In further financial news

This is the latest BBC story on the fun and games going on in the international stock markets at the moment.

Central banks in several countries have been intervening in the money markets to prevent a continuing problem with US housing loans turning into a global financial crisis.

Central banks in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines intervened to sell dollars to support their currencies.

The European Central Bank injected a record $130.6bn (£64.6bn) into Europe's money markets to prevent a financial system seizure.

The worry is that should banks make losses, it would hurt their earnings and their profitability, making them less willing to fund the takeovers and buyouts that have underpinned much of the stock markets' recent gains.

And now the funny bit:

The declines in the US markets came despite attempts by President George W Bush to calm market fears.

GM Mistakes I have made

There are many, many mistakes that a GM can make. I should know, I've made all of them. They can give players too little to do, or railroad them, or give them clues that the players will never get in a million years (even though their characters would get them in seconds), and a hundred other things that will kill the fun stone dead.

However the next session can be better, the GM can learn, and things can always improve. Individual sessions can always be recovered from - what you have to worry about are GM mistakes that will kill a whole campaign.

And the biggest of these, in my experience, is loss of faith in the game world and its stories. Over here theferrett says "There's a bond of trust in telling a story - namely, that the author knows what will happen." and while RPGs aren't a truly linear form of narrative, this still holds true.

I've seen several games go from being fun to slowly losing their sense of purpose and fun because it became obvious to the players that the GM was just making things up as they went along - in some cases because the GM quite proudly told them. It didn't kill them dead - but there was a slow loss of meaning to the game, it had gone from something where the players were investigating a world and trying to solve a plot/thwart a disaster/deal with a terrible villain to being an exercise in pointlessness. After all, if anything can happen then why do anything at all?

Of course, the GM generally _is_ making up a fair bit of things as they go along - but without a core of cohesiveness, a feeling that the world you're gaming in _matters_, the connection to something that while completely real is still very real on the inside, well, it just doesn't mean anything any more.

Quentin Tarantino, when talking about Kill Bill, said that he wasn't giving us lots of details about the supporting cast - but it was important that _he_ know their backgrounds, and that we know that he knew. The illusion has to be maintained - the disbelief has to be suspended. And this is something that gets harder over time as it is, drawing attention to it will stick a dagger through its back. It might crawl on for a while, leaking blood everywhere, but it won't make it far.