Posted by Sarah Hemenway in Revision and Clarification to the GMT Process

Posted by Lieutenant Commander Sam Pennington (Assistant Game Master Director / Junior Gamemaster) in Revision and Clarification to the GMT Process

I want to focus on the suggestion below because it’s somewhat interesting.

While I favour the side of keeping previous test scores and recommendations, some good points have been made for making the GMT gather new ones. If we are to make the GMT gather new materials, I propose the following, something of a compromise. The exam score remains in place as it is unlikely to change in any meaningful way, each person who wrote a recommendation is contacted and asked if their recommendation stays or is revoked. If any recommendation is revoked, it must be replaced.

-Sam

Yeah, I really don’t see any point to having people retake the exam and that was never intended. My suggestion would be that the recommendations remain as long as they continue to meet the criteria at the point when the person would like to start their sim (so, the person has RPed at least one month out of the last three with the recommender). That way, you don’t end up with someone coming back six years later and trying to start their GMT sim using recommendations from people who may not even be in the club any longer.

(Either idea will require some wording changes in OGRE/M#11 to clarify when a person is a “Prospective Gamemaster” vs. “Gamemaster Trainee”.)

Sarah

So… just speaking as a CO who has taken on a lot of GMTs, I think that there are a lot of skills or interests people don’t realize going into the process are necessary, and if there is a deficiency of some sort in one of those areas, it isn’t always discovered by the GMT process until they actually start running a sim with a real crew. People who write the recommendations can’t be expected know these sorts of things in advance of the process, because most of their observations evaluate how the candidate performs as as an individual contributor who is just writing a character. Some examples of things I’ve seen before come up during GMTs that wouldn’t have been identifiable include:

• Candidate not knowing that they don’t actually like GMing because they never had a chance to learn from experience that they don’t like it
• Candidate not really being interested in GMing generally, but only wanting a license to do something very specific (e.g. CO/GM their own ship)
• Candidate may be more interested in creating a sim that is avant garde than they are in creating a sim the crew can enjoy being a part of
• Candidate not understanding how to function as part of the command team
• A personality conflict of some sort between the candidate and one or more other people

Usually these sorts of things get ironed out during the training sim, but sometimes they don’t, and occasionally it leads to things ending early whether or not it’s technically called a “failure”. I think if an issue like this is identified during the first training sim, and is identified as the reason for an “actual failure,” (e.g. not just someone going AWOL or quitting early) then it’s really important to know why the second try is going to be different from the first. So, I think rather than making the person just get two more recommendations about how they are as a writer, I think it would be more valuable if they discuss why whatever issue that previously caused a failure isn’t going to lead to another failure of the same type. I know that might be really hard to do, because it can be very hard to discuss some of these things in something that’s going to be public. But, asking a CO to take on a GMT is already asking them to take on additional risks to their ships; asking them to take someone who failed before is even riskier, so I think they’re entitled to have some answer up front why a second try isn’t going to be a problem.

– Joe