Playing without the GM present?

[coralwave]

in one of my past groups, if the characters were planning a heist or something like that, we would meet up outside of the standard game session without the GM, so we could plan things out, figuring out what each character's roles and tasks in the action would be. we learned, the hard way, that if we did that in front of the GM, he would alter his initial set up, the one we had researched extensively, so we knew what we were facing, SPECIFICALLY to thwart each character.
saying "yeah, they had been working on these upgrades to security for a while now, they decided to implement them tonight, sucks to be you."
the first time we accepted it as bad luck on our part. after that we saw it as him being an adversarial dick, who had to "win the game" at any cost.

I'll be honest, not at all sure I'd keep playing. I had a GM that liked to turn everything I said in character to a confrontation with NPCs, to the point that I stopped talking to them. Even when I specified I was whispering in another PC's ear, somehow the NPCs heard. It got so bad that other players told him off. These days I'm much less tolerant about such things. We have limited time and come to enjoy

I help my players as much as I can without fudging/ changing stuff. Hold no punches, but rooting for them every step of the way

 

[Golden Bee]

You don't even need other players! The Power of Blue-Booking

 

[Bagpuss]

Did you do this? How did it go?

We played a AD&D game were we were all avatars of different demi-god we had come up with trying to carve out a new domain for ourselves. Each player had at least 12 pages of notes on their faith, their minions and followers, religious holidays and practices, treaties with the other gods and between their followers. Most of which was developed without much GM involvement at all.