GM PCs

So, the other day I was reading issue #23 (October/November 1980) of Judges Guild's The Dungeoneer Journal. In it, there's a lengthy interview with M.A.R. Barker by Rudy Kraft. A lot of the questions and answers are old hat to anyone who's knowledgeable about Tékumel and Empire of the Petal Throne, but one exchange really stuck with me:

Judges Guild: Do you do much playing of characters as opposed to Judging?

Barker: I've never played a character.

Common sense would, of course, dictate that what Barker meant was that he'd never had what we typically call a player character in his Tékumel campaign. Certainly, he's played characters -- non-player characters -- over the course of his campaign, many of them in fact! However, he's never created a character who was his rather than part of the world in which other people's characters adventured.

What's interesting is that Professor Barker's answer is the one I'd generally give too. Back when I first started gaming, we all considered it a no-no to both play and referee in the same campaign. That's why we generally had several campaigns running at any given time. If I wanted to play D&D rather than run it, then I'd do so in someone else's campaign, not the same one I was running for my friends. When I read about the Lake Geneva Greyhawk campaign, I always thought it odd that Gary Gygax was both a player and a referee in it. Somehow that seemed to be "cheating."

In the early to mid-90s, I did play in several campaigns where referees also had characters of their own in the same campaigns. The results were uncongenial enough that I continued to feel the practice was one to be avoided rather than embraced. One of the biggest issues I encountered was the tendency of the referee to treat his PC as an important NPC and use him as a central element to an adventure -- a way to have his cake and eat it too, so to speak. Looking back on those campaigns now, I honestly don't think they were improved by allowing the referee to pull double duty; indeed, I think just the opposite.

Now, like all such practices, I don't know that this has to be the case. I'm sure there are many examples of campaigns where the referee's also being involved as a player hasn't had dire consequences. Still, I can't shake the feeling that there's something wrong with it. I guess I just prefer a stronger separation between the roles of referee and player (in the sense of player-of-PCs anyway) than this seems to provide, but perhaps I've just been very unfortunate in this regard.