Game Etiquette

Hello, everyone. I was sick for a little while so I missed the discussion here while it was happening. As someone who's written two full games for this group (both 12.5k+ in length), I have a couple of thoughts on what could be done differently--if themes are something you enjoy and would like to see continued here, of course.


Thank your GM and writer: kind of super obvious, shouldn't really need to say this. People in the past have gone to a lot of effort for this group, so if you've had a nice time playing in the future, acknowledge the work that's gone into creating that experience for you. Given that everything here is done entirely for free out of passion and personal interest, it's literally the least you can do to thank the people responsible--including other players. 

Use the flavour text language: if you like the themes enough that you want them to be part of the games you get to play in, your side of things is that you really ought to use the language the flavour text provides when discussing other roles--i.e., "keeper," not "jailer," or "priest," not "doctor." It's a little thing--and maybe to you it's more annoying or inconvenient than anything else, having to learn these new roles each time--but if you, the players, can't be bothered to do it to keep up some ambience during daytime play, why do we bother with themes at all? It's one way players can participate in the world that's been created, and I personally think that the toll you pay to play themed games--where people have gone to trouble to make unique roles with fun night actions etc.--is that you actually do have to learn what the new roles are called. 

Compliments are nice but feedback is better: if something really worked for you--it had an emotional impact, you had fun because of it, you felt it worked well, you'd like to see something similar in other games--that's the kind of thing creators like to hear about. "I liked it" is nice, but "I liked it because..." is actually useful. I'm seconding the suggestion of an end-of-game session to thank players and creators, give awards, that sort of thing, but it's also worthwhile mentioning that it doesn't necessarily need to be built into the structure of playing itself to reach out and go, "Hey, cool thing you did." This is particularly important to me because this group has a lot of creators (GMs, writers, and future GMs and writers) who aren't me and therefore possibly have a little less confidence in running a whole game etc., and would really benefit from hearing encouraging and constructive feedback from players once in a while. If you want people to take on the daunting task of entertaining everyone for a whole week (several hours of work all up), you need to work to make the environment one where people feel some amount of valued for doing so. 

Fewer themed games: I think part of what created the problem this group currently has is the fact basically every game since the inception has been themed. This both speaks to the generosity and creativity of the group--but it also means you can wind up taking what's actually quite difficult to pull off for granted. Therefore, I think having quicker/non-themed games between themed ones can take the pressure off creators to be constantly thinking of/writing new material, and will mean that players get to play good old vanilla mafia more often too. The last thing anyone--player or creator--wants is to become exhausted, and you know what they say about having too much of a good thing. 


So those are my thoughts. I'll add more if I think of them, but I think this is a good enough start. To be perfectly honest, I was fairly surprised (and insulted) by how poor the manners were after the last game, but hopefully this group will consider how they interact with their GMs and other creators in future.