My group was odd in that we didn't do the "a single adventure each session" thing, but we had one big overall plot that we sorta progressed on however much amount we ended up progressing during a session. My group was known to do things like spend an entire four hour session checking into a hotel. So I could come up with scene after scene but it'd eventually have to lead up to something, and it was that I was struggling with since I started running out of ideas for scenes after a while. (Had an eventual goal in mind but no idea how to get to there from here.) So I gave up and went back to just being a player and left GMing to our more creative minds.
I don't do a single adventure per session in either the group I play in, or DM/GM. I've always played/written overarching plotlines with small arcs in within each segment, but a lot of the time I just react to the players and write the next bit of the arc based on them.
Example; the game I currently DM has an overarching plot about the PCs coming into their powers as Titans in order to defeat the Devourer (an eldritch being from the Far Realm). I know that along the way they will either kill, or ally with, many of the gods within the pantheon as well as travel to a few other Planes and ally with other Titans in order to have the powerbase necessary for the endgame. I know, it's not terribly original.
Have I planned much more than that? Not really, most of my ideas remain as ideas so I can alter them freely. I know roughly what will happen over the next few sessions (as in, I have bullet pointed plot threads and scenarios that I can fit in almost anywhere), but after that they (my players) will be making a choice that will determine the sessions after that.
Mixed in with the main plot, I've seeded some side stuff they can pick up on if they want to and, if they indicate they prefer that over what I have planned, I have no problems at all working it into the main plot/replace the main plot entirely.
Admittedly GMing isn't for everyone, I know people who flat out refuse to do it, but if you enjoyed doing it, there are things like Story Forge that provide prompts to jog inspiration when you're stuck for a direction to take things in. A lot of it practise, of course, and some people find certain styles of GMing faaaar easier and more natural than others.
I hope I'm coming across as helpful, rather than overbearing.
The one time I tried GM'ing, it was running a homebrew system I made myself, and the game was pretty dumb because I was young. :B But I also count myself in the "bad at thinking on my feet" category, enough that I find I prefer games light on actual roleplaying, even as a player.
I honestly prefer P&P RPGs to be more like socially constructed video games, when you come down to it. D: It's a failing.
This. So much this.
During college, I spent so many hours writing up stats for character after character, NPC after NPC, only to realize that my players will see next to none of that. They don't care about how many feats the guard captain has, how many points the villain has in History, or anything beyond the most rudimentary mechanical elements which which they interact directly.
In the end, this gives you a massive space with which to operate illusorily, as so much of your players' experience with a character hinges upon their own character-interactions with that character and less their mechanical-interactions. No one remembers that Black Nellie had a +22 to Pick Pocket and a +18 to Athletics; everyone remembers how Black Nellie fliched the Gem of True Seeing from Rygar's pocket while they were negotiating a truce and how she led the entire party on a chase across the city rooftops before escaping on a pirate ship.
RPG-writing legend John Wick noted, in his infamous (and brilliant!) book Play Dirty, that as a GM, "There are no rules for you. Cheat anyway." Advice to take to heart!
This is great advice!
There are two principles in many of the games that use the Apocalypse engine which I apply to every game I run, both of which benefit from a liberal interpretation of the rules from time to time:
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Be a fan of the characters - as a GM, you aren't there to obliterate the characters, you're there to build them up, support them, and help them grow from their starting point. By doing this, everyone around the table should have fun and be engaged (it is important to remember, you cannot always keep every player engaged).
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Make the character's lives interesting - as a GM, it's also your job to challenge the characters, wear them down, remove their supports, make them feel like the world itself is out to get them, keep them on their toes but know when to cut back on the pressure and let them relax before ratcheting up the stakes once more.
Continuing on with my theme of the players not knowing unless you tell them, always bear in mind that your game is your game. If you forget a rule as it applies to something, that's fine. If it makes the experience worse, own your mistake and remember it next time. If it makes things better however, you intended it all along. No-one else will know any different.
As an aside, I think it was Mike Mearls of the D&D team who recommends that your prep time takes no longer than the session length. Obviously, some things will take longer than others to prep, but that does seem to be the sweet spot, in my experience anyway.
Stop checking for for 18 hours and all of this happens. There is alot of GM here. Platinum Warlock didn't know you made some stuff, going to check it out this weekend. I am looking into non-d20 systems to try.
The Best advice I read was, What are the NPC's (non player Charaters, anyone who are not the players) Motive? In this scene what are they trying to do. This help put when the Players throws a wrench into the system (are very convincing, give good logic that you didn't think goes left field or just blows them off).
I say don't be afraid to try, you will fail at times but how else are you going to learn. One day you will look back and laugh at the though of giving a low level Charater haste(a powerfull ablity) breaking your game but it was fun at the time. You might want to stick to a premade story for the first time. Makes life easier.
Anything else I want to say has been said, except practice improv.
- If you have never GM'd a game, what is the biggest barrier to you trying it out?
Fear of failing, but my desire to play out weighed that fast when i started.
- If you have GM'd a game, what were the biggest challenges you faced? What did you find most and least enjoyable?
Learning how to go off script. I am the player who would buy a robe of usefull items, use a patch to make a window on some glass, which was use to forshadow the boss (You see them their with an NPC you have to save, blah blah adding tension) and have a suprise attack on the boss. Then I put glue on my self and hug the mind controlled person we are trying to save. . . I had a hard time dealing with players like me.
- If you have played in an RPG, what was the best thing a GM ever did while running a game?
Letting my crazy idea (see above) fly. I am ok with them failing but just seeing how far they can go is fun for me. The look on the DM face when I glued myself to Mind Controlled NPC(cleric), who was ment to buff and heal the Boss. . . Priceless. I like resourcefull charaters.
Side note: I also am likeing Fantsy Flight's Star Wars system. Lets us get away with much. More story driven .
I'm reading all of these responses, and as the pure noob to this genre of game, one word keeps cropping up in the back of my mind.
Daunting.
I think all the feedback and information in this thread is really fantastic. But from the perspective of someone with no experience ever with this type of game, I feel like I'm more likely now to pass on the RPG than I was a few days ago.
Maybe I'm missunderstanding things due to my inexperience with the genre, but theres a lot of "be prepared for this, that, and the other" and not a whole lot of "this is what you do to prepare for this, that, and the other". Is it even possible to give more tangable answers to these questions without knowing the extent of the rules system?
@Foote: Well, FWIW, playing in an RPG is not that hugely hard.
But GMing, yeah, it takes a really specific talent set to be any good at it.
Here's the thing. It seems like a lot. But in the end, it all comes down to one fundamental question: Are we having fun?
Mechanics don't matter for this. You can get the math wrong, you can roll the wrong dice, you can fudge the numbers over and over. If people are having fun, that's what matters.
Performance doesn't matter for this. People can laugh at your attempts at voices, run totally off of the rails, or leave the quests behind. Is everyone having fun? That's what matters.
This was the biggest hurdle for me, in terms of maturing as a GM and designer. It's so easy to want to plan out Every Last Step of the adventure…if that's what you want, go write a novel. You control those characters. The ones in your game belong to their players; you have to react to what they do just as they react to the situations you present for them. If you're flexible and are willing to roll with the punches, you can't go wrong.
One of the oft-quoted pieces of advice in GMing is to "Say yes or roll dice." I might add to that, "Say yes, give them an obstacle, or roll dice." If you can do that much, you're good in pretty much any situation.
Tangible answers come across as a bit… facetious (I think that's the right word here), at least to my mind. Put simply, the answer is play the game.
Like with any storytelling or improv-based activity, practice is key. I've been running games for about 7 years, and I know I don't have all the answers. What I do have is a wide knowledge and experience base which I can draw upon to make characters believable. Knowing the rules helps, of course, as does knowing the story you want to tell.
So at the moment of writing, my answer would be "Play the game to learn the basic rules, play a few scenes out to find the story you want to tell OR to find out what you want to explore and draw upon every experience you've ever had, book you've ever read and story you've ever consumed."
Only you know what you know and that's what makes every GM different. Open any rpg rulebook and the introduction usually contains some useful information on role-playing, but really, it's just play-acting with rules. Someone is the director and controls the scene changes/setting/chorus, but it's a game of make-believe. It's surprisingly hard to do it wrong, at least, to do it wrong more than once.
Role-playing isn't for everyone. I think that's important to bear in mind. As a community, we can be passionate, but at the end of the day, if you don't enjoy it, that's perfectly alright. It's a game, after all.
I would say, get a few games in as a player before trying to GM. It helps you learn the ropes, common practices and playstyles.
There is some really good commentary and discussion here!
I now want to address Foote (and other people in a similar position; I know there are a bunch of you!). The SC RPG Starter Kit, and the other adventures we are going to release for this game, are exactly what you want to make things less daunting. To explain what I mean, I'm going to talk about my general approach to GMing, in particular for story-driven RPGs like Sentinel Comics. Although this might sound daunting, I'm *then* going to explain how the adventures we are making are going to remove most of the daunting work, and make it easier for you as a GM :D
1) Make sure that all of the players have characters that are fun for them to play, and have reasons to work together.
This relates to the comments above about the "social contract" between players and GM. As the GM, I believe it is my job to craft a story/setting that will be fun for the players, and give them all interesting things to do. I also believe it is my job to make sure that the players all create characters that have motivations and desires that are at least somewhat compatible. To this end, I'll generally have the players create their characters before I solidify the adventure, and I'll give "soft" restrictions during player creating if I think it is necessary, or guide player creation until they come up with something I can work with (often using the "yes, and" techniquie from improv). For example, I might say that all of the players in a Star Wars campaign have to have some reason to be working for the Hutts, or to be Imperial officers; or in a D&D-like setting, I might say that no one can be Evil, or maybe even restrict Chaotic Neutral if I know that'll be a problem.
FooteNote:The Starter Kit solves this for you! We will provide premade characters who all have reasons to work together (they are the Freedom Five!).
2) Craft scenarios where all of the characters have something to do that interests them.
Let's use the example from above! PlatinumWarlock proposed the following situation:
Jim makes a character designed to follow in Bunker's footsteps; he's interested in dealing a ton of damage, fighting a bunch of bad guys, and stomping on robots in a mecha-suit. Amy makes a new Virtuoso of the Void; she's more interested in exploring the relationship between the Virtuosos and Akash-X, as well as interacting with other heroes (and even villiains).
There is actually a lot to work with there. The nice thing about a comic book setting is that it is easy to tell players that they have to make characters that think of themselves as heroes, and generally act in a heroic way. In the above setting, I'd likely create a scenario where some kind of villain wants to harvest power from or otherwise damage somewhere important to Akash-X and the Virtuosos; maybe somewhere attuned to void power. I'd likely also make their scheme involve tapping into the power of the Void and/or the past Virtuosos. Then, I'd make sure that they had some sort of violent means by which they wanted to accomplish their ends; maybe Professor Pollution is back with some PollutionBots that are out to kill all of the local fauna, or maybe the antagonist is Citizen Dawn and a bunch of Citizens. Either way, there'd be a situation where both players have lots of hooks for their characters, and will each get turns in the spotlight.
FooteNote: Again, the Starter Kit solves this for you! Since we know that the characters will be the Freedom Five, we put them in a scenario that they'll inherently care about.
3) Know your world.
If I were to run a game in the Dune universe, I could fake it if my PCs didn't know much about the world, but I'd have a hard time. I'd really want to go and read some more dune books and talk with our Inventory Manager for many hours to prep. However, if I'm going to run a game in the Star Wars universe, I just pick a starting portion of the galaxy and run. If the players decide that the place I planned for them to be (say, Hutt Space) is not for them, and decide to run off somewhere else (say, Corellia), I've got a decent idea of what's there, which is enough to bluff my way through the session and describe some stuff that the PCs see when they show up. I can then just pop over to Wookiepedia between sessions and come up with some more detailed settings. Knowing your world is also of course doable if you create the world from scratch, but it is actually a lot harder; not only do you have to craft the world, but you are the only source of world information, so if you haven't prepped something for an area, you don't have a wiki to fall back on.
FooteNote: Here's a quasi-secret - one of the major reasons we started releasing The Letters Page now is for background/worldbuilding for RPG players. If you listen to the podcast, you know more than enough about the world of Sentinel Comics to run an RPG. Relatedly, we recently made the Sentinel Comics wiki officially supported by GTG, and it is a great source of info!
4) Know the game rules
As the GM, you are the arbiter of the rules. It is important that you know them fairly well so that you an answer rules questions from players. It is also important to be confident; if you don't know a rule, it is generally better to guess (and stick with that guess during the session) rather than pause the game for 5+ minutes to look something up.
FooteNote: This is the main thing you'll have to do in order to run the Starter Kit. Fortunately, the rules for the Sentinel Comics RPG are much simpler than many other RPGs. So simple, in fact, that the rules document for the Starter Kit can fit in a short, staple-bound booklet. If you can understand the rules for Spirit Island (to say nothing of Galactic Strike Force), you'll have no problem with the RPG rulebook :)
5) Prep Settings/Scenes, not plots.
In my experience, preping entire plots, movie-style, is way too much work and often a waste of time. In an RPG, Players have agency, and PCs will definitely jump in all sorts of directions you don't expect during a long campaign. Instead of saying "no, you can't do that", you really want to be able to use the old improv trick and say "yes, and then this happens". To accomplish this, I tend to create antagonists who have their own goal and plans, and then put the heroes in a situation where they will want to do things that intersect those plans. I'll then prep specific scenes, but not how I envision the plot proceeding. For example, I might decide that Citizen Dawn is going to invade Megalopolis, hold the City Council hostage, demand gold, and have some Citizens start blowing up infrastructure. I'd prep 2-3 different "citizens are blowing up infrastructure" scenes, a City Council scene where Dawn is making demands, and a scene where the gold is being delivered. I'd then introduce it by saying something like "You're sitting around Freedom Tower when you feel a huge explosion. Looking out of the 34th story window, you see smoke rising from the power transfer station down on 101st street*. What do you do??". The players then have a reason to investigate the explosion, and on the way might see some other suspicious stuff that will let them work out what is going on. I'll then have a rough idea of what I think Dawn and the Citizens will do in any given situation, so I'll just have them react on the fly accordingly, with no specific plan for how the situation will end.
FooteNote: Running a story the way I just described definitely takes practice. However, the Starter Kit is specifically designed as GMing 101, with a story that is fun to play, and is presented to the new GM with sort of "training wheels" for the system. There is a lot of room for player choice, but the plot branches are constrained by the story, and the Starter Kit walks you through letting the players do things in any order they choose.
Final Thoughts
- Play to your strengths. If you are not good at voices or dialogue (I'm not!), don't bother with it! If you are, do it up!
- Don't worry about getting all of the rules right; just worry about making it fun.
- Lean heavily on stuff you already know and work other people already did.
*All of the geography of Megalopolis and Freedom Tower is non-canon stuff I just made up as I was typing. 75% of GMing is making up plausible-sounding BS on the fly.
I will say that my game group started playing the summer after our sophomore year in college, and I wanted to GM then because I had a lot of fun doing improv type things, rolled up a random dungeon from a generator, had all of the players roll up their characters and just played. It was a lot of fun! I made every mistake in the book, but as we were all inexperienced with the genre, we were very much all focused on how we could do the coolest things with all of our individual characters. That random dungeon had a randomly generated title "The Lair of Wez the Mad", that I had disregarded until the players started looking for a quest in a tavern, and they wanted to know why "bad things" were happening "in that cave outside of town" and I floundered for a minute(cried bathroom break to take time to think), and then told them it was an abandoned research laboratory that used to be owned by a wizard known as Wez the Mad. That was enough for them, and they went forward. The rest of the "setting" was mostly generated when the players would ask things about why something would be in this research station(randomly generated was not my friend here), and I made up something that I wanted to be true, wrote it down for future consistency, and it was thus!
After that first summer, I bought a DM guide, looked up on a few forums, and learned all of the things I had done "wrong", and tried to do one recommended thing each new session(about once a month). Mostly player/table engagement things (discover what your players enjoy: exploration/combat/clever-puzzle-solving/etc.; keep sessions focused around one, maybe two major events to maintain focus), the occasional tips about how to keep combat from feeling like a slog(much more pertinent in a rules-heavy system when players just want to punch, not math to show the punch the best), and leaning general rules about how the system I was running worked so I could lean on handy shortcuts for player decisions that I hadn't anticipated(GM screen with charts for Overcomes, etc. would be great). I still ran a prep-light campaign, as I liked when players decided to try to do something new, and only had a sparse outline of Big Bad, Major Faction(s), Map, McGuffins, and "home base" progression. I essentially would glean a few things that the players wanted to do, and weigh how likely that thing they wanted to find/explore/interrogate/imprison/fight/seduce was to actually exist in the world, and then just ran with it.
The few homebrew story sessions I ran of SCRPG after stealing some materials from 2016 Gen Con worked very well with my prep-averse style, as the system(at the time) could do everything the card game did in terms of *Unexpected Minion Surge!*/*Death-Ray Charge-Up Sound!*/*Rocket Launch Exhaust!* can just happen at any time. This really encouraged me to outline A Thing(tm) and then just throw Things Likely Adjacent To A Thing(tm) at players during an encounter. I personally enjoyed gauging the player's excitement for "finishing" an encounter in a particular way (PUNCH MORE/ALL THINGS, find source of enemies/shut gate, collapse building to prevent X, etc.) and having that emerge as an obvious solution if they don't explicitly start trying for it.
@Foote, this was meant to be reassuring about flying by the seat of your pants, but it probably wasn't as helpful as I thought it was going to be when I started writing...
TL;DR:
Tangibles: Find why your players came to the table/system/game, how their characters are equipped to let their players do that thing, and try to have an opportunity for most of the players at the table to do that thing in every/every other session. Players are all different, and we could probably do a little Archetype:How to Engage that Archetype, as the players(to me) are the most important thing to handle well.
EDIT: Ninja'd by Paul with a more concise rundown =]
I feel that was very helpful Paul. Hopefully more folks in my position see that rundown. I think I have a better understanding of what an RPG entails if nothing else.
Hey Paul can you pin your post.
I would thumbs up it but no option for that on the forums.
Seconded--that's some great advice, brother!
One aspect that can be overwhelming in a thread like this, is that we are all different storytellers, trying to help others learn to tell their stories.
My style?
Build the entire world and the end game that I have yet to ever reach, and come up with stories that I want to tie in. Then I write each story, and see which characters will be recurring or only in one episode, and then I create a very ino uous seeming first adventure that foreshadows things and leaves the characters a bunch of paths to eliminate as they play (I don't like end of episode choices, I like midgame choices that eliminate possible paths).
Then we work through the places and events I came up with, adding new ones when inspiration strikes, and basically letting it play out in the order they choose.
It is incredibly time consuming and e eryone says I am crazy, but it is honestly what works best for me.
A starter kit is a fantastic way to get your feet in the pond. After that I draw from scenes i love in stories or movies and create similar moments.
GMing became really fun for me once I was experienced enough to let things go off track without having to stop and dig through books to continue.
And really, even being open ended isn't hard. Every campaign I run I set up 3 alternate adventures at the start, that i can plug in at any time the players go off script. Usually something like an escape, a travelling story (for when players just leave the town where the adventure was supposed to be) and a captured story (for when they do something to run afoul of things too tough for them. If i use one, I just replace that adventure and I still have 3.
The key is to find out how to tell your story your way, while empowering your players to tell their character's story. That mostly just comes with experience.
Something else for new GMs to note: by virtue of the choices they make when creating characters, your players will tell you something about the kinds of stories they are interested in. For example, I'm making/made conscious choices with Lacuna that say she's got ties to the GMs choice of the literal forces of Hell (a la Apostate) or the Unpronounceables (a la Nightmist), and that I'm interested in stories that explore the consequences of using power too much, because I want her to toy with becoming addicted to the use of her power - and risk burning out because of it.
If you can arrange it, I strongly encourage you to devote a "Session 0" to joint character creation if you aren't going to run the Freedom 5+i. As a part of that, steal something from Everway/Fate games, in which you either give every player/character the opportunity to ask each other character a question and/or appear in each other's back stories.
I want to adress this point, because the "thinking on one's feet" is perhaps one of the hardest and most daunting of the things expected of the GM.
And, like someone mentioned above, it is really hard to give advise on it, because most of us just floundered and practiced until we could do it, but there is one thing mentioned off-handedly that I'd like to expand upon.
This
is perfectly fine and perhaps one of your most powerful tools.
Sometimes, it depends on the players, but I have some groups that absolutely love the times they flabbergasted me and put me in a positon where I had to time-out and think through what was going to happen next.
The most famous (infamous) of these involved the Savage World System and a deck of cards that came with that system that essentially allowed the players to change the story, forcing me to adapt to new events. It started by them falling down a cavern beneath the cavern they were in (a card called "out of the frying pan" to avoid the combat they were losing pretty handily) and ended with one of the players playing the Love Interest card… on a semi-eldritch being with no capacity for love or other emotions as I conceived her.
It… honestly it broke my entire homebrewed world to a degree, she wasn't supposed to be a person, she was supposed to be a thing, hinting at the dark energies at the core of a different set of villains. And suddenly she was madly in love with one of my players… They recorded my reaction, and I had to call the game for that night so I could think through the implications of this and adjust. It was simply too big of a change to adjust for with any speed.
In another example from a group of mine, much less severe, I was rushed in map building for this castle the players were exploring. The adventure was to the right, and the player turned left… where I had forgotten to draw anything or even think of what could be down there. I asked for a few minutes while I quickly made-up what was that way, let everyone take a bathroom break, and the resulting encounter led the player to making a deal with The Nine Hells which had repercussions throughout the entire rest of the game.
The point I am trying to make, is that if you end up thrown for a loop and you can't think of what can possibly happen next. Tell your players you need a few minutes. Taking a break so you can figure out what happens next is perfectly fine, and they may even get a kick out of throwing you for a loop or suggest things that could happen.
Also, if the problem is more that you end up circling but never able to get a good lead up into the final encounter of a series of events. Just have that ending come suddenly, even jarringly or out of place. I think it is more important that something happen and the story moves forward than for you to keep trying to find the perfect way to do it. There is no perfect way, just the way it ends up happening. Trust that the scene is exciting enough on it's own and the players will likely not question why it was finally this door that led them where they wanted to go.
I'm not familiar with Savage World but… couldn't you just say no? What if a player uses that card on an animal, or an inanimate object? The GM should default to saying "yes" most of the time (or, more powerfully, "yes, and" or "yes, but"), but saying "no" is often the appropriate response.
The way the cards were designed (and to be clear they are an addition to the game I bought and allowed into the campaign, not something which is in the base system itself) saying "No" violated the agreement and understanding of the cards.
For example, one of them forces the villain to spend a turn giving a villainous monologue. If I said no to this card, then I could say no to that card, and they only get to draw one or two for the entire session.
I've banned the deck for more serious games, my for more light-hearted games where this kind of silliness is more appropriate, everyone seems to love having something in their back pocket to rock the boat.
EDIT: And, I want to make something more clear. While the entire backstory of the world and a lot of my lore had to be altered in light of that event, and it did cause me much gnashing of teeth for a few hours, I think the end result was incredibly cool and satisfying. It worked out and allowed for some pretty great moments for the next few sessions.
In fact, I've rarely had a game where the player actions reduced the fun of the game or ruined the game for myself or someone else. It has happened, but those are horror stories I don't think anyone here has to worry about emulating, because it all had to do with particular personalities that I imagine few other people will end up having to deal with. As long as you are playing with people you know and like, you should never have to worry about that sort of mess.