I’m feeling the “observation of player dynamics from the other side” feeling right now. Playing in two games, back-to-back, after only having run for a looooong time, and I’m in particular noting things that are not being done that I have come to rely on as second nature, and I’ve had to shift myself hard into “ringer mode,” as you put it.

Like, I get heavily improvising a short campaign; that’s how I roll. But if that’s going to happen, I build a lot of structure into character creation, with leading questions like “A, what did B do in your shared history that means you’d walk through fire for her?”

Without that? Yeesh. In our Uncharted Worlds game, there was none of this group-structure-building, just a vague reassurance that the GM wasn’t going to restrict us much, and we ended up with a completely unworkable mess of characters. Sociopaths alongside big-damn-hero types, everybody keeping their super seeeekrit backstories to themselves, players thinking they needed to pass notes to the GM. Frigging nightmare. (Literally my first scene: I picked another character, took him aside in game, and said “you seem like someone I can trust; here are all my secrets! Also, what do you know about mysterious plot element?”)

It took less than ten minutes to fix it between the first and section sessions, but it required me to say “look, we dropped the ball and our party is a mess, can we try to build our characters to actually give half a shit about sticking together in this giant open world?”

One of the “worst” players in our group, in the sense of making characters and playing them like precious little darlings who are oh-so-super-unique and also don’t need anything from anybody, has never run a game. Maybe ever. Certainly not since he’s been playing with my crowd. I think there’s definitely something to the notion of flipping the screen every once in a while.