Activist GMs Are Something I Try To Avoid

Generally speaking we expect a judge to act dispassionately, and to weigh a case on its merits to see how the law as it's written applies to a criminal or civil matter. While these individuals tend to have some discretion in how they use their authority, the expectation is that they are attempting to implement the rules of society as they exist, rather than as they might like them to be.

An activist judge, by contrast, is someone who uses their position and authority to attempt to change or alter the law as it exists to better suit their personal belief system and ideology. This term is most commonly used for judges who sit on the supreme court in the United States, as there is not really a higher power above them that can double check their work for bias, personal slant, etc. when they rule on how a law should be applied. Best you can hope for if a ruling affects you in a negative way is that whoever sits in the big chair next undoes that ruling.

Game court is now in session!

I generally think this is a good framework to use when you're a game master as well. It isn't your job to rewrite the game, or to twist the rules outside of what they actually say because you don't like them. You're there to oversee that the rules you've all agreed to are implemented fairly for everyone.

For more use of this metaphor, take a look at my post Table Attorneys Vs. Rules Lawyers: How To Be Fair Without Bogging Down Your Game. Also, if you want to make sure you don't miss out on any of my fresh posts, be sure you subscribe to my weekly newsletter!

Rule 0, Cooperative Play, and GM Neutrality

I'm sure there are a lot of folks out there who are already preparing their rebuttals for the comment section, but before you put on your Caps Lock let me break down the totality of what I'm talking about when I say we should avoid being "activist GMs," and how that interacts with things like Rule 0, homebrewing, etc.

There's a lot of text here... so let's take it one issue at a time.

Now, to begin at the beginning, an activist GM is not someone who homebrews their own setting, who writes house rules for their game, or any of the dozens of other examples one could probably think of. I'm not advocating that we all play our RPGs exactly how they're written in the books with no changes or personal touches ever. That would make for a game that got pretty boring pretty fast.

As I've said repeatedly on here, every table is free to customize their game and setting however they choose to do so. If you want to make your own classes, alter how certain feats operate, change spells, or ignore anything from falling damage to alignment restrictions, you are absolutely free to do that... provided that as a GM you are A) up-front about any changes to your players, and B) that your players agree to the new changes and limitations you have made.

However many or few those changes may be.

So what would make someone an activist GM? Well, let's say you're looking over a player's sheet, and the swashbuckler they're running has a morning star. You decide that, though Swashbuckler's Finesse expressly says they gain weapon finesse with all light and one-handed piercing weapons that the spirit of the class was to recreate the Three Musketeers, so that ability only applies to rapiers and daggers. Also, they can no longer use the feat Power Attack combined with a finesse attack, because you feel that just isn't in keeping with how a dexterous fighter should function.

It's not that you're changing the rules... it's that you're changing them based solely on your personal opinions about what the so-called intent of the creators was (or should have been), typically in ways that disadvantage your players. Doing that without having a discussion with your players, or making it clear that's how you're going to run things just adds insult to injury.

It's like if you were making a case in court, and then the judge declared that you weren't allowed to cross-examine witnesses, or present more than three pieces of evidence, because they felt that was more in keeping with what the founders of the court intended when they wrote the law. Even if that's not what they actually put down on paper.

Let The Dice Fall Where They May

RPGs aren't perfect, and sometimes we can't house rule out all the issues we find in them before the first session. There are even times where you don't realize something is even a problem until you're halfway into the campaign, and suddenly the issues with a given mechanic are front-and-center. We're always going to have to make tweaks and changes as things go.

When we make those changes, though, they need to be with the consent and input of the players. Not only that, but changing something to better fit with your personal tastes or desires (whether it be giving half-orcs automatic negatives to Intelligence and Charisma because you think they're ugly and stupid, or stating that barbarian players don't get to control when or how they use Rage because you feel that's not how anger control issues work) means you're putting yourself before your players and their experience.

GMs should have fun, there's no two ways about that. You're a player, along with everyone else. However, you are just one player at the table, not a director telling the actors what to do as part of your personal vision. There needs to be room for everyone's fun and ideas at the table (within reason, of course), and you all need to be operating under the same rules.

And if those rules do need to change, they should be changed to make the game better for everyone involved, not just because they don't jive with a GM's personal image of how a game should run.

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