullcap of the storyteller is always under there, even if all we're doing is narrating the results of raw die results following completely unsolicited player action.
sometimes the players deal the gamemaster an unwelcome surprise. That we understand what that feels like. That we can relate to the feeling of having effort rendered meaningless, even if it is only in the short term. That it's not fun.
Maybe we deserve it, maybe we don't; maybe we're good at coping with it, maybe we're not -- that's irrelevant. No one comes to a game session expecting to be negated, and when it happens, we get disgruntled.
Having been in more or less exactly this situation, I'd like to add that what is really disappointing about it has less to do with, "Boo hoo, the players won't get to solve my clever riddle now," and more to do with, "Who does this douchebag think he is, making unilateral decisions for the party like this?"
It's not about plot vs. environment, it's about trying to construct a play experience that's fun for everyone and having that negated.
maybe I have more players in my long-time regular crew who enjoy tossing a monkey wrench into things just for the sake of introducing a little chaos.
I don't see my job as GM as
storyteller. That's a term I assocate with the White Wolf/2nd ed AD&D style of RPGing, which is my least favourite approach. The biggest
textual influence on my GMing approach is Luke Crane's stuff written for Burning Wheel.
I don't
construct a play experience. I participate with my players in playing the game - I frame scenes that I believe will be interesting, relying on player cues and genre presuppositions to help with that. When the players succeed on checks, events go the way they intended. When they fail, I try and establish interesting consequences. If a particular scene or situation seems not to be engaging (I'm lucky that that's not too common, but sometimes it happens) then I adjust or move on.
It's not uncommon in my game for PCs to oppose one another. Sometimes it comes to blows, but more often it plays out through other forms of conflict. My players are consscius of the need to manage group tensions, and are sensitive also to whether or not the game depends on "party" play (see eg 4e D&D, which is, vs Burning Wheel or Cortex+ Heroic Fantasy, which is not). The most recent conflict was in our last session, a Dying Earth game, in which one PC was recruited by an NPC to help humiliate the other PC, who had one-uppped that NPC in the opening sequence of the session. The most recent before that that I recall was the same two players playing PCs in Prince Valiant who were rivals for the hand of a noble lady.
Since 1990 I've GMed a session weekly for about 10 years, then fortnightly or so since then, and I've never had a player come to the session with the intention of
negating the play of the game, or wrecking it. I put that in the same category as someone who goes to a chess club and then knocks over the board if s/he is losing. I'm aware that such players exist, from my times playing in a club, but I regard them as toxic.
I have played with GMs who may have regarded me (and fellow players) as "disruptive" or "negaters" because the GM had a preconception of the events that would unfold in the session, and we wanted to declare and play out actions for our PCs that involved different things from what the GM had in mind. I've walked away from two such GMs (once in the early and once in the late 90s). Those GMs were using an approach that I didn't use then, don't use now, and personally don't think gets the best out of the RPG medium.