So I'm in a gaming group that plays two games. We alternate which game is run every week. I'm running one of the games and one of my players is running the other game. In the game I am not running, none of us are enjoying it. All of us end up complaining about it behind his back, and praying for a TPK so that we can actually play in a game run by someone who knows what they're doing.

But of course subtle hints and the like can only take you so far, especially when the GM seems to be so oblivious. It's blatantly obvious that people at the game are bored and dissatisfied, but he doesn't do anything about it! He just ploughs on, and then there's that awkward silence at the end, when he's obviously waiting for players to thank him for the game, as we generally do after a good game. I can't bring myself to do it, but others do, and this only allows the situation to continue to fester.

The problem is, the GM is a good friend and a nice guy, but he's very sensitive to criticism. Plus, its not like he's totally fresh to GMing, so friendly advice that would be seen as helpful to a GM just starting out sounds more like criticism of someone who thinks they know what they're doing.

You see, he's really a very poor GM in comparison to the others on offer, making seemingly novice mistakes, but he suffers from delusions of grandeur or something. No matter how many times we've hinted "So the last session didn't go well. It's not the end of the world, maybe it was just a bit ambitious. How about you try going back to basics and focus on the story, rather than the rules." he still gets carried away with rule lawyering and not only does this mean that the story tends to be underdone, but we spend far too long shifting through books to prove that the rules allow our characters to do some action. On top of that, I've had every other player in our group approach me out of session to say that they would rather play my game over his.

So how do we tell a friend that none of us want to play in his game unless he is prepared to swallow his pride and be treated like a novice, and take constructive criticism? A fellow player and I wrote up a list of our concerns and suggestions for the game. We tried to include some compliments as well, but we could only think of one or two, in contrast to a list of maybe a dozen criticisms.