Society for Aesthetic Deletions

Oh, these are good ones. Ginger took one that I'd use (names), so I'll have to work to come up with others.

It's not the GM's game, it's everyone's.

Back when I started gaming with Lou (well before he was The Husband), he ran an Amber game wherein my character and another friend's character were children of the Bad Guy, pretending to be good little Amberites (this game had, up until it was all revealed, a rather party-oriented feel). My character fell in love with another PC, and the player of the PC and I would talk, both in and out of game.

When this player had an issue with the game, I'd encourage him to tell Lou. Lou was very open to hearing from his players, always willing to talk through the issues (comes from that psychology background, amongst other things, methinks). He'd talk to me about the problem, and I'd encourage him to talk to Lou, and he'd respond the same way, every time.

Oh no, it's his game, he can do what he wants.

This frustrated both me and Lou, because I would tell him that the player had an issue, (and sometimes what the issue was), but that the player was hesitant to talk to him. Lou didn't feel he could go to the player and talk about it - it was the player's responsibility to bring up issues, not for me to do it. It shouldn't come through a third party.

This lead to my primary rule in my game. I wasn't going to put up with this childish stuff (and while said player was not in my game, others were who often bitched to other players and not to me, so I was laying it all out on the table in advance) in my game.

The rule's worked out pretty well so far.

Evil is relative.

This one is mainly for D&D games, specifically for alignments. Everyone knows evil is relative in Amber (heh).

I don't like alignments. I understand their purpose in D&D terms, but I would feel much better without them. I argued against them in the game world Lou and I created, but with the number of spells and abilities that are good/evil related, it would lose a goor portion of its feell, its flavor, if it was without alignments.

That said, we've been very free and loose with them in the game. So much so that in the original incarnation of the game (using 2nd Edition rules), our group, who were all some variant of good, and many lawful good (including my paladin), made a deal with Asmodeus. By his taking us from one part of the world to another, we would be doing each other a favor. The Hells were getting crowded, it seemed, because Neutrality had risen up and was killing off good and evil alike, and he didn't want such an influx to cause a big turf war. If we accepted his help and went to stop the big Neutral guy from causing an earthquake that would likely kill thousands, if not millions more, then he'd be more than compensated.

We took the deal. We stopped the earthquake, and saved many lives. Would this have worked if we had played alignments as written? Not on your frelling life. But evil is relative ... and if by making a deal with a nasty you can save millions of good people in the process - sometimes, you have to do it. For the greater good.

Go Strider!/He's going to Strider it!

Okay, this one is very our-group-specific in name, but in theory it's something I'll bet everyone has experienced.

You know, that moment when the GM's NPC steps forward and kills the bad guy with one great hit, after the rest of the PCs have been hitting on him for rounds and doing a small amount of damage.

The name in our group comes from an NPC one GM had in his game, named Strider. And Strider exhibited this behavior often. And it became an in-joke for other games when the NPC was going to hit the creature, even if it was down to its last few hit points, to say that he/she "Strider'd" it.

Or when the NPC steps up to fight, perhaps even after a few good whiffs where he's not hitting the thing, to nail it in one shot. That's when the call of "Go Strider!" comes into play.

This isn't always derogatory, even though it started out that way in the beginning for that specific GM. We joke about it now more than use it as a cry of "foul!" But I think a lot of that has to do with the NPC. At home, we use a term of "GM's NPC" - that one NPC that hangs with the group and is essentially an equal, and definitely not the GM's voice in the party. He or she can screw up just as much as the other PCs, but also allows the GM to perhaps be the voice of common sense when the party so desperately needs one. Even if they don't listen to it.

Oops, off topic. Well, that should do it!