AYMS - Angry Young Man Syndrome
by
, 04-30-2012 at 04:49 PM (5028 Views)
To preface this, I am someone who’s successfully been in sales, customer service, maintained vendor relations and had negotiation training. It might be safe to say I know something about convincing folks to do things.
Training and experience aside, there’s a saying “you get more flies with honey than vinegar,” which I’m sure everyone has heard. Most of the time the honey saying works but about 5 percent of the time, one has to be a bit stern. Secondly, common sense really does count in life. Third, treat people as you wish to be treated.
Now in roleplay (yes role not roll), those same concepts should apply when establishing and maintaining contacts or negotiating to get what you want which are very important in certain games, especially the contacts portion.
In a game, What not to do -Take an established ally or contact who is a friendly and acts accordingly and treat them badly. So often the Angry Young Man (AYM) decides that they can talk smack and/or verbally abuse them (not in jest). After that the NPC says, don’t call me the next time you want a favor. The GM says cross Mr. Smith off your list of allies/contacts. AYMs always get upset because that was unfair. Not all young men do this but when it does happen it does seem to be done by males between the ages of 18-23. It has happened so often in my playing and GM’ing experience that it makes me wonder.
These AYMs aren't playing a jack@ass characters by background or usually ugly to other PCs. Outside of game, they're nice folks.
Even before I had all the training in the first paragraph, I knew about the sentiments of the second one. This has happened just too many times with various AYMs. Even though its a game and not RL, the same principles apply or should. Who in the world thinks that you win friends and influence people by being a jack@ss? Did I miss the memo?