In my experience, do-overs aren’t all that common in RPGs. Most groups I’ve gamed with (on both sides of the screen) prefer to compensate for mistakes (“Okay, since I boosted the minotaur’s AC, you get double XP”) or treat them as water under the bridge.
One of the terrible Diablo-to-D&D products, however, took things several steps further — players could declare that they were saving the game at any point, and return to that point later on. I don’t see that working terribly well in most RPGs, but it was a decent idea for that particular game.
So with the two extremes being “no do-overs, ever” and “save at will,” what has your experience been? Does your group fall closer to one end of that spectrum than the other, or do you rewind on a case-by-case basis?
We’re very close to no do overs ever. The sole exception would be accidentally killing PCs, and even that is usually not fixed. If the GM overlooks something that would have kept his creature up, that’s usually ignored– if we meet the monster again, it’ll fight with its neglected powers, but a fight that’s over is over.
There was a bad experience with a rewind that persuaded us that it’s usually a bad idea. (If you’re curious, I’ll explain later in the thread.)
I’m curious. We are also close to no do overs ever, with the same exception… the accidental death of a PC do to a rules oversight that would have saved him/her.
I’ve never been fond of reversing game events and only do it when someone has misunderstood what was actually occuring in the game in a big way. I might have a creature attack an invisible character, for instance, when it simply shouldn’t have happened. This is okay to reverse.
When other unpleasant things happen simply through minor neglect, such as forgetting a monster’s special abilities, I just silently kick myself, adjust the event’s outcome as appropriate (and corresponding XP), and live with it.
The Diablo approach strikes me as something which will be quite disruptive. First, it eliminates consequences for everything. Second, it makes the GM’s job a living nightmare as players can always be privy to the big bad’s strategy in ‘advance,’ can test all actions to measure their outcomes, etc. I don’t see how permitting a lot of do-overs could work in any roleplaying game.
Killing player characters is perhaps the most tempting area in which to reverse time, but even here I find it uncomfortable. Some strict GMs maintain player deaths, arguing that the threat of death keeps players smart. This might be true, but it’s a rare game that completely removes those odd twists of fate that get characters killed in unenjoyable ways.
The problem with holding to even these worst of outcomes is that roleplaying games are ultimately about telling a story as a way of having fun. What if Frodo botched a climb check when passing through Moria and tumbled down to the bottom of the caverns, dying and losing the ring? What kind of fun is that?
I’m coming quite close to implementing a house rule in my games that removes these random dangers. While it might vary by system, it would basically be this: if reduced to zero/negative health/HP/wounds, you are “dying” for about a minute. If no on can get to you in that time, you may pass on.
It’s annoying enough as a player to have the dice turn against you and put your character out of an entire encounter, so I don’t see it being fun to let the dice randomly take your character out of the game.
We’re doing a “do-over”, or more like a “back-up” right now in the True20 one-shot I’m running.
I have five players where two are more action-oriented and two are more social interaction oriented. Because it’s a one shot adventure, I pre-made the characters and the players picked when the started. Both of the action-oriented picked two social skill characters and were “all-thumbs” playing them.
Add on top of this one of the social players decided that his character would work against the other players to make things more intersting. Everything started to implode around the third hour and you could see the action-oriented players were not having a good time.
Post-game analysis showed what the problem was, and I suggested to the players that when we meet next week, we changing around the characters. The two action characters will play musketeers and two social characters play spies.
Since it’s a one-shot adventure (to learn the rules and try something different) no one has too much invested in character creation or development. I think that we’ll make it to the conclusion because feedback on the system was positive.
P.S. knowing my players we would never do a “do-over” in a long running campaign. Dead is dead.
“The problem with holding to even these worst of outcomes is that roleplaying games are ultimately about telling a story as a way of having fun. What if Frodo botched a climb check when passing through Moria and tumbled down to the bottom of the caverns, dying and losing the ring? What kind of fun is that?”
Kinda like the proponents of doing all their rolls in the open for the “tension” that it brings to the game?
I wonder if there’s a correlation between the necessity to do “do-overs” and GMs who consider fudging die rolls a bad thing?
I’d rather fudge one roll behind a screen to keep a dramatic and tense moment in the story moving forward than randomly killing a PC and going, “Whoops…do over!”
I don’t believe in do-overs. I DO believe in ret-conning, but in my mind that’s different.
Do-overs are actually re-winding events and making everyone role-play through them again. First off all, it’s a pain in the ass, second of all, it’s rarely fun to do the same thing over and over.
Ret-cons are just saying: “yeah, that’s how it went down” and moving on. I usually only ret-con when I make a bad call and it’s something small. Oops! Yeah, that card you found was black, not red. Oops! I didn’t allot enough time for your phone call to your dad right now. we’ll run through it later and ret-con it in.
I actually had an incident lately where, checking the rules, a character had extra-crispied himself with a lightning ball he dropped. I explained the rules error he had made and the rest of the group eagerly said “Ooooh! Is he dead then!” I told them no way was I ret-conning something that big. He survived miraculously, and we’d know for next time.
Interesting, because I’ve found explicit do-overs to be a perfect way to avoid fudge on a TPK or near TPK. I’m not sure I’d go so far as to allow a do-over for just any situation, but the whole social contract that has fueled those do-overs totally limits it. The do-over doesn’t happen without group consensus.
I also regularly retcon for serious mistakes. I try and limit the scope of the retcon. Certainly if a big good results in a dead PC, I would retcon the PC alive. But I wouldn’t tend to handle it as a do-over unless the oops is caught immediately, so, for example, if a player discovers he actually made a saving throw, I might re-roll something (perhaps a secondary effect that depended on how much damage was done).
It’s interesting to look at how the two near TPKs I’ve had recently worked out.
The first was in Arcana Evolved where I tossed a Tendriculous (CR 6) at a the party (also 6th level). They were ripped to pieces, even after burning several hero points. After the fight, we talked it over a bit, and as a group we concluded that the Tendriculous is NOT a CR 6 creature (perhaps I should have been clued in by it’s name). In fact, one player pointed out how it’s WAY nastier than another nasty CR 6 swallower, the Remorhaz. We didn’t bother re-playing the encounter (it was just a random encounter anyway).
The second was in Cold Iron. I sort of pressured the players to continue into the next cave without resting. The cave was filled with a bunch of skeletons (which I keep forgetting how hard they are for low level PCs to kill – you HAVE to score a crit to do any damage to them, you can’t wear them down). The encounter turned out horribly, and a player asked for it to be a bad dream. We all agreed, and I asked if they wanted to do it over after a proper rest (and with a better idea of what skeletons were like), or if they just wanted to flush the encounter down the sewer. They chose a do-over, and we ran the combat a second time, with rested up PCs this time.
For mistakes in application of the rules, I constantly weigh the effects of rewinding. One thing I regularly do is allow people (PC or NPC) to take actions when I accidentally skipped their turn. Sometimes they will just get an extra turn at the point of recognition, other times, I’ll try and make an approximation of the conditions (obviously the 2nd if a character lost a turn and is now incapacitated). Of course if on round 5 you say, “Wait, you skipped my turn back on round 1!” I probably won’t rewind (though perhaps I might let you take an extra non-disruptive action, like casting a buff spell or something).
Frank
I generally try to avoid do-overs by explaining anything that shouldn’t have been in game.
If it’s small like someone forgot to mention they had knowledge of something during a social interaction I let it go “You didn’t bring it up in the conversation, why didn’t YOU do that?”
If it’s big like, oh yeah basilisks have stone vision . . . then I try to find some reason why it wasn’t used. Explain it away instead of undoing it. Maybe the warriors first hit damaged something vital, maybe the basilisk was sick and ala spiderman they lose their powers when their sick.
In general I find do-over a not great thing. Sometimes I’ll use them if I absolutely have to. I tend to go by the philosophy of I’m running the game I get to play with phsyics. Sure the lightning ball should have crisped the guy, but we’ll call it a lucky escape and make it not so bad.
God may not play dice with the universe, but GM’s do.
ScottM, I’d love to hear the story about the experience. I’m always up for hearing a good story.
“I wonder if there’s a correlation between the necessity to do “do-overs†and GMs who consider fudging die rolls a bad thing?”
No, but there is probably a high correlation between the necessity to do “do-overs” and GMs who combine hardcore, no fudge with no concept of how to run without fudge. However, mostly it is a preference thing. Fudge is a safety net. Do-overs are a safety net. Not everyone needs or prefers the same net, or the same amount of net. Some people are just more snarky about it than others, apparently. 😀
Me, I don’t give mulligans, or “do-overs”. I will retcon to fix a gross injustice. People aren’t perfect, not even GMs. Sometimes a rule mistake is flat out nothing but a rule mistake. I’d prefer to handle GM/player imperfection of this nature OOC, since it has nothing to do with the characters as living creatures in the fictional game world. Heck, I’ll even do “reality shifts” to accommodate fixes in rules mid campaign, if the players think it is really necessary. No need to justify that in campaign, or you end up with some crazy nonsense like the D&D 2E Forgotten Realms “Time of Troubles”. If you try to fix everything in-game, that’s where you are headed. You might skillfully manage to avoid getting there, but you are pointed in that direction.
ScottM, that so reminds me of that scene in the original “The Gamers” movie where the thief keeps trying different things to get around getting killed. 😀
Scott – that’s an interesting situation. I’m of several minds:
1. PCs of absent players will only die if the whole party dies (or at least many of the party).
2. PCs of absent players, if they allow their character to be run, have to live with whatever.
3. I would seriously consider in retconning something like this that all it can change is the fate of the PC of the absent player, or at least nothing worse can happen to the other PCs.
That scene from The Gamers was definitely a classic example of how NOT to handle retconning. If our redo of the Cold Iron skeleton combat had still gone poorly, I would have either let the TPK stand, or we would have gone for a total “bad dream” bit and moved on.
Frank
“I’d rather fudge one roll behind a screen to keep a dramatic and tense moment in the story moving forward than randomly killing a PC and going, ‘Whoops…do over!'”
I don’t know that this is necessarily always the choice that lies before a game master: a lame death or good drama. There are two different things here. The first is whether it’s okay to fudge rolls to preserve a good game flow. The second is whether it’s okay to reverse an undesirable outcome.
Fudging has a quality that reversals typically don’t, and that is that fudging is within the unique domain of the game master and this makes it fundamentally unfair. A player might build a character to be the ultimate marksman, world’s best negotiator, or the team’s fastest runner.
When the GM decides to fudge, he takes control from the players. Maybe the ultimate marksman took out the villian in a single shot, ending the battle before anyone else could act. If the GM decides to fudge, he’s negating the effort of that player to play as he wants.
When a GM reverses, however, there’s something different going on. Reversing an outcome is usually a consensual process. When everyone agrees that a particular outcome was bad for the game, a reversal is an order.
Despite the name, a Game Master should not have unilateral control over the game. Fudging puts a lot more control into the GM’s hands.
As far as randomly killing PCs, that can be fixed through multiple mechanisms. One is to just implement a house rule that staves off death, giving time for PCs to rescue each other, captured for interrogation only to escape later, etc. Some games include these to one degree or another through hero points, action points, etc.
I’ve never GM’ed, but I’ve been RPGing for a long time, and I live with a GM. My experience has always been of GMs who rolled behind a screen, and presumably fudged, amended, adapted or reconsidered a few rolls now and then.
That said, the game policy has always been “no retroactive gaming”, no re-do’s, unless…
A) Something was overlooked (a life saving ability or magic item for example) but caught almost immediately.
or B) A huge failure of logic is discovered, but again almost immediately.
In general, once something has happened and we are on to the next round or action, whatever it was is History now. Like it or not. Sort of like taking your hand off the chess piece. Once you let go, that’s your move, for good or ill.
Spectacularly stupid deaths or injuries? Well those are what makes the game humourous! Laugh ’em off and roll up a new character! (Or hope your comrades chip in for a raise!)
I think it’s a bit silly to say “fudging isn’t fair because it’s the unique province of the DM and it give them WAY too much power” There’s three reasons behind this:
1) It’s not the unique province of the DM.
2) It’s silly to assume the ability to alter the dice or DCs on a whim give the DM any more power than the ability to add more monsters, more traps, blue bolts of lighting from the heavens, or whathaveyou.
3) Given the unlimited nature of the power of the GM, entering a game under someone is a tacit acceptance of their soverenty. If you didn’t accept that, you wouldn’t play.
Granted, the ability to fudge dice gives the DM a more immediate and subtle power than most others, but it’s still relatively minor compared to the ability to “Oops! a great old dragon just wandered around the corner because it heard the sound of you critting my big bad guy!”.
Also, to say that fudging is solely the realm of the DM is nieve. I can’t tell you the number of stories that have been related to me over the years of players fudging. We just call it cheating when they do it. In addition, as someone who plays with people who are far from good at simple math, there are also several times a session where players unintentionally “fudge” and then next round they say “oops! I just realized I added that last action wrong. Wanna go back?” The only solice being that they fudge randomly and in random favor.
And of course, unless your social contract says otherwise, your DM is in charge of seeing to it that the adventures your characters undertake are fair and fun for all. It’s foolish to assume that any but the most masterful (or prep-heavy) DMs have zero margin of error during adventure design. I know that I make mistakes fairly regularly. Asking them to be responsible for the fairness and fun of the game but denying them tools to sdjust on the fly is hardly fair to them.
“It’s foolish to assume that any but the most masterful (or prep-heavy) DMs have zero margin of error during adventure design. I know that I make mistakes fairly regularly. Asking them to be responsible for the fairness and fun of the game but denying them tools to sdjust on the fly is hardly fair to them.”
Upon what are you basing this analysis upon, Anecdotes? What does prep-heavy have to do with it? Since when is “zero margin of error” and saying that a GM must have a very specific tool to deal with said errors, logically related?
If one group of people say that something isn’t possible, and another group says it is based on their own experience–then it’s incumbent on the naysayers to explain their analysis. (Or I guess you could say that the second group is incapable of giving an accurate report of what actually happens in their own games.) Those of us in the second group are not perfect, masterful GMs. Yet we somehow manage to do something that the first group insists is impossible. I’m to the point where I’d really like some evidence from the first group, instead of assertions.
What I meant was, that short of playing through your entire adventure several times in advance and having accounted for every single action or variable (hence heavy prep) it’s impossible (and chances are impossible even then) to field a session in which you have thought of everything and made sure that the only possibilites that random chance allows to occur are within acceptable tollerances.
Common sense suggests that this is true and emperical evidence in every campaign I’ve ever run or participated in has supported that. I suppose it’s in theory possible that out there is a GM so perfect in their design and execution that nothing ever needs to be adjusted on the fly, but I’ve never met them.
It is true, that this does NOT logically imply neccesity of any singluar specific tool, but rather is an arguement for NOT REMOVING any tool that may be helpful from the GM’s arsonal of available actions/modifications they may make use of to adjust the parameters of the game to where it was intended during design.
Again, fudging die rolls isn’t the ONLY tool, nor is it perfect or appropriate in all circumstances, but it DOES have two things stongly in it’s favor that make it an excellent tool.
1) It’s subtle
2) It can effect anything that has been left to chance.
Does that make it necesary? No. But you don’t insist that craftsmen hammer nails in with wrenches. Give the GM the right tool for the right job.
By saying “I don’t trust you with this tool” you’re essentially saying “I don’t trust your judgement of when to propperly apply this tool” and that points to deeper issues than whether or not fudging dice is acceptable.
“Common sense suggests that this is true and emperical evidence in every campaign I’ve ever run or participated in has supported that. I suppose it’s in theory possible that out there is a GM so perfect in their design and execution that nothing ever needs to be adjusted on the fly, but I’ve never met them.”
Well, meet your first. I’m not a perfect GM. Yet, somehow I manage to do what your common sense says is impossible. I’ll also tell you that I’ve talked to other GMs with similar accomplishments. Given that statement, there are, logically, three possibilities:
1. I’m mistaken or lying? I think for the sake of politness, we can assume not lying. So if you want to assume I’m mistaken about my game, we’ll have to discuss that.
2. I’m more perfect than I think? Not bloodly likely!
3. Your common sense solution is missing something. (This is my best guess for what is happening here.)
“Again, fudging die rolls isn’t the ONLY tool, nor is it perfect or appropriate in all circumstances, but it DOES have two things stongly in it’s favor that make it an excellent tool…”
“…No. But you don’t insist that craftsmen hammer nails in with wrenches.”
And in regards to the tool that it is, one really big thing against it: It does tend to get used as a pipe wrench, nail gun, power saw, level, wheelbarrow, etc., because it tends to become the tool of choice. Or in other words, it’s not an excellent tool at all. It’s a very general tool that can be used in a pinch when another, more specialized tool is not acceptable or accessible.
A craftsman would rather drive nails with a hammer and turn nuts with a wrench. In a pinch, you can drive nails pretty well with a wrench–especially if it saves you another trip up and down the ladder. What you should never try doing is turning nuts with a hammer. 🙂
You’ll note above and elsewhere that I’m not insisting that people not use it. At a given point in time, your toolbox is only so big. But from my perspective, the situation is that fudge proponents are often saying that the *only* way to drive a nail and turn a bolt is use a hammer. I do insist that the wrench exists. I do insist that it does a better job of turning bolts. I agree that a hammer is better for driving nails. I think that if a GM is so attached to his hammer that he denies testimony that the wrench will work, he might consider using the wrench a bit excessively in the way of practice. If that leads to driving a few nails with a wrench…well, it won’t be as messy as turning bolts with a hammer. 😀
I’m for GM’s making informed judgements. If you use nothing but fudge when something else *could* work, then you aren’t making an informed judgement. If you deny the existence of the other tools, then you are spreading your uniformed judgement to other people.
I went a little too far on another board and said that fudge was a crutch. As you can imagine, that led to a bit of a flamewar. Fudge is not a crutch. It is, however, something that GM’s sometimes use for a crutch. If you insist that something is required for all (non-perfect people), when other people say it’s optional–it *might* be a crutch for you. It’s just possible that generalizing from your own experience has led you astray about the nature of the wider reality.
I’m not sure if I’m being unclear, so I’ll try to re-state in different terms what my original point was:
All GMs occasionally have problems. Some problems are best handled one way, others are best handled another. Why remove a tool from the GMs toolbox?
What I hear you saying is:
“I’ve never made a mistake that I’ve needed to adjust on the fly. Ever.”
What I suspect you mean and I’m not reading right is:
“I’ve never made a mistake for which I NEEDED to fudge dice.”
I think you’re mistaking me for saying that GMs don’t exist that can’t handle problems without fudging dice. I’m SURE that there are problems out there that can be solved without fudging dice and I’m CERTAIN there are GMs out there who have never used die fudging as a fix for a problem. That doesn’t means that the problems don’t exist, just that you didn’t use that tool to fix it.
If you find, for example, on the first encounter of the night, the the scheduled baddies are a bit too tough, you don’t NEED to fudge dice. In fact, it’s probably NOT a good idea to fudge dice. You might instead opt to hurriedly reduce the numbers of opponents in each of the following rooms by a few. That’s a good solution (better than fudging dice all night in fact) that doesn’t involve fudging dice.
If I’m still misunderstanding you or putting words in your mouth, I don’t mean to. Feel free to correct me.
I DO agree that there are problems that can easily and gracefully be corrected with a variety of tools. And I agree that it’s possible for someone to become dependant on ONE tool to the exclusion of others, and that that’s NOT a good thing.
I also don’t feel like it’s a big deal if someone personlly chooses to not use die-fudging as a tool. I just don’t think it’s a good idea to rule it out completely as a tool. After all, it HAS good points (as well as bad) and it HAS problems for which it’s an ideal fix (and ones for which it’s an abominabul fix).
“I’ve never made a mistake for which I NEEDED to fudge dice.”
That’s closer than the first one, but still a bit off the mark. In particular, that “never” doesn’t belong in there. 😀 It was more like this:
I once used fudging liberally to fix all kinds of mistakes, including some that would have been better off fixed some other way. I recognized that fudge was a poor tool for some of the things that I was trying to do. With no expectation that I would abandon fudge completely, I set out to learn some other tools. I did. Along the way, I discovered that GM fudge can be habit forming (can be, not must be) for GM and players alike–and should therefore be watched with narrowed, beady eyes for signs of dependence. (Some people, however, seem completely immune to the effect. I suspect that they are the ones totally mystified by suggestions to reduce or eliminate fudge, since they are suffering little to no ill effects from it.)
The reverse, however, was also true. Once I found a few things that lessoned my need for fudge, I found that it was even easier to eliminate the next little bit of fudge. And here’s the crucial point. Eventually I realized that I could truthfully say that:
“There is now no mistake that I make for which fudge is the optimal solution.”
As far absent PCs go, my last long-running, zero-fudge game went by the rule that PCs of absent players were played by someone else, and death was on the line. Once we switched to play-by-post, not responding in combat meant you took the full defense action (this was D&D 3.5e).
No one ever died while absent from the table, which in retrospect I’m quite glad of. Even with a good, mature group (which this was), that would be a tough one.
That makes a lot of sense Jerome. I haven’t seen that for myself, but that’s not to say it isn’t true. I’m interested then (no doubt you’ve already been all over it I’ll see in a moment) on your alternatives to the situations I pose under “Good situations to fudge dice” in my new forum thread “GM’s toolbox”. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know everything and it may well be that fudging dice is easy, but not necesary.
I think since I’ve become “no fudge” (or mostly so), that we haven’t had a absentee player’s PC die (or otherwise come to some permanent harm).
I think my definition of fudge may be slightly different from Crazy Jerome’s in that I require it to be something done to change the outcome of a resolution mechanic (usually random) without the explicit knowledge of the other players.
Now to refine that, my feeling now is that it is best to delay changing the outcome until something undesireable actually happens. In otherwords, don’t try and head off a TPK until everyone is actually dead, or at least more PCs are dead than some threshold (this assuming that single PC fatalities are ok, but a TPK somehow isn’t).
The reason fudge, as I’ve definied it, is bad, is that everytime you change outcomes, you are that much closer to the resolution system being irrelevant, which probably renders the player’s decisions irrelevant.
By changing outcomes with the agreement of everyone involved, the impact of rendering decisions irrelevant is reduced or eliminated.
Now deciding whether do have a do-over because someone made an actual error in applying the mechanics, or made a decision based on faulty understanding of the mechanics, is something separate from fudging. There, I think there is some balance between negative and positive impacts of rewinding. Obviously, if you roll damage, and then realize you rolled the wrong die, the impact is pretty low to re-roll the right die. If, at the end of the battle, you realize you should have had 5 more hit points and not gone unconscious on round 2 out of a 10 round battle, and there were no PC fatalities, well, I think most people would agree that rewinding is not worthwhile.
You also have to balance mistakes that are in the player’s favor vs. mistakes that aren’t.
And I guess my thought is that if you use a strict, “you took your hands off the piece” rule, you could accidentally encourage player cheating (hey, if I roll a bigger damage die, or “miscalculate my adds”, and the GM doesn’t notice when I call out the damage, then I’m golden).
Frank
“I think my definition of fudge may be slightly different from Crazy Jerome’s in that I require it to be something done to change the outcome of a resolution mechanic (usually random) without the explicit knowledge of the other players.”
I consider any change that bypasses the resolution mechanics after rolling to be fudge. Whether the players know or not, it’s still fudge in my book.
If the change is made before rolling, then I consider that bypassing the mechanics (or using alternate mechanics): “Hey, why play out the next five rounds of this combat, when it’s clear that the party will win handily? Let’s say everyone took three points of damage and save ourselves 20, 30 minutes.”
Hmm, “without explicit knowledge” would be better written as “without explicit agreement.”
What I see as fundamentally wrong is breaking social contract. So I differentiate between the way most fudge (as Crazy Jerome defines it) and the group of players, after something undesireable has happened (or something undesireable is immanent – I don’t think you absolutely have to wait for the last PC’s hit points to hit -10…), deciding: “Gee, that sucked, let’s say that was a bad dream, or re-play the encounter.”
Or perhaps another working distinction is whether something is an incremental attempt to keep the “story” going the direction the GM wants or whether it is a single change that directly addresses the problem.
Or another way to differentiate it, the typical fudge is the GM attempting to solve the problem at the game fiction level. Solving the problem at the metagame level is different.
The advantage of getting consensus at the metagame level is that it quickly becomes obvious if the players are not on the same page. And that problem can be directly addressed. When the GM, affraid that someone will be upset at a PC death, fudges the outcome, ending up denying the player the satisfaction of having gone down fighting, or the player satisfaction that the world is “fair.”
And bringing this back to the subject of this thread – I think the critical thing is that when a problem happens in the game (someone made a mistake, an encounter turned out badly, whatever), step out of the game fiction to the metagame level, and solve the problem between the players (which may entail discovering that the GM is the only one who perceived a problem). And that really goes for ANYTHING that could be a problem, from a string of bad luck, to the GM misapplying rules, to someone declaring that his PC rapes another, whatever. Also, if the GM models this behavior, then the players will also feel more open to raising issues they have.
Frank