Ben's Gaming Maniphilosophesto

bring it on, bi-aaatch

wow, that's a wiki block

"There comes a time in a young GM's life, when he must write his maniphilosophesto. Your time was yesterday, and on account of tardiness, you get to clean the privy for a week."
-Jens Svenkmeyer

Jason did it. Matt did it. Now it seems I'm motivated to do it. Meaningless pontification, by and large, and essentially stream of consciousness.

I'm going to break my "principles" down into 3 categories, layers if you will, where I think different things are important: Out-of-game, Meta-game, and In-game. I'm not really that interested in where you think things fall in this spectrum, unless it's crucial for some more substantive debate. It's just an organizational structure for my thoughts.

Out-of-game This is a very general category, mostly relating to simple group dynamics. As such, the principles I'm putting here are largely redundant with any primer on "how to hang out/work/play with a group of people".
For the most part, I think that for the things in this category, Concordance is by and large the most important thing, by which I mean that everyone is "on a level" with everyone else: things start going sour when one or some fraction of the peoples is doing significantly more or less than everyone else. I'll make specific notes about where I think there's more to it.
1.) Commitment: pretty self explanatory. I think it has two components: time, and resources. In both cases, it's basically a purely quantitative issue
-Time: the more important factor. In general, I think it's important that people are attending sessions, and that people are in agreement about how long a session should be.
Ben's personal opinion: while I think time concordance is crucial, I personally think that a given session should last at least 6 hours. less than that is ok, but really only if people are very focused (see below). I actually think frequency of play is less important, though if you go too long, the feel of the game disappears. more important than frequency, I think, is that most of the players are present for every session: I think the game suffers when there is a steady rotation of present characters.
-Resources: Everyone should do what their means allow, and do it freely. That means if you have a car, you should offer rides, and if you have money for food/drinks/books/cards, you should contribute. Not much more to say about it than that.

2.) Focus: I think a good game is immersive: since tabletop rpg's provide no visual or auditory cues, everybody has to contribute to some hazy collective unconscious of what's going on. The problem is, this is disrupted easily if just one person isn't on board. As long as everyone understands what the level of focus in a given game should be that's fine, I suppose.
Ben's personal opinion: I think that even small drops in focus during play time come with a high cost and a feed forward loop in terms of the game sucking ass. less focus makes for a less imersive game, which encourages less focus, etc. I think these sorts of things should be gotten out at the beginning and the end of a session, and maybe in defined "breaks", but during playtime, I think anything not directly relevant to the game needs to be gone. If