Musings of a Happy Game Master

It is a happy moment when the players in your role playing universe transcend the statistics on their character sheets and start actually playing the personality of their characters. And there is a greater satisfaction to the GM when the same players elevate to thinking, acting, and reacting as their characters would. Meta-gaming is so simple to do, that a GM often finds it hard to police with any consistency without detracting from the easy flow of dialogs that make up a good gaming session. The best GM's in my opinion should spend about 10% of the time as rules arbiters and the rest as storytellers. It's not an easy feat.
 But once the GM sees players embracing the roles they have chosen to play, there is a sense of success. The story has gone from a passive one-way storytelling event to an active collaborative experience.
 These experiences are highlighted by moments when gamers prove their commitment to character even over the safer route - when a meta-gaming solution stares them right in the face and says, "hey, this would really be a simpler route for everyone..." and the players choose to act their roles despite the consequences.

 Moments like this are probably rarer in gaming than they should be, but when they happen, I for one feel a sense of accomplishment, not only for myself, as a creator of a world that people feel comfortable in, but for the gaming community as a whole.

Many people play in games where the content is almost exclusively geared toward the players rather than the roles they are supposed to play, and for me, it seems a betrayal to the name of "role playing" to even consider those people in the same category.

I have to give serious kudos to my players for giving me moments of pause, and for their ability to take total strangers on a piece of paper and turn them into memorable characters in a grand work of shared fantasy.

Thanks for moments like this. It really makes all the time you don't see me putting into campaign material (some of which you will never see, or skirt through in moments) well worth it.