Everything is written. The props and handouts are ready. You're set to start this weekend. What's left?

Oh yeah, players.

It's not that you haven't thought of this. You've got a handful pre-registered and are expecting plenty more to show up at the game start. There's no doubt that there will be players. But have you really considered what that means?

In a single-GM game, you're usually only looking at up to half a dozen players. That number of players can be managed. You can give each player a significant portion of your attention, figure out his or her desires, and work to tailor your game to fit. Plus, in most cases, everyone at the table is more than a casual acquaintance; even if you don't understand them all well, you are at least aware of which players you don't understand.

In a gestalt game, one of the primary reasons for getting extra GMs is to be able to tell a story that is designed for far more than half a dozen players. Even if, collectively, you have a ratio of one staff member for every six players, or better, it's not precisely the same as a normal tabletop game: each GM isn't locked to the same subsection of players. In theory, your staff can probably give the proper amount of attention to every player. But in practice, you'll have a hard time learning whether a few players got attention from every GM and a few players got ignored entirely.

But just because you're ignoring those players, it doesn't mean that they aren't having an impact on the others. How do you keep players from feeling ignored, and, if they are ignored, how do you at least try to keep their impact a positive one?

Player Character or Paying Customer?
"We can't afford to run the game unless we have 20 players..."

It's a running joke that, in a pay-to-play game, PC more accurately stands for "Paying Customer" than it does for "Player Character." The cynical context of the joke is that, for a lot of players, paying to play is a bigger contribution to the game than playing a good character. But the joke isn't just about the value of a player versus his wallet; it's a statement about the anonymity of gestalt games.

When you run a single-GM game, it's hard not to get to know everyone at the table. You might find a new group, or recruit from the internet, but new gamers don't stay strangers for long. If there's someone who regularly shows up to your game and stays quiet, chances are that she's a friend outside of the game. It's very unlikely to have a game where a regular player remains unknown to the only GM.

This changes in a gestalt game. The more players you get, the more likely it is that someone is known to one GM and not another, tagged along with another player, or responded to an advertisement with no existing contacts in the game. When you switch to a pay model, a moderately successful game is virtually assured of having players that none of the staff has ever met outside of the game.

The longer you spend running a gestalt game, the more chance there is that you could pass some of your players on the street and not even recognize them (especially if your game involves full costuming). What are the chances that you're giving enough attention to these players when they are actually at your game? They may be serving as little more than extras in your production, and they may start to wonder why they're paying as much to play as anyone else and don't get to be the stars.

Even if these players don't feel slighted by your lack of attention, they're still playing the game completely off your radar. You don't know what deals they're making, who their allies are, or what they think about your plotlines. If you bring in an NPC designed to introduce a complicated section of your setting to the general players, these are the folks most likely to roll him to see if he has any useful items. Is it their fault that they interpreted the game through the lens of their previous games instead of the one you intended? Are they bad players because you don't know them and don't know how to connect them to the game you're trying to present?

There is no easy answer to how to keep every paying customer involved in your game. Some that you feel are the most disconnected from the game are happily providing backup for their friends and fully engrossed in the plot, even if they get it secondhand. Some that you see in every encounter, module, or fight are just there as a tourist, and are missing vital clues that tie the entire game together. Your strategy for dealing with anonymous players will vary widely based on the type of game you run, its size, and how much emphasis is played on plot versus player actions. Just be prepared for it to be an increasing difficulty proportionate to the success of your game.

The Drama of Expectations
"We didn't have any fun so we're probably not coming back."
"Oh? Why not?"
"We told you we needed a Storyteller, and then sat and waited for you out of the way for the rest of the game."
"Oops. Sorry guys, I got interrupted by other players every five feet on the way to you until I forgot."

When you run a small tabletop game, your players are able to judge what to expect of the game based on what is happening to the other characters. They can generally tell when they're getting less spotlight time than others. They can compare their stats and items to others. They can even, over time, figure out what they can get away with based on what you've allowed others to accomplish.

In a gestalt game, all of that goes out the window. At any given time, there could be a dozen or more clusters of players, none of which can keep an eye on what the other players are getting to do. Keeping up with the Joneses is a typical human behavior, and it doesn't go away in games. Even your most laid back players might not always be immune to a twinge of envy when they see another player doing something cool. They probably don't have any basis to judge whether they've gotten just as much cool stuff, but the envy remains.

This problem can be compounded if your staff isn't consistently on the same page. Did you have a vampire spend twenty minutes roleplaying the hunt for blood? What if another GM simply had another vampire make a quick challenge to fill up? One player might feel like you made it harder for him while the other might feel gypped that he didn't get an in-depth roleplaying session with a GM.

Your post-game staff discussion might benefit from comparing notes on this type of thing. Figure out what kind of items you gave players, what scenes you ran for them, and how hard you made it for them to accomplish off-screen tasks. Then work to bring your styles closer into alignment in future games. Players learn early on if talking to different staff members results in widely different results.

Even with a unified staff, though, the green eyed monster still rears its head. Players will often feel slighted if they don't get similar GM attention, rewards, and NPC interaction. You don't even want to see what happens when they start to think they're going to fall behind other characters in experience points.

You can combat this to some extent by being proactive in making sure players are given attention and feel satisfied with their experience. However, players might not even know they're unhappy until they see someone else with a cool magic item or hear about a closed module for a certain group in the game. If envy starts cropping up, your best defense may be to simply explain your policies to the game at large. They may not believe you when you tell them how much time and resources you're giving to most players, including them, but then, no one ever said envy was rational.

Is it Cheating if I Don't Get Reprimanded?
"The item card said six shots per round, so I shot him six times!"
"That's the maximum shots per round, for when you have speed powers. Why did you think a basic item that you got for free was six times as good as any other weapon in the game?"

Of course, the biggest worry for a lot of folks that run gestalt games is the ever present bugbear: cheating. Any staff that gives players expendable tags or tokens for their traits is probably worried about cheating at some level or another. And why shouldn't they be? It's hard enough to catch a cheater fudging dice rolls at a table with a handful of other people. When the cheater could be anywhere in the venue, with traits that no staff member can hope to remember off the top of his or her head, the problem becomes much harder to notice.

In a single-GM game, chances are good that cheating happens primarily because a player doesn't feel that his character is able to shine enough in the GM's game. This perception might be untrue, but it's often possible to solve a cheating problem by identifying and removing the reasons the player feels the need to cheat. In a gestalt game, however, cheating may happen completely outside of the scope of GM involvement: players may cheat because they feel unfairly treated by other players. When three other PCs have cornered you, it's tempting to up your combat stats a little, or to play fast and loose with your resistance to whatever powers they use on you. How would they know what your stats are?

Even outside of the realm of pure player interaction, gestalt games offer the unique cheating problem for which this column is titled: the mommy/daddy game. Just like children asking their father for something when their mother says no, certain players will ask staff members, one at a time, for something until someone gives it to them. And once they've identified the GM that will give them what they want, they will often seek to use that GM to the exclusion of all others. This is an area where post-game staff discussions are important: you can eventually figure out that a player is inflating his on-sheet statistics, but it's much harder to notice when three of four GMs disapproved his item cards.

So what can you do to curtail cheating in general? First, you can work to mediate player conflicts. That's not to say there shouldn't be any, just to say that it should be rare for you to create a situation that puts players in unequal competition with other players. Try to design your scenarios so they don't pit players against one another over important decisions/resources unless you're absolutely sure the sides in the conflict will even out to a fun level. For example, giving a small group of players a macguffin that the big, aggressive group is sure to want is a situation that may lead to cheating if the small group feels that they need to hold onto their prize but can't defend it.

Another common solution is the aforementioned tags or counters for character traits. Unfortunately, this is far from a perfect answer to the cheating problem. Tags involve a lot of costs to print and cut, and then you have to schedule staff to hand out the tags to players whenever they refresh their traits. In the actual game, pulling tags can slow down players and lead to arguments. A common confrontation between players in such games is over whether or not a player discarded tags after a conflict; essentially, using tags implies that anyone might be a cheater, and players get this message quickly. Unless cheating is a huge problem in your game, you're probably better off avoiding tags.

In general, the best way to prevent cheating is to reduce the need players feel to do it. Lifelong cheaters are going to cheat no matter what you do, but the majority of players will only do so when they feel they lack other options or they think everyone else is cheating. Be firm with cheating when you catch it to dissuade the cheaters and convince the other players that it's not common. Keep an eye on how play occurs in your game, and make sure there are few times when players feel forced into situations where they expect that they have to succeed but can't. Be fair with players, and make sure they know you're being just as fair with everyone else. No matter how clichéd the statement, it's still true that managing players is like herding cats. Most cats won't scratch you unless they feel threatened or ignored, and players will cause problems for similar reasons.

Next month, I'll talk about what to do when changes in your circumstances threaten changes to your game.