It’s been a hell of a week. Well, last week was a hell of a week. Some personal s$&% segued beautifully into a medical issue that I had to waste several days resolving and which knocked me right the f$&% out for several more. But I’m not just b$&%ing about my life. This is relevant.

See, the only reason I read the e-mail I did—an Ask Angry question—was because I was sitting miserable and bored in a doctor’s waiting room. Otherwise, I’d have just deleted the f$&%ing thing. And I absolutely shouldn’t answer it. But I’m going to. Because I ended up thinking way too long about it. And actually feeling bad for the person that sent it. But I’ll explain all that below.

Incidentally, if you want me to answer one of your questions in a future Ask Angry article, send it to ask.angry@angry.games. But, make sure you don’t make the same mistakes today’s questioner made. Don’t be a dingus.

Some dingus asks…

Wait.

Before I get to the question, I have to do the disclaimer thing. As I said above, I should never have read this question. And I shouldn’t be answering it. Let me explain.

I like doing the whole Ask Angry thing. It’s fun. It lets me write about topics I otherwise wouldn’t. Either because I’d never think of them or because I’d never get a whole article out of them. It’s also a fun challenge to write about s$&% I didn’t come up with. And it lets me interact with the community.

But the Ask Angry columns are also a useful time-management tool. Because they don’t require a whole lot of brainstorming, outlining, research, and design work. Even seemingly simple hacks—like the companion thing and the town map thing—even simple hacks take a lot of f$&%ing work. And I’ve got one minor and two major systems, an RPG, and a module all going in the background right now. And when a bunch of other bulls$&%—like personal emergencies and major infections and dental surgeries—come up, it’s great to have some quick content I can put out.

Now, I only let myself do one of these Ask Angry things a month. And I don’t decide in advance when I’m going to do them. Usually, they happen because I realized I’m f$&%ed in terms of time and plans and need to lighten the load. I slot them in when I have to. And then I go through my stack of questions and pick a few out.

It might seem like I just pick questions at random. Or just pick the most recent questions in the inbox. But I actually put a lot more f$&%ing thought into these columns than that. I get a lot of questions. And there’s a lot of criteria I use to decide which ones I’m actually going to dignify with an answer. Obviously, I pick questions that’ll be interesting for me to answer, but I also try to pick ones whose answers will be interesting to read. No s$&%, right? But there’s more to it than that. I actually answer questions here and there that I don’t find particularly interesting just because I know they involve a common issue that a lot of people can identify with. I look for layered questions, too. Ones where there’s an underlying issue hidden inside a fairly simple question. And I look for…

Look, it’s not important. There’s a lot of s$&% I look for, okay? And I can’t even explain it all. I don’t even know all the things I’m looking for. I follow my gut. But I do know that I also try to choose a variety of questions. I try to mix them up. When I pick three to five questions for an Ask Angry column, I make sure they’re different enough so that each will appeal to a different kind of reader. But I also make sure the questions aren’t too different. I’m always looking for questions that have some kind of common theme or through-line. Or even questions that’ll let me include a few callbacks in the column. That way, it’ll look more like a single column than a bunch of random essays.

So, picking questions for an Ask Angry column is a lot more complicated than you probably thought. No one ever gives me enough f$&%ing credit for what I do. And I’m always picking them out on a tight deadline. And that is why I’m always asking you f$&%ers to be brief. I get a crap-ton of questions every month and I need to troll them very quickly to pick out the good ones. And lately, the questions keep getting longer and longer.

Thing is, I know that’s my f$&%ing fault. Because I keep answering long questions. I rip into the schlub who sent the long question for one paragraph, sure, but that’s just the price for my advice anyway. People are already willing to take a lot of abuse just to hear my brilliant take on their dumb-a$& pretend-elf-game problem, so what’s a little more? And today’s column isn’t helping my case. Because the schlub who sent this question—who I have to call Dingus because he’s a world-class failure at following simple instructions and didn’t give me permission to call him by name—the schlub who sent me this question driveled on for-f$&%ing-ever.

The only reason I read the damned thing is that I was stuck in a doctor’s office and I was trying to distract myself from excruciating pain and because I knew I’d have to do an Ask Angry column this week. And because of my miserable, drug-addled state, I actually felt a pang of sympathy for what I read. Because I saw what Dingus was really struggling with. And why he’d written such a long-a$& question. And I know he’s not the only GM struggling with it.

But—and this is a big-a$&, capital B, boldfaced but—But this is the end of this s$&%. I’m not making fun of long-a$& questions anymore and then answering them anyway. From now, I’m putting on the boxing gloves before I check the Ask Angry inbox. And when I see a question I can’t assess—that I can’t even take in—at a single f$&%ing glance, I’mma shout “DELETED” and slam the button.

Okay? Are we clear? This is the last f$&%ing time.

Now.

Dingus asks…

…a question that is way too f$&%ing long for me to reproduce. So I’m going to summarize. And even the summary will be too f$&%ing long.

While playing Curse of Strahd, Dingus the GM’s players pissed off some NPCs, so the NPCs hired a changeling infiltrator to sabotage the party. The changeling disguised himself as an acquaintance and played hurt. While the party’s artificer was checking on him, the changeling pickpocketed the artificer’s gun from its holster and made an excuse to leave before anyone noticed. A few minutes later, when trouble broke out, the artificer went to draw his gun and ended up with nothing instead. And the artificer’s player was pissed off. After the players worked out what had happened, the player accused Dingus the GM of not playing fair. He even accused Dingus of lying to him. That is to say the player accused the GM of purposely presenting an enemy as an ally to intentionally screw the party.

Now, the angry player was fairly inexperienced. Another more experienced player came to Dingus the GM’s defense and said that sort of s$&% happens in D&D. It’s part of the game. But the player was not assuaged. Moreover, Dingus the GM explained to me in exhaustive detail how he’d resolved the situation mechanically with Passive Insight scores and Passive Perception scores and Sleight of Hand checks and Deception checks and all that s$&%. I’m not going to go into the whole explanation here, though I will mention some relevant details later. Just trust me when I say that Dingus the GM handled the whole situation with the scrupulous fairness of a board-certified, licensed game master who knew he’d be audited and wanted to really cover his a$&.

But all of that was just the f$%&ing setup. Because Dingus’ actual question was this, which I will quote:

How should a [GM] run an interaction between PCs and a character who is an expert at deception and infiltration? Is there something I could have done more fairly?

Let me start, Dingus, by addressing your direct question directly. You should run an interaction between infiltrators and PCs pretty much exactly the way you ran it. And while I wasn’t actually at the table and have to take everything you’re saying on faith, if everything you’ve said is true, there is very little you could have done to be fairer. In fact, I hereby award you The Angry GM Award for Scrupulous Over-Fairness in Role-Playing Gaming.

Yes, I said over-fairness. I’ll get to that. But don’t worry too much. Because an award for fairness in RPGs is completely useless and you’re still screwed.

Now, let’s look at the bigger picture and the underlying issues.

First, Dingus, you made some mistakes. Some big f$&%ing mistakes. And they’re probably obvious to even my most casual readers. First, artificer. Second, gun. Third, changeling. Holy mother of f$&%. Did you just slam the entire grab-bag of Eberroni spellpunk bulls$&% into your Curse of Strahd game? Are you using f$&%ing psionics too? Did you replace the Sunsword with a lightsaber? Did the game start with the players getting off the magic choo-choo train in Barovia and sending a message back to their boss at Exeter by way of gnomish telegraph?

I mean, you don’t need my permission to run your game any wrong way you want, but I’m really tempted to just leave you twisting for all that s$&%.

But none of those mistakes are relevant to the issue at hand. Which has nothing to do with fairness incidentally. It has to do with a struggle GMs have been struggling with since GMing was invented. And your reliance on fairness is part of the struggle. And while I’m happy to help you resolve the struggle, I will not f$&%ing enable your self-confidence issues.

Look, I’ve gotten e-mails like this before. There’s a reason you—and many others—ask questions like this. The way you do. The way we do. Because, look, I’ve asked questions like this this way too. Of course, that was a long time ago. Before there was an internet. But we had magazines. And game store owners were expected to be GMing experts. But that’s neither here nor there.

The thing is, you could have just asked me “how should GMs handle interactions with deceptive NPCs fairly?” But that’s not what you wanted to hear. You wanted to hear my take on the situation itself. You wanted me to pass judgment on what you did at your game table. Which is pretty common, actually. And there’s two kinds of GMs who do that. There’s GMs who know they’re right and want to hear it from someone else. And there’s GMs who think they’re wrong and want someone to tell them how not to be wrong next time. Validation or absolution. That’s what you’re looking for. But that’s what everyone’s looking for. Even me.

Okay, I’m hyperbolically oversimplifying to make a point. But not by as much as you think and the sooner you admit it, the happier you’ll be as a GM. Here’s the problem. You’ve got some faulty assumptions built into your question. First, you’re assuming that if a player’s pissed off, you did something wrong. Second, you’re assuming that if a player’s pissed off, fairness will fix it.

Let me prove, first, that this isn’t about fairness. Because you weren’t fair. You shot past fair. You told me you used two Sleight of Hand checks to resolve the changeling’s gun theft. One to “unsnap the holster” and one to actually take the gun. Remember that? That wasn’t correct. And it wasn’t fair. Let me explain.

I’m going to put aside the fact that snap fasteners are anachronistic as hell. They weren’t invented until the 1880s and didn’t become popular until the 1900s. And retention holsters—holsters designed to keep someone from grabbing your gun and shooting you in the face with it—are way more modern than that. And they only make sense for someone who’s carrying a gun they never want to have to use. Someone—like a law enforcement officer—who expects to get into physical altercations with someone they don’t actually want to shoot dead. A vampire-hunting adventurer in a pre-modern, fantasy world of brutal violence wouldn’t wear such a holster. When that sort of person ends up in a fight, they fight to kill. And every second counts. If a gunslinger adventurer ends up in a close-quarters fight with someone and doesn’t already have their gun drawn, they f$&%ed up and they’re probably dead.

But that’s just me spouting realism nonsense.

Here’s the real reason why that’s not correct. It’s not correct because you used two die rolls to resolve one action. Sleight of Hand’s primary functions include planting things on people and taking things off people. Without their knowledge. And that’s almost always going to involve manipulating the person’s clothes and gear without them knowing. Based on your precedent, every common use of Sleight of Hand now requires two die rolls. Which makes it less likely to succeed than any other skill. You nerfed the skill. Nice job breaking it, Dingus.

Beyond that, though, there is nothing in the game’s rules that suggests you should ever use two action checks to resolve the same, single action. And, hell, it also breaks one of the cardinal rules I laid down years ago about adjudicating actions. One roll’s always enough. And I stand by that.

Here’s what I think happened inside your cranium. Consciously or otherwise. The players found the changeling playing hurt and you rolled a Deception check. It didn’t overcome the artificer’s Passive Insight so the performance fooled the artificer. When the artificer got close, you rolled the Sleight of Hand check and beat the PC’s Passive Perception score. And then you felt a twinge in your GM brain. You realized the changeling was totally going to pull it off and no one would notice. The infiltrator’s plan was going to work. And that didn’t sit right with you. So, you told your GM brain, “okay, that roll was just to, uh, unsnap the holster. This is the one that really counts.” And then you rolled another Sleight of Hand check. And you secretly hoped that second roll would fail. But it didn’t.

Sound about right? If it doesn’t, you have no way to correct the record. But if it does, you ain’t alone. Every GM in the history of gaming has done the same thing at least once. At least every GM who’s not an a$&hole. And I know for certain there’s at least one GM who is an a$&hole who’s done it too.

And I’m also pretty sure the reason you phrased your question the way you did is because you still feel guilty about the whole thing. That’s why you know you did something wrong, isn’t it?

Every GM’s had that brain twinge. Usually when the stakes are high or the outcome’s really going to f$&% the players over. Taking a PC’s primary weapon is pretty big. Even if it’s not valuable or magical. It can feel like a violation. And D&D’s a combat game. If you don’t have a weapon—or spell focus or spellbook or holy symbol—you’re naked in a hostile world.

By the way, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with taking weapons away. I’m totally okay with it. But it’s also a high-stakes thing to do and most GMs know it.

The twinges get even worse when all the resolution’s happening behind the screen. When you can’t show your work. If the gun actually got stolen, all the artificer would know is that you, the GM, made his gun disappear. He might never even figure out where it went. It’s just “your gun’s gone, surprise!”

Point is, you probably knew that it was going to be a s$&%y situation. And so you took extra steps to assure yourself that you were actually being super-duper-ultra-fair. To the point where you were being unfair in the players’ favor. Just so you could tell your players—or yourself—that you were being totally fair after they discovered the surprise screwjob.

Turns out, though, fairness isn’t the shield you hoped it would be. Your player still thinks you were unfair. And so do you.

When a player takes issue with something you’ve done, you absolutely should take a good, hard look at the situation and figure out if the player’s got a point. Think about what you did and why you did it and if you’d do it again the same way. And sometimes you’ll realize that you did do something wrong. But a lot of the time—and this is something lots of GMs have trouble recognizing—lots of times, you won’t be able to see anything you could have done differently. And if you’re totally honest with yourself, you’ll also realize you don’t feel like you should have handled it differently.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with seeking the opinion of someone smarter and wiser and more charismatic and more handsome than you. But you’ve also got to be able to own your own decisions. To say, “I feel good about the way I handled this; the player is wrong.” It looks like you’re having trouble with that from the tone of your e-mail. You’ve got a lot of doubts. You’re biased against yourself.

Of course, it’s hard to think you did right when you have an angry player. Logically, if a player feels like a victim, something wasn’t fair, right? Except people get angry for all sorts of reasons. And none of them are rational. Anger’s an emotion, not a reason. Trust me. I know anger. When people play games, they get mad sometimes. They get frustrated. In this case, your player lost. Your players did a bunch of stuff to piss off the world. The world hit them back and landed a good, solid blow. One that really hurt. And that’s what RPGs are all about. That’s how they work. Which your other player outright said in your defense.

Problem is, it sucks to lose. And it sucks hard when we deserve to lose. Losing because of random chance sucks, but it’s impersonal. Losing because you f$&$ed up? That’s all about you and how you suck. And no one likes getting called on their suckage.

It takes a measure of maturity to handle losing with grace. When I was a kid, a long f$&%ing time ago, they taught us this thing in school called sportsmanship. This was back when games had winners and losers. Kids were taught—in f$&%ing kindergarten, no less—to handle both winning and losing without being a$&holes about it. When you won, you acted with humility and compassion for the losers because losing sucks and there’s no need to rub it in. And when you lost, you weren’t a whiny, bitter little b$&% about it. You accepted you’d earned the loss and tried to do better next time.

I’m guessing your player got mad because he lost. I can’t prove it. I don’t have psionic powers. But I’m guessing that’s what happened. And I’m basing that on the fact that he got mad at you. He blamed you for screwing him. He didn’t blame the situation, he didn’t blame the dice, he blamed you. He personalized it. And that’s one of the major components of anger. To get truly angry, it’s not enough to get hurt. You have to feel like the hurt was wrong or unjust and that it was done deliberately or knowingly.

That’s why I emphasized the player’s specific accusations against you. He wasn’t just annoyed by a bad or unfair situation, he blamed you. He said you’d deliberately misled him so that his character would be screwed. That’s a very serious accusation. The player’s accusing you of cheating. And of acting with malice. He’s not just saying you resolved the situation unfairly, he’s saying you set out to screw him and used your position as a GM to do so.

Believe it or not, I’m actually capable of sympathy. I wouldn’t be answering your giant-a$&, overlong e-mail if I didn’t sympathize with you. And I wouldn’t have said that losing a primary weapon is a painful, scary violation if I was incapable of seeing things from a player’s point of view. But if a player leveled those accusations at me, the game would have stopped dead right there and we would have gone off—the player and I—to have a private conversation. And the topic of said conversation would have been “will the player ever play at my table again?”

Now, I know I’m going to catch some flak for that s$&%. People lose their f$&%ing minds whenever I suggest these sorts of no-nonsense, my-way-or-the-highway positions. I’m not making that statement lightly. It’s not about kicking out a player for disagreeing with you. It’s not about kicking out a player at all. It’s about the fact that the player-GM relationship is broken and if it can’t be fixed, it can’t continue.

Look, maybe your player really believes what he said. Maybe he wasn’t just lashing out in anger. Maybe he really thinks you set out to screw him and broke the rules to do so. And he might even have some good reasons to think that. Reasons you could talk about like adults. But, as long as the player believes that s$&%, he doesn’t trust you to referee the game fairly. And until he trusts you again, everything that goes against the player is going to reinforce his belief that you’re out to f$&% him over. The game can’t go on like that.

But it’s possible that the player doesn’t actually really think what he said was true. Again, I know anger. And when you get angry, the classic response is to attack whatever’s making you angry. He might have been lashing out because things didn’t go his way. Maybe he had a bad day. Or maybe he’s a sore loser. Maybe he missed sportsmanship day in school. But now you’ve got a bomb sitting at your table. Someone who’s shown they’re willing to explode whenever something goes wrong. The game can’t go on like that.

See why I said the Angry GM Award for Scrupulous Fairness in Gaming doesn’t matter? Because this ain’t about fairness. There’s something else going on here. There’s always something else going on. Because being a GM isn’t just about running games, it’s also about managing human beings. And human emotions. Then again, everything we do with other human beings is about managing human emotions. Our own and other peoples’.

You’re the de facto leader of a group of irrational and emotional human beings—and that includes you—who’ve decided to partake of a particular group activity in the hopes of having a collective good time. When a problem arises between the irrational and emotional human beings, no one can have a good time until it’s resolved. And, as the de facto leader, the buck stops with you.

You’ve got a player who either doesn’t trust you as a referee or who throws tantrums when he loses. Or who has some other problem that manifests itself as angry outbursts and unfair accusations. That’s the problem you’ve got to solve. And I can’t tell you how to solve it. All I can tell you is “this is the sucky part of being a GM.” Oh, and I can tell you not to ignore this. It’s very serious.

The only thing you can do is sit down with the player and try to hash it out. And if you can’t hash it out, you may have to continue without the player. Or give up your GMing screen. Or you can ignore it until it destroys the game for everyone.

The fairness issue is secondary. And maybe it really is an issue. Maybe the guy really does have the wrong idea about D&D. Or he thinks you do. If he really feels wronged, that’s something you can resolve. But only after you get your own head on straight enough to believe you handled things right. Start by looking yourself in the mirror and telling yourself that you handled things the best way you could have. That you wouldn’t do anything different. Unless, of course, there’s something you would change.

GMs struggle with this s$&% a lot. And when interpersonal issues arise, most GMs are like “well, I didn’t sign up for this s$&%!” Because no one ever talks about this side of GMing. Which is why GMs think if they just write good adventures and run them fairly, they’re doing everything right and everyone will be happy. That’s just not the way it is.

Everyone’s got different values and priorities and perspectives. Everyone wants different things out of their games. And everyone’s an irrational, emotional, unreasonable mess. The GM’s job is to assemble a group of people who can have fun gaming together despite all of that crap. And despite being irrational, emotional, unreasonable messes themselves. Sometimes, that job entails fixing your players enough so that everyone can game happily together. Sometimes, it involves replacing intolerably broken players with players who are broken in more tolerable ways. And if you don’t like that part of the job, well, you quit running games. Because it’ll always fall to you.

Were you fair? Yeah. Probably. I think so. Congratulations on the award. But you’ve still got an angry player who doesn’t trust you. And you really need to fix that.

One way or another.