I’ve long felt–usually every time I heard a GM complain about their “problem” players–that GMs often contribute to their own problems through how they reward or punish player actions or the unspoken assumptions they put into their game world. Here are two related articles from a few years back:

Expectations, Conditioning and Your Game: Examples

Expectations, Conditioning and Your Game: Rules of Thumb

Ramza:
I apologize if I offended you with my comments. I was not trying to belittle your insight or imply that you were plagiarizing. As Martin correctly theorized, I was just trying to point out a part of your post that A) I had seen covered before, and B) agreed with as a point important enough to bear repeating.

I believe the two posts he’s thinking of are Getting Player Feedback and The Loved, Blah, Hated List, a GMing Tool. Any overlap I see there is fruitful, so no worries, Ramza. Your post stands just fine on its own, and it’s excellent.

Why so critical? Especially given the subsequent lack of links pointing out where I cribbed the post from. I will respond as dispassionately as possible.

The concept quoted as being derivative was not the main point of my post in any event. Most importantly, the method of analysis is different from the typical solicitation of feedback, such as a list of ‘hits and misses’ from each player. The main point of my post is a behavioral analysis. Discussing observations of behavior, even when one’s behavior is at issue, is not the same as self reporting. Thanks VV for mentioning the behavioral aspect of the post.

This is, in no way, meant to diminish the power of self reporting; only to distinguish from the behavioral analysis. The suggested ‘hits and misses’ tool is a good one and I mention it only in response to the first comment.

This guest posting thing is hard on the ego!

Later.

This concept has been covered here and in many other GM-advice columns. Again I am lazy with the linkage, but I recall good notes here at TT about soliciting feedback from your players. One of my favorite suggestions along these lines is to take a few minutes at the end of each session and get from each player a list of “hits” (stuff they liked) and “misses” (stuff they didn’t like).

If you’re really good at task-juggling and self-assessment, you might even be able to capture this kind of information during play, without prompting the players. Body language and tone often say more than words, and a perceptive GM will know when a player is jonesing or bumming.