Tips for GMs
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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.”
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
BE AN ADULT -
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.
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Yeah if there’s something to figure out, I like going in with a few potential pathways in mind and then dropping them all and rolling with whatever the players come up with in terms of how to get there. Having a set solution to a problem is a way to frustrate yourself AND your players!
let it be a challenge to you
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One of the more key things for me (and mentioned by BN up there too) is
p a c i n g
And in particular, understanding that certain things take more time than other things. Asking PCs to brainstorm their own solutions, asking PCs to choose between a variety of options that may have good or poor outcomes, puzzle solving, talking to NPCs, resolving in-group disagreements as to approach, these all take way more RL time to accomplish than you’d sometimes think.
It’s important to keep it moving, it’s important not to get the players stuck on decision points or hurdles that won’t ultimately matter. Understanding for yourself how much time combat in your system generally takes (and how to keep it flowing relatively quickly) is important. And knowing which things are slow is important. It doesn’t mean you can’t do them, but if the PCs need to talk extensively with multiple NPCs and then have a fight, those may need to be separate sessions.
Back in the day I think events could be very long chunks of time and now you’re probably lucky to get 2-3 hours, because everyone including the GM is busy and has kids and has work in the morning. Pacing is key to get the most out of limited time chunks available.
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@Ashkuri This is why I will always start scenes in media res now and never put a closed door in between my players and action. I have learned.
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@sao said in Tips for GMs:
Having a set solution to a problem is a way to frustrate yourself AND your players!
I agree, but I also feel the exception to this is scenes where the players are all on board for a very very specific resolution from the start. The easiest example of this are those one off scenes where a GM gets a bunch of the more combat oriented PCs together to blow off some combat steam against nameless minions of evil. In those situations, trying to find an alternate route to resolution will also frustrate everyone involved.
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@Pavel I know this as the Woodlouse Test, first formulated nearly 30 years ago.
If three woodlice can’t solve your plot with two of them on their backs, the players haven’t a hope.
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Regarding solutions to things, my suggestion is to have a tentative solution to a problem and do not, under any circumstances, rely solely on that solution/story thread to move to your next plot beat. It’s important to be flexible and be able to incorporate the emergent fiction of the game into your story.
One thing I usually do when I write out plots is use a mind map. I’ll put the inciting incident of the plot on one side and my tentative eventual goal(s) on the other side of the map, then start filling in possible avenues that could be taken to reach the goals. Next up, I create two sections for players: an active section and a bullpen section. If I know the players fairly well, I can usually anticipate the course of action the players take, which is important for developing potential story beats. Usually I’ll make a note of the characters’ primary abilities or, if I am not staff and have only observed the players, I will make a note of what I’ve seen them do most often. I’ll ask, but people are often really weird about their stats, or they used to be anyhow. Failing either of those, I’ll base it off whatever data I can mine from their wiki pages or stereotypes about those types of characters (e.g., Brujah vampires are likely going to be pro-combat).
Being a (primarily) WoD storyteller, I will also create a three-part approach to stories, with a focus on what will happen if someone attempts to develop a solution to a problem socially, through research (mental skills), or through combat. This will spin out to consequences and forward momentum, which will move to more story beats.
Since this is a largely living document, it also allows me to course correct if things are getting too wildly off path. Something that’s a bit out of left field or way out of bounds of what’s in scope for the plot might be its own spin-off. When that happens, if I can’t run that at the same time I’ll provide the player with a timeline of when we can approach it, then do some redirection if possible. Usually, but not always, those players have followed the plot to their own personal satisfaction at this point and are more interested in this sideline piece. Those players will get shifted down to the bullpen which helps me adjust the weight of some of the other possible outcomes that might come into play given the existing scenes/story beats that I’m going to be running. Do this enough, and you start to see a pattern emerge, and you can usually predict what course the story will take. Despite that, it’s important not to be reliant on your own internal narrative for the story, even if you have a fairly conclusive “big showdown fight at Important MUSH Location #1” ending.
All of that is, of course, for a longer-running thing. For shorter plots or one-shots I generally will have no ending plotted out at all, and will usually just build a few responses based on the approach type of the players: either that three part physical/mental/social, or if I’m very aware of their capabilities and reasonably sure they’re all going to show up, a set of more personalized challenges that the players will overcome based on their strengths and limitations.
This is a lot of work to do and I don’t anticipate that it’s something a lot of people want to do, but I feel like it’s been the path to success for me.
