This is sadly true of nearly any social activity. Someone, often the host, has to be the adult.
It really isn't. And most of the people in this conversation seem to agree that it isn't.
A lot of people are hostile, or worse. It is just how people are in social situations.
Again, it
really well and truly is not. Your experience is so radically divergent from what even I--who have a lot of difficulties with social stuff--have ever faced, it genuinely borders on "this person is making this up, it's parody, it couldn't possibly be real". I
know that you are serious, but there's a good reason more than one person has told me to stop taking your colorful anecdotes seriously. You describe what sounds like an absolutely horrendous, dystopian nightmare of viciousness, callousness, idiocy, and aggression, a dog-eat-dog world where everyone is arrogant, cruel, and contumacious to the point of preferring self-sabotage over ever allowing any structure or pattern to stand. This is so overwhelmingly extreme, so over-the-top, it is genuinely difficult to believe that you actually have this experience.
This, above anything else, is why I have to wonder exactly how you have found such a
virulently hateful and hurtful social group, and why
@pemerton asked what methods you use to find new players. Because your experience, if it is in fact exactly as you've described it (e.g., if you aren't misinterpreting things, or in some way unintentionally bringing about this result), is just so
egregious, it sounds made-up.
It's also why I have asked--more than once--if you have considered the possibility that your own behavior could be contributing to producing this experience. Your open contempt for developing positive regard between player and GM, for example, is not likely to help you retain players who have a friendly attitude, but very likely to ensure that players who backtalk, who delight in breaking your creations, who find perverse joy in being a jerk at your tables, will stick around--because GMs that fold over easily aren't nearly as interesting as GMs who
try to restrain them and fail.
I find players in all the ways: pen a paper posts on peg boards, online posts and the ever popular someone knows someone.
As said above, I know you have nothing but contempt for the idea of trying to relate to and understand your players...but would you consider giving it a shot? Your "Buddy GM" concept is a ridiculous caricature, and I wish you would stop pretending that it is in any way actually a thing, so....just note that I'm
not asking you to be the thing you call a "Buddy GM". Instead, I'm suggesting that you
actually try to be friendly and positive with/toward your players, in order to build up an understanding, rather than immediately presuming that every person is hostile and thus you have to strike first so they don't strike you.
Because that very attitude--"we MUST pre-emptively strike in order to prevent
their first strike"--is precisely what creates the hostility you have described.
