Tips for GMs
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One of the biggest things that frustrate me from a player perspective is not being informed of the space I am in. I love to interact with things, but if I don’t know what’s around me to interact with? It’s a problem. I need to be able to visualize where I am at in order to RP and have fun.
Which leads me to, give me things to interact with. Don’t tell me the story, let me play with it. But also this goes for players… please actually interact with the setting? If there’s a cake there, eat the cake. Don’t just look at the cake or act like the cake doesn’t exist. Do something with the cake!!
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Events and scenes don’t always have to be huge affairs. It’s okay to limit the number of people or break a huge event into different areas or parts so it’s more manageable for not only the GM/ST but also the players. As someone who finds it harder to focus when scenes become 6+, half of my energy is spent on worrying that I may have accidentally missed someone in my pose. Also, I’m afraid of dragging down the pace having to respond to 7 other poses as well.
Which leads to my second item, pacing. Try to keep the scene moving, even if you have to be a bit direct. Some may disagree but if each round is taking one hour to run, then there is less opportunities for players to act or react because people get tired after a few hours.
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@KDraygo said in Tips for GMs:
Try to keep the scene moving,
Please. Please keep things moving. I’ve been in GM’d scenes where we haven’t even finished “posing in” and have already hit the 1 hour mark.
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Please try to keep a consistent emotional tone throughout the plot. Otherwise, we get these bizarre scenarios where the forces of hell are massing at the gates, but our heroes are all taking the afternoon to attend a “cuddle a baby lamb tea party” or whatever. It is jarring and detracts from the emotional richness of the wider story to inject pointless bathos for comic relief.
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@Pacha said in Tips for GMs:
Please try to keep a consistent emotional tone throughout the plot.
I would go one step further and say “Please try and be responsible with emotional shifts in the plot.” The emotional tone of the plot changing is fine, but when it rollercoasters seventeen times in a single scene, that’s just too jarring.
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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.
