Tips for GMs
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Be flexible. Don’t look for reasons to say no to player ideas. Look for ways to make their ideas work within the mechanics of your game world.
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Play with your players, not at them. If there’s a big speech where there won’t be any opportunity to interact with it? Make it a post, not a scene. Don’t make players pose “sits still and listens quietly” for three rounds, and don’t make them talk “through” a big important speech just to have some interactivity with each other.
It’s perfectly legit to have a big post/scene-set of a speech or first dance or whatever can’t be interrupted, and then have the actual scene be everyone reacting to it.
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Chekhov’s Gun: Don’t put things in the scene that aren’t there for players to react to.
I know it’s a writing hobby, and sometimes we’re trying to establish a mood so we’re including evocative details, but if you mention that this obsidian cave is carved with ancient runes, has a brazier spewing purple flames, smells faintly of candied apples, and I can hear an old woman singing from the mouth of an adjacent tunnel, all of those elements should be open for some sort of follow-up.
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@KarmaBum said in Tips for GMs:
I know it’s a writing hobby, and sometimes we’re trying to establish a mood so we’re including evocative details, but if you mention that this obsidian cave is carved with ancient runes, has a brazier spewing purple flames, smells faintly of candied apples, and I can hear an old woman singing from the mouth of an adjacent tunnel, all of those elements should be open for some sort of follow-up.
You can even cheat in this scenario and have all of them be open to the same follow up of “You realize as you investigate further that this entire cave, this entire space, is entirely illusion.”
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I offer this humble morsel from my own forever-GM:
“Your players are idiots. They could be the most brilliant people on the face of the planet with a collective library’s worth of degrees and professional accreditations. In your game, they will be idiots. Do not be discouraged when your players cannot solve your puzzle, or understand your clues. Adjust. They want to win as much as you want them to, they’re not doing it on purpose.”
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Don’t plan out every single detail of the scene. Go in with a vague idea of where you want to go, players are insanely good at filling in the details for you.
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@Pavel Agreed. And there’s nothing wrong with calling for some Wits checks and then just providing them with the necessary information if they can’t figure it out based on your clues. Maybe your clues aren’t as brilliant as you thought they were, maybe the players just had a bad day and aren’t braining well, or maybe they’re shy of putting an idea forward for fear of being wrong. There’s no shame in either just giving them the information they need, or going the Brindlewood Bay method of “whatever solution the PCs come up with was the correct one, so long as their rolls were good enough.”
Formerly known as Seraphim73 (he/him)
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@Roadspike Oh I like that latter idea. Particularly if it’s the kind of player plan that makes you sit back and say “oh that’s much better than my idea…”
You get to smile magnanimously, nod sagely, and confirm that that was your plan all along.
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@Roadspike said in Tips for GMs:
@Pavel Agreed. And there’s nothing wrong with calling for some Wits checks and then just providing them with the necessary information if they can’t figure it out based on your clues. Maybe your clues aren’t as brilliant as you thought they were, maybe the players just had a bad day and aren’t braining well, or maybe they’re shy of putting an idea forward for fear of being wrong. There’s no shame in either just giving them the information they need, or going the Brindlewood Bay method of “whatever solution the PCs come up with was the correct one, so long as their rolls were good enough.”
My life became a lot better, as a GM, when I really understood that the things I thought were So Clear as clues were only clear because I knew what the plot was. Expecting players to read my mind to understand what I was hoping they’d get was really just frustrating everyone.
Besides, I have come to believe that it’s rarely the process of getting information that is the most exciting–it’s seeing what players do with information once they have it. (Which isn’t to say I don’t love a good research or questioning scene, but I try to focus on ‘failure means consequences, not a shutdown’ as much as I can. (Which isn’t always as much as I want–a tired brain drags us all down, on occasion.)
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I’ve been in scenes that run the gamut from “this is a team effort and my actions and decisions matter” to “I’m an NPC here to watch the GMPC look cool”. Since I much prefer the former to the latter, the main thing I learned as a GM and what I try to impart to new GMs is “it isn’t about us, it’s about them”.
To present a scene with a good story that is also a good-but-not-insurmountable challenge, it’s really hard, and there are so many GMs (in this thread, in fact!) that make it look effortless. It requires investment of time and energy and the ability to improvise or sometimes completely throw the plot out and start writing on the fly because Barry just dropped a live grenade into the server cluster. But seeing players visibly having a great time and coming up with really cool ideas and witnessing those little hits of dopamine when they get to indulge in those ideas? It’s better than any drug.
So yeah tl;dr I guess the only real tip I have for GMs is, once again, “it isn’t about us, it’s about them”. As long as your first thought is on the players, the rest comes as easy as it can be.
