gm'ing tips?

[scarecrow102]

so im fairly new to gm'ing and i wanted to now if anyone has any tips for me? any is welcomed!

[Bill]

The best advice I can give you is to remember that your job as GM is to facilitate the PCs' stories, not force them into your story. You can still define a lot of parameters up front (no evil alignments, all the PCs are from the same area, only classes from specific books, that the scenario is to save a princess or steal the Ark of the Covenant, etc.) but once the characters are built and the scenario is under way, it'll be a lot more fun for everyone if you don't over-plan or come up with absolute solutions to the challenges that the players will encounter. Have faith in their creativity and when they offer a somewhat plausible solution play it out. Even if it fails, the players will enjoy it more than going through a preplanned solution that you've fed them with an NPC.

One thing I do that I highly recommend is a post-session wrap up. After every session, I ask each player who was it that made the session more exciting for them and why. It gives everybody a chance to say something nice about the game and reinforces good player behavior. I award bonus experience points to the player that receives the most compliments to further incentivise good play too; around 250 usually. I award another player the same amount for any reason I like, usually because they've made an effort to role-play more or they've helped move the story in a new direction. I've been using this technique for about ten years and it's always had a positive impact on my groups.

Take your prep-time seriously. Once you've gotten the hang of things, it's not too hard to fake your way through a session. However, having handouts, notes on the various things you want to include, a list of known NPCs, and a list of names that you can use for NPCs that haven't been encountered yet will give your players a much better experience. It's easy to focus on stats and gear for NPCs, but those are really less important than what they look like and what their motivations are.

Lastly, play act. Your players will take their cues from you. If you get into character, do funny voices and big gestures, so will they. If you narrate stuff, so will they. The former makes for a much more memorable game in my experience.

[Natasha]

Be consistent and fair. I usually let the dice answer their questions or determine the choices NPCs make. Often it's 1-50% is this and 51-100% is that. I fix my mistakes as soon as I recognise I've made one. They won't do what they don't want to do so figure out a way to work in your ideas another way if they're going left when you want them to go right; one way to do this is to keep your encounters flexible enough to appear most places in the game and another is to completely change the presentation of a core idea. When the rules are in doubt and they have made a decent case, I usually take it. Although you control their adversaries, you are not their adversary.

[Killer Cyborg]

Your job is not to defeat the PCs.
Your job is to help everybody have fun, and perhaps to challenge them a bit.

[Daniel Stoker]

Expect the PC's to breeze past hard puzzles that you spent hours coming up with as if it was nothing (if they don't just completely bypass them) but then be find themselves pole-axed by something as easy as how to cross a stream and make it into a night long event. And gods forbid one of them is an or wants to be an engineer.....


Daniel Stoker

[Natasha]

Which means sometimes you have to make executive decisions about pace and spoon feed them a little bit to move things along. But as I've said, you can pocket that encounter for another time and place. I've received some resistance to this notion in the past when I've expressed it, but I think it's important not to get bogged down in stuff. I've seen 3 hours in real life blown away resolving something that took 15 seconds in the game (and I'm not talking about a combat round) and a lot of players sitting on their hands waiting for one or two to figure what they're going to do because the Game Master had no interest in pace. If there are no natural leaders in the group, you're going to have to figure out how to provide it without being blatant deus ex machining it.

[scarecrow102]

thank you all for the wonderful feed back! it's certainly helps!

[Alrik Vas]

Which means sometimes you have to make executive decisions about pace and spoon feed them a little bit to move things along. But as I've said, you can pocket that encounter for another time and place. I've received some resistance to this notion in the past when I've expressed it, but I think it's important not to get bogged down in stuff. I've seen 3 hours in real life blown away resolving something that took 15 seconds in the game (and I'm not talking about a combat round) and a lot of players sitting on their hands waiting for one or two to figure what they're going to do because the Game Master had no interest in pace. If there are no natural leaders in the group, you're going to have to figure out how to provide it without being blatant deus ex machining it.

Everything mentioned here is pragmatic gold.

[MADMANMIKE]

All of this advice is excellent.

For my part, I say if the GM gets a good handle on the setting they're going to use, the rest becomes a matter of logic if-thans. If the players do this, than that will happen. With that you can run a game on minimal planning as long as your players don't just sit there like a bump on a log. I've run sketch-outlined adventures with different groups of players using the same characters and it's come out surprisingly different each time.

[Myrrhibis]

Expect the PC's to breeze past hard puzzles that you spent hours coming up with as if it was nothing (if they don't just completely bypass them) but then be find themselves pole-axed by something as easy as how to cross a stream and make it into a night long event. And gods forbid one of them is an or wants to be an engineer.....


Daniel Stoker

My current GM says this or the Players latching onto a minute detail as a Major Plot Point (the aforementioned PCs going left when you wanted them to go right) are his two biggest trials as a GM. Regardless of system.

[flatline]

Learn to recognize when a particular player (or set of players) is losing interest. You'll eventually learn what kinds of things cause each player to be energized by the game or to lose interest. Gloss over the things that your players find tedious or uninteresting. If one player likes something that the others don't, let him have his glory, but don't let it bog down the game for too long or you'll lose the other players for the rest of the session.

--flatline

[Spinachcat]

Definitely post lots of questions in both the GM's forum and the game specific forum. There are many GMs who frequent the forums who can share decades of experience.

My main advice is that YOU rule the rules. The rules do not rule you. If something in the book doesn't work for you or your players, change it. You are not beholden to the rules as written or the game line canon.

[flatline]

Definitely post lots of questions in both the GM's forum and the game specific forum. There are many GMs who frequent the forums who can share decades of experience.

My main advice is that YOU rule the rules. The rules do not rule you. If something in the book doesn't work for you or your players, change it. You are not beholden to the rules as written or the game line canon.

Absolutely. They're not rule books, they are suggestion books.