Well, I'm not actually having a baby. That was a big lie on my part. You or someone else on your staff might be having one, though, at some point in the undisclosed future of your game: a baby in potentia, as it were.

And babies are sometimes the least of your worries. I know a number of couples (possibly even a couple of couples) that have begun families and still failed to miss more than the occasional game. A baby is something that you can work around for a weekend every now and again (with appropriately gullible grandparents or other babysitting methods).

No, what I'm talking about, using "baby" as a codeword, is any dramatic change in your life that trumps the game. It might be a job that's too good to pass up that has a weird schedule or is far away. It might be an unfortunate long-term illness in a staff member or a member's close family. One of your members might even get a position as main tank for a big raiding guild. Good or bad, it's more important than the game and means that a member of your staff is unable to participate for an indefinite, extended period.

In a normal game, when the GM can't run anymore, the game is usually over. You might be able to substitute another GM, but the game won't really be the same any longer. The GM is finished, long live the GM.

But a gestalt game can recover from the loss of one of the parts that sums up the whole. One of the things that make democracy different from monarchy is this gradual transition of leadership. But, just like your government has an established succession plan, your gestalt will benefit from being prepared for doing without any particular member and still continuing the game.

If your game goes on for long enough, you might see most or all of the staff replaced one by one. How do you make sure this happens while keeping the game enjoyable for both staff and players?

Remonstration
"This is just a game, right?"

Learning to work together as a team is a long process; a lot of effort goes into making a gestalt. If losing a member of the team feels like losing an arm, you're doing something right. It's hard to run the game without a teammate upon whom you've come to rely.

But a good gestalt should also share information. Even though each teammate specializes in their strongest areas within the group, that doesn't mean that the rest of the team should be incapable of performing in a single teammate's role. If everyone is in the loop, an open position on the team should just mean that the others have to work harder, not that certain tasks are completely missed. If there's someone on your team that you could absolutely not do without, you should figure out why that is and how to work in some redundancy.

Businesses plan for contingencies all the time. In my office, we talk about what we would do if any of us were hit by the proverbial bus. Even in a high-paying job, anyone might leave on short notice. A game isn't any different; your team members shouldn't feel like they're more locked into their leisure activities than they are into their paying job.

Even with all of this in mind, it's hard not to lay blame and complaints. Conditions severe enough to pull someone off of the team are often severe only to the one person. You're not getting his awesome new job; you're losing a resource that improves your fun. His quitting to help a family member hurts you. And these are situations where it's easy to empathize and put yourself in his shoes. It's much harder to accept a friend appearing to blow you off for something much less important.

But, just as with staff burnout, when someone really wants to leave the staff, keeping him there is liable to do more harm than good. Do you want a teammate that blames the game for keeping him from taking his dream job? Do you want one that spends every game worried that he's not at home with his sick mother? The game is becoming a detriment to his life, not the improvement that it should be, and that kind of thing will begin to infect the game even if it never becomes overt.

If someone has to leave, let him go without remonstration. If you let him free on good terms, he may continue to help when he can and be happy to return if the conflict of responsibilities passes. If you make him feel like he's hurting you to leave, you may lose your friendship, get no help if he leaves or poor help if he stays, and contribute to the stress levels of a person that just wanted to play a game. It is always just a game, even though that's sometimes easy to forget.

The Long Haul
"It's hard to imagine that I'm committed to running this game until I'm 30."
"I'm already 30; by time we're done, I'll be 35!"

How long will your game run? Do you plan on just a few months? Does it have a tightly packed, one-year storyline? Will it take several years to finish the main plot? Are you actually planning on creating a sandbox-style game that could go on indefinitely? Have you been in development for a significant period already?

The shorter the run-time of your game, the less likely you are to lose staff. For one, you reduce the amount of time in which something unpredictable can occur; you have a very small chance of being hit by a bus, but it's still more likely to happen sometime within a decade than sometime within three months. More importantly, a short game means that an end is in sight and within the range of short-term goals. It's harder to anticipate your final game in five years than it is when it's only a few months away. People are much more willing to tough out a conflict of commitments when the end of one commitment is within their grasp; a successful completion can make up for a little bit of extra stress. But if that gratification is extensively delayed, the stress will eventually overwhelm the future benefit.

This is all to say that if you want to minimize your chance of losing a staff member, you need to minimize the length of your game. If your game must be longer to meet its goals, then you should be prepared for staff dropouts. As the game goes on, take more and more opportunities to institute redundancy and prepare for the loss of any given individual. It's sad to see a short game end after a few months due to staff issues, but it's tragic to lose a game after years for the same reason.

Continuity
"Is anyone from the original staff actually still running the game?"

Over a long-running game, staff replacement becomes increasingly inevitable. But, for the most successful games, the core player base remains essentially the same. The more turnover you have, the more likely it becomes that you'll also lose your core players.

The first reason for this is simple loyalty. No matter how much success you have at keeping the whole staff on the same page, players may still align themselves with a particular GM. They may like one person's storytelling style better, feel like that individual is the primary one handling their personal plotlines, or just be friends with that staff member out of game. Whatever the reason, when one staff member goes, there are players that will be tempted to go with him.

Parting on good terms is the best way to prevent this. If players believe that their favorite GM is leaving for reasons completely unrelated to the game, and there's no bad blood because of it, they'll be less likely to quit out of a feeling of solidarity. You can go even further be having the departing staff member identify the players with whom he has the most contact. Talk to those players in particular, and make sure they're satisfied that they'll continue to receive the same level of attention from the remaining staff.

The other reason is the problem of thematic drift. As more and more of the original staff depart and are replaced, the feel of the game will change. Long-term players begin to draw unflattering comparisons; if they liked the game in the beginning enough to stick around, chances are that any change in the game will be looked at as a problem.

Back in the old days there weren't all these random monsters, or nowadays you hardly ever get a good random monster attack. Back in the old days you could count on a rousing battle near the end of a session, or nowadays the NPCs are constantly dropping out of scenes to play monsters in pointless fights. Back in the old days things were the way we liked them, or nowadays things just aren't as good.

This is thematic drift. It's often a problem even without staff turnover, and only becomes worse because of it. As a game gets bigger and more entrenched, the staff may forget exactly how they used to run the game, or may have never even noted which game features were a big hit with the players. The staff may have even made a deliberate shift in style to better suit the story or the majority of players, but have left behind a group that liked it the old way. In-game situations become different, and it affects the perceived theme of the chronicle.

The solution to this, whether or not turnover is a problem, is to communicate with the players and remember what they tell you. It's useful to the staff to understand exactly why their loyal players are loyal. One game may be successful because it has rousing mass-battle scenes but minimizes the random encounters. Another's players may love the in-depth NPC roleplaying and be glad that there aren't so many contrived big fights, but feel that a helping of random monsters lends color to the setting. In essence, what is it about your game that turns casual players into long-term players and forms them into the core that makes a long-term game possible?

As new staff members come in, they can be given the rundown quite simply: these are the secrets of the setting, these are the active plotlines, and these are the theme and flavor elements that keep our core players coming back. If the staff makes a point of staying consistent with what the players enjoy most, a completely new staff can make the game feel the same as it was at the beginning. Your game has been baby-proofed.

With this column, I've hit all the original points envisioned for Gestalt. The final columns will cover anything else that you fell that I've missed. Please, post in the forums below with any other topics you'd like to see covered in the next two columns.