Spouses hating your hobby 2: The Nightmare gets worse

The previous article titled “When Spouses hated your hobby” received a lot of fan mail in regard to the article. Now, I had planned to move on to another issue, but what should have been a one-time problem, that the previous article dealt with, blew up into a situation which got worse by leaps and bounds. In this situation, I entered into a power struggle between another player’s spouse and myself. The previous article did not contain the type of advice needed to deal with such a hostile altercation. Things finally turned out OK, but only after a lot of effort on the part of my friend and me. Let me fill you in: for six years now, I have been running a Shadowrun game with three separate campaigns. About a year ago I brought in some new players and their friends. All was good for the most part, for the better part of a year and a half, but finally his wife decided I was the antichrist, the sum of all evils and the focal point for all of the troubles in their marriage. Consequently, he was told to form his own group. Unfortunately, she decided that the new group should be created by destroying mine and reforming it. What began as a personal and private venting of GMing frustration, became twisted and rearranged into a vicious lie, and nearly cost me my group, after running around like a chicken with my head cut off in an effort to reassure my players. The struggle became e-mail harassment. The purpose of this harassment was to continually remind myself of what a poor GM I was, and that everything that went wrong between me and my group was all my fault. While I freely admit most of you won’t come across this level of gaming problems, you might want to know the best way to handle something as ridiculous as this. This is where this becomes an article dedicated to helping you, the reader, to deal with this level of gaming strife.

First, don’t stoop to your enemy’s level. Always maintain a higher degree of honor and integrity. Your enemy wants to make you degrade yourself and your personality to make it easier to close in for a final strike—a killing blow if you will. Be on guard and remember not to take this step. Remember you’re not causing this, and they are harassing you. Treat it as such. What they are trying to do is make your hobby so frustrating that you’ll quit it. Either that, or they will want to turn people that you’ve considered friends against you by any means possible. Secondly, never say or write anything that can be used against you, because it will. Record all e-mail conversations and phone calls when possible. Make sure you don’t vent in front of your enemy once you know who they are. Your words will be taken and used against you, even if you said something such as Mr. A & Mr. B are a couple of morons not capable of an original thought.

Whether you said it or not quickly becomes the issue. Remember that when you say anything it can be twisted to suit your enemy’s needs. What you said will come back to haunt you and will not even sound close to what you originally said. Don’t let a moment of venting steam become a weapon to be used against you. Try to remember what you said so you can confirm or deny it. If you did indeed say something, make sure people know you were upset and just blowing off steam. When you haven’t said anything, respond quickly, and with a certain amount of zeal, defend the truth and make sure your people know what really happened. Always remember that this is harassment and to treat it as such. As a GM, you take a good portion of your free time to work out scenarios for the group to go through. The players, for the most part, run through your little universe without a care and have fun. They are not going to like everything, but for the most part things will run smoothly. If a speed bump of this magnitude occurs, remember to treat it for what it is—harassment. For those husbands/wives/etc, who read this article and say, “Hey, this has happened to me!”, you now know what to do. Hopefully, the rest can take the advice from what many people have called a soap opera, and use it to prevent the same from happening. If you’re one of the spouses who do this, remember your significant other could be at a bar drinking themselves silly. They could be running around to get away from this because they can’t spend any time with their friends and gaming buddies. Be glad you know where they are and what they’re doing. Would you rather they spend their time and money on books or beer and pretzels?