Players, pipe up! Why being a high maintenance player is a good thing

I think it would be a good thing if more players were high maintenance players. I'm a high maintenance player. What does that mean? Well, there's something to be said for thinking of being high maintenance as engaging with the story outside of "office hours", i.e.: sending reams of character backstory, fanfiction etc to the GM. If my players are that engaged, I regard it as a huge bonus, and a vote of confidence. But that's not what I mean here.

What I mean is this: I pipe up and talk to my GM about things that don't work for me or that I don't like. Obviously I do this out of session time, not at the table. But I frequently take a while to get my thoughts in order and compose a message explaining what rubbed me the wrong way and why. Bonus points if it comes with a list of potential fixes or other helpful suggestions.

Is this a slightly overbearing way of letting your GM know about your preferences? Sure. It helps if you're good friends, or at least have a good rapport with your GM, but I'm self-describing as high maintenance - I know it for what it is. So why is it a good thing? How do I defend it?

Well for starters, almost every GM has had the following experience: You get to the end of a session and ask if everything was okay, if anyone would prefer to go faster or slower, more or less combat, or some variation, and you're met with a round of "Nope, it was fine." Doesn't sound too bad on the surface - everyone says the session was fine. But one of two things could be happening here. Either everyone actually is fine with how things are going (quite likely) and there's nothing you could do to meet their preferences better (extraordinarily unlikely), or people have issues that they're not voicing.

That last possibility is the kicker. If that's the case, my GM mind says, then every week I risk putting people through an experience that they dislike. That possibility, paranoid though it may be, kills creativity by throwing the spotlight on the GM as the creator of the experience everyone's going through. For one thing, that's a warped perception of the game's core dynamic - there is no experience until the players decide to interact with the GM's prep, otherwise you're running a railroad. But the main issue is that I as a GM now have to evaluate everything I prepare to check if the players will secretly hate it without knowing what their preferences are. And that can only lead to a paranoia that stifles creativity in prep time, because I'm afraid to put anything down that might not be to people's tastes. In the worst cases this can ruin ideas for me that I previously found exciting and inspiring, by associating them with this crippling mental block. How, oh how can this be avoided?

It's actually fairly simple: A social contract. If I solicit feedback - if I the GM ask you if there's anything you want raising - you have to raise it (potentially in a message after everyone's gone home, rather than at the table). And if you don't, therefore, I can tread all over that preference, which you're keeping to yourself, with a clean conscience. Specifically adhering to this contract is the only way I can absolve myself of responsibility for unknown player hangups to the point where I can start to be creative with game prep, and therefore start to enjoy it. And it's adhering to this contract that makes me such a high maintenance player.

There's a huge problem here. Sometimes players don't know their preferences. I've played with a few players recently who are new to ttrpgs, and all my players have been introduced to new systems they hadn't played before. These people lack a frame of reference for what they like and don't like, and how the game could be different. Then there's the category of people who are just too laid back about the whole thing to care about fine-tuning the experience. None of these players is secretly harbouring a gnawing grudge against a particular npc they hate, or the balance of combat and narrative, or the setting. But the game could, nevertheless, be made more enjoyable for them - this is what I meant above when I said it was really unlikely that there was nothing about their experience that could be improved. And I take very seriously the responsibility of trying to make the game the most fun for the most players possible when I'm GMing. 

So I've just had to make my peace with the newbies and the people who play unreflectively. It would be counterproductive to their fun, the end goal, to try to force them to overanalyse the game, so I rest content with the fact that they come back each week and seem to have a good time.

But in order to hold to this contract, I have to uphold it when I'm on the other end. That is, I have to give feedback as best I can when I'm a player, partly so my GM doesn't suffer from the paranoia state I described above, but partly just to keep my conscience clear. That's not as moralistic as it sounds; there's a somewhat cynical end goal, namely allowing myself to be creative and have fun when I prep and run my own games. If I don't act in good faith, in the way that I want my players to act, by honouring the contract, then I won't have the clear conscience when I come to prep/run my own games that allows me to act as though any preferences I haven't been told about don't exist, thus allowing me to be creative, because I myself will have unvoiced preferences. You can't reassure yourself that unvoiced preferences are to be treated as a nonentity if you yourself are harbouring them about another game. You need parity to uphold that principle, and exceptionalism kills parity.

It's all psychological, see?

As a caveat, I will say that if a GM ever asks players not to give feedback, or to stop giving feedback, then I will of course do so. The end goal here is to help all GMs concerned feel secure enough in the game they're running to have fun running it - that GM's method is obviously different if feedback is what is making them feel insecure etc. in the first place. They've exempted themselves from the contract, and therefore I don't risk feeding into my own paranoia by keeping schtum. Also, I'll almost always wait for feedback to be asked for, rather than giving it unsolicited - there is a time and a place for unsolicited feedback, but it's not the majority of cases I feel. Having said all that, I've never had a GM specifically ask not to receive feedback, and most GMs solicit it at some point, with many (myself included, obviously) doing so as a matter of course.

Which is hardly surprising, since wanting to be a good GM means wanting to home in on what your players want. Which is not to say that you yourself have to sacrifice your own fun on the altar of theirs - what I've been trying to get at is that assuring their fun might in fact be a necessary condition for having your own. Which is why high maintenance players are actually highly valuable.