Re: Help a new budding GM

From: skrenta@pbm.com (Rich Skrenta)

Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2000 00:00:00 +0000

phen376022@aol.com (PHen376022) writes:
> >Rich Skrenta has never played a PBM. Still does an OK job despite that.
>
> Not from a player support point of view.
>
> I love Rich's game, it is rich, well developed, and a ball to play, but Rich
> almost never answers E-mails, and it takes a huge amount of public complaining
> from multiple players to get him to fix a bug that affects gameplay balance.
>
> He's not a hands on type of GM, and many players have quit for this reason.
>
> Personally, I don't mind, and I'll keep playing as long as it is fun.

I was much more active in the early days of commercial Olympia, and
caught a lot of heat for it.  It seemed like half of the players always
wanted a bug fixed, while the other half screamed bloody murder if I
changed something.  Perhaps this merely reflected the conflicting design
goals inherent in an open-ended wargame.  Everyone had an opinion about
what should or shouldn't be changed, but making one player happy would
invariably anger others.

Maybe if I was more of a gamer the design would have been perfect.  :-)

In any event, it seemed that not acting made a portion of the playership
happy, could arguably be the most fair, and I could address very serious
bugs when they occurred, or at least by the release of the next game.
Combined with a busy non-Olympia life, this lead to my "hands off"
moderation style, which I admittedly carry to a fault.  But the game
does run like clockwork, as it has since launch in 1994.

References

Re: Help a new budding GM
phen376022@aol.com (PHen376022)
Fri, 24 Mar 2000 00:00:00 +0000