Congratulations and beware..!!!

Yes, definitely. It’s supply and demand: if there are too many players you’ll have a harder time running enough games to let everyone play as much as they want. It totally depends on how often your average player wants to play versus how much you can GM. And if you let too many people play in one session, no one has fun (or everybody has less fun). We had a few eight or nine player games and they were pretty chaotic, so I capped party size unless there was some really good reason.

Think of how often you’re willing to run games. Say it’s once a week. If you’re willing to have an average of five players per game, you can accomodate 5 players in your pool if they all want to play every week, 10 if on average they’re happy to play every other week, and so on.

In other words, the GM has to be willing to play (player pool / 5) times more often than the average player does. Of course a teeny bit of over-demand is not so bad. Keeps the competitive spirit. But too much can lead to serious bad blood.

I had a waiting list to join for a lot of the campaign. There’s always the urge to bring in more people and share the fun, but sharing too much waters down the fun.

To people who like that phrase, I ask: What, specifically, is the behaviour that person in our group just did that was undesirable, and why? Tell them about that, then, and stop pretending everyone automatically understands what behaviour you mean by “dick”.

“Don’t be a dick” is dismissive and lazy, and I want it gone. If we value our social groups and actually want behaviour to change, we need to step up and communicate about it, not throw down a pat phrase.

I’m curious to see what you think about this style of play. Are they not successful? (I don’t know, I haven’t gamed with them).

(http://jeepen.org/dict)

That’s a fair case and I agree completely that we wind up with the social norms we demand. But I think this mantra teaches a behavior we shouldn’t want.

My criticism of “don’t be a dick” is that it destructively oversimplifies. It implies that if you tell someone else they are being a dick you’ve done your job. Sure, sometimes that might be good enough (like the case you mention, where someone is being a jerk but would stop if you told them) but when someone is only lashing out because they think they are the one being insulted, calling them a dick just throws gasoline on the fire. As a philosophy it encourages blanket judgment and dismissal instead of trying to really understand what is going on. It encourages you to call people dicks (or think other people are “just being dicks”) and think that’s a solution, because you’re just following the well-accepted “don’t be a dick” credo.

I’m all for maintaining social standards of behavior, but I think sanctioning unfairly or rashly because you haven’t tried to understand what is going on causes more problems then it solves.

Someone being a dick can be doing it because they feel they have a social license – either because they assume this is the norm in this social group, or because they have observed others being dicks and the group fails to chastise it.

Telling someone “not cool, that’s not how we do things here” will tend to be effective in those cases. Doing it repeatedly can be more effective. I don’t think you are correct to dismiss the role of reinforcing our preferred social norms to change someone’s behaviour.

If someone is a dick to you, just take it and move on. Do not retaliate. This is how wars start. They probably didn’t realize it or it was just a bit of crankiness or it just slipped out or something along those lines.

That said, don’t be a doormat. If they are consistently a dick then address it. If it doesn’t end, kick ‘em out or find a new group.