I run a Warhammer Fantasy RPG on Saturday nights, its been a lot of fun but sometimes its too much work for the constant complaining and criticism I get in return. I believe that constructive criticism is an important part of any group function. Any time you have a group working together to accomplish something (in our case, fun) everyones input is important. However, this group is very different from all of the other groups of gamers I play with. The other groups generally consist of a group of friends who do other things together besides playing an RPG together. The Saturday night group while made up of some of the same people also has members who do nothing with the group other then play on with us on Saturday night. This inconsistency creates a different group vision of how the game should be played making the criticism of my game mastering style varied and the complaining varied. This is quite literally a case of not being able to please all of the people all of the time.

This whole feeling of not being able to make everyone happy is quite foreign to me in the context of game mastering. I realize its unrealistic to please everyone all of the time but within a smaller group of 5-8 people I believe it's attainable. I have ran this exact same campaign for a previous group and failed to please everyone in that group as well. A wife of one of my friends quit coming to our gaming group; she never said anything, just quit showing interest. I believe that her lack of interest was largely my fault because I imposed some relatively harsh rules about character creation making it difficult for her to get a character that she was happy with. I used the same rules for this new group that plays on Saturday nights and it was not an issue with any of them and we have been playing for probably six or seven months now.

I guess my point is that oddly, in many years of running games for friends, these are the only two instances that immediately come to mind that I have had disgruntled players. (I guess there were some disgruntled players when I was a teenager but my games have matured a lot since then.) I want the players to be enjoying the game; I want them to be having fun. I probably should not try to carry the full weight of that responsibility on my shoulders. I regularly listen to the Sons of Kryos a podcast about role playing, and they spend a significant amount of time discussing the various ways to create an enjoyable experience at the gaming table. One of the things they strongly condemn is a game master taking the entertainment of the entire group solely on his own shoulders. I agree with there assessment of how the gaming table should work, however I find that in reality thats not how it works; especially in my Saturday night group. They are gamers, of various stages and various dispositions, that cannot come to a consensus of what they want from the game (and to be blatantly honest, I'm not sure if they did come to a consensus, that the consensus would be the type of game I want to run).

The easy answer would be to walk away from the group, find a different group that can come to an agreement of how they want the game to be played and relieve my stress with some great games (or just enjoy my Saturday night with my wife instead of trying to entertain them). But the fact is: I want the game to go well, I want to complete this campaign, and I do have fun when people aren't complaining that something isn't fair or the game is going slowly. I don't think I could walk away without completing the campaign.