User Blog:
Bonus Content: What if My Players are Smarter than Me?

 I'm going to lay it out like this, and be up front about all this. I'm not a drooling nitwit, I have things that I know well, things I'm well read about and things I understand on a gut level your average person does not. There are also plenty of things I don't know about, and spots where I might seem down right ignorant. (Cooking is a good example. I have no intelligence in the kitchen. If I don't have step-by-step directions to refer to regularly, I burn soup.) That said, there is one player who plays with me regularly who is just hands down smarter than I am. That's not me putting myself down or trying to stroke his ego across the internet, it's just me acknowledging that in many very analytical ways, he's smarter than I am.* Over the years I've played with a lot of people who were smarter than me in one way or another, but it was rarely a big deal, but this guy just seems much more clever and bright when it comes to things that help in a game. It's just the way his mind works, he out paces me at every turn when I GM for him. Thinks outside of every box I try to shut him into. He works out my NPCS and clever plot contrivances no matter what I do.**

So what's a GM to do? I can live with a player being smarter than I am, but how do I keep that from ripping apart my game? My careful plot? My beautiful Moriarty-like NPC? Clearly, the answer isn't that I should just quit and never GM again. I also can't kick the player out, it isn't his fault and I actually do enjoy playing with him. So, from my experience with Mr. Smarty-pants and a number of other Smarty-pantses I've played with over the years, let me make some recommendations.

Stop Trying to Beat 'Em: A lot of GMs start out with a mentality that they're going 'up against' the players at their table and it is their duty to have their NPCs beat the characters as proxies for the struggle between GM and player. The reality is there is no struggle between player and GM. We're actually all at the table for the same reason; that is, to have fun. If you aren’t there to have fun and you feel like the players are there to beat you or make you feel stupid, either you're there for the wrong reasons or your players are jerks. When I create NPCS and plots that they're developing, I don't worry about what the characters are going to do. I don't try to outthink the players, I just worry about what the NPCs know and are willing to do. It's gotten to a point with me where I don't worry if the players are going to defeat my plots. I know they will. I anticipate the enjoyment of watching how creatively they go about defeating my plots. The crazy and off the wall plans they come up with are a million times more fun then anything I could come up with on my own, that's why I'm roleplaying instead of working on my novel. (...which I should probably be doing, but that's another post.)