The GM's favourite

Have you ever guested in somebody else's long-running campaign? If so you might have come across a referee who indulges one player over the rest of the table. It doesn't occur in every gaming group, and if it happens in your own regular sessions you probably haven't noticed it. But here are some warning signs...

When you were setting up your campaign, did a player come to you with a shopping list of special off-the-book character buffs? "Can I have immunity to everything? 5 points would be a reasonable cost, wouldn't it?" If you granted those, then face it: that player is your teacher's pet.

It isn't always that overt. If the referee and one of the players are particularly close friends, their imaginations are likely to be in sync. Jamie and I spent our teen years steeped in the same science fantasy classics, so if I'm working up a trope in a Tekumel campaign (Tekumel drawing freely on the likes of Robert E Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and Jack Vance) then he's likely to be ahead of the pack in catching on.

There's also the case of the player who is aware of the kind of thing his or her referee likes and so plays up to it. "I swing on the chandelier, soar nimbly across the shoulders of the guards and somersault to land in a crouch before the princess." If the referee applauds ("Oh, beautifully done!") when they'd ask anyone else for a dice roll then the player is probably a favourite who knows the referee's fondness for swashbucklers. A newcomer to the group, unaware of the codes that unlock referee approval, would have to work that much harder.

Some games explicitly say the referee should be a fan of the player-characters, but the snag is that any partiality will come to be abused. It's like working for a company where the boss's sons and daughters have all the key positions. You know they weren't appointed on merit, even if the good of the business was what the boss had in mind at the start. That's why I believe in comprehensive rules, not loose interpretations at the whim of the referee. The point is not to gum up the flow of the game. You hope all those rules will rarely, if ever, be needed. But if it comes to it, the final court of appeal is not to an individual but to the rulebook.

Of all the causes of one player hogging the spotlight, the hardest to avoid is when that player is simply giving better value than the rest. Every group has its star players and its supporting characters. Often the players themselves prefer it that way. Some people are shy or naturally cautious; others are in like Flynn. As the referee you're always alert to moments when the pace of a session might be flagging, and a player who peps it up by improvising brilliantly in character is going to grab more of your attention. Writers describe the same phenomenon: "The character took over the book!"

I don't think the solution is to bake everyone's fifteen minutes into the rules. That just forces the game to follow the patterns of a bad TV show: "So I can't shoot this guy, despite being MI6's top assassin, because I already had a couple of highlight moments earlier in the session..?" But you do need to monitor who is demanding the lion's share of your attention, and whether the quieter players are happy about that. If they're not, make sure there are opportunities for them to shine too. Otherwise the first sign of that gathering resentment might be when they stop turning up to the game.