Improving My Craft as a GM

I have played roleplaying games for almost two decades at this point.  Strange to realize that I have been roleplaying longer in my life than I was not roleplaying.  My preference between running games as the GM or playing them as a character has always tended towards running games.  Maybe I’m just a control freak.  I’m sure my players will attest to that.  But as most games have 4-5 players for every GM at the table, I need to make sure I can offer the best game I can.  Otherwise if I offer to GM a game, I’ll just be overruled by the rest of the group and we’ll go in a different direction.

Over the past few years, I’ve taken a much more deliberate approach to being a GM.  I have always enjoyed doing it, and I feel like I’ve learned a lot from running games, but over the past five years or so, I have been much more focused in trying to hone my GM-ing skills.  Sometimes I’m successful in my attempts, and other times I find I still have a lot to learn.  I thought it might be interesting to look back at some of the things I’ve tried to learn.

The Ice World – Dungeons and Dragons (4E)

I ran this story back in college with Dungeons and Dragons 3.0, and then decided to revive it when the Fourth Edition of the game came around.  It was our first long-term 4E campaign so I wanted to go with a more familiar storyline.

The setting was a world that had been dominated by an ice age ever since the Frost Dragon (one of four siblings) had been slain, unleashing his cold upon the world.  The other dragons fled, leaving their world to slowly decay.  Now the three dragons were returning, but in the form of eggs, and forces around the world were trying to gather them for their own plans.  The players had to nurture the eggs, then hide and train the newborn dragons, then lead them in a war against the other forces that were trying to claim them.

As a GM, I had a couple of goals for this campaign.  Primarily, I wanted to finish a long-term campaign.  So often I would start a campaign, get really excited about it, and then have my interest wane halfway through.  It sounds like a simple goal – just to finish a campaign – but it certainly was something I had to work at.  Knowing I would run the campaign through to the end helped me learn how to keep grasp on a growing storyline.  I used to keep expanding and expanding storylines until I could no longer keep a hold on them, and then I’d give up on the campaign and start anew.  Knowing that I would have to end the game eventually taught me how to be tighter in my storytelling.

The other thing I incidentally started doing was being more flexible in my GMing.  This is something I had been working on in the past, but I decided to push it farther this time.  When a player told me what they were doing, I tried to move away from figuring out why what they were going to do would not work and towards trying to figure out how it would work.  As a result, several parts of the story were vastly different than I anticipated.  One of the players killed off the historian who had a lot of knowledge early on just because he was a goblin.  Later, a daring escape was led down an ice mountain by one player using a second as a sled.

I actually had a harder time with the second part (being more improv-friendly) than with the first.  Running the campaign to completion was difficult at times, but I always knew that I could get it done because I was in control of the whole situation.  It would only really fail if I let it fail.  Being more flexible with players was harder because I had to always be on my toes and suppress my instinct to find the fault in plans.

The Fairy Tale World – Grimm

Grimm was a system I had wanted to run for a long time, but it took me a while to track down the book for it.  The premise was that everyone was a kid, and that the things from Grimm’s Fairy Tales were real.  This was well before the television show of the same name, so if you’re thinking it’s going to be like that, you’re a bit off.

The idea of the world is that the characters all fall into the Fairy Tale world for whatever reason and play completely in that world.  I wanted to mix things up a little and try a different type of story.  I’ve always loved time travel and the paradoxes that can come from it, so I decided to craft a story working with that as a premise.

The idea was that the characters would travel back and forth between the real world and the fairy tale world.  Every time they returned to the real world, things would have changed as a result of what happened in the fairy tale world.  Slowly the group figured out why that was happening and by the end of the game, they were able to control the changes and set the world back to normal.

In the mix with all of this was a group of adults who were trying to harvest this ability the children seemed to have to reshape the world.  And one of those people managed to get himself caught in the fairy tale world, and was able to start pushing the players around in the real world, dropping them through time.

Sound complicated?  It was.  Having gone through and finished a full campaign, I decided this time to try to test the limits of how intricate a plot I could create and still reach the goal of finishing the campaign.  I ended up with unusual situations of having the players roleplay through the results of actions they had not even set into motion yet, and then having to backtrack in future sessions and get the situations to line up with what had already been done.

My initial storyline proved far too ambitious.  After going through a few fairy tale worlds, I decided for my own sanity I had to cut the story in half and toss whole pieces out the window because, as usual, I had created far too much to work with.  I slipped into one of the hardest campaigns I’ve run where I really had to force myself to keep going.  It started to feel a bit more like a chore than like something to do for fun.  Thankfully my players were encouraging and I cut a few pieces out, restrung the plot together, and we managed to get through to the end.

Lesson learned, though.  I had to be a lot more realistic about my plots knowing that I would eventually have to tie them all down in the end.

The Four Horsemen – Alpha / Omega (and other systems)

I have never really been a fan of gaming systems.  When it comes down to it, I just don’t really care about the system we’re using.  That was never more clear than when I ran one of my gaming groups through a game of Alpha/Omega.  We had seen the game at GenCon one year, and the art for it was gorgeous.  So we decided we had to play it.

Of course, I am the worst at dealing with gaming systems.  So I told my players to read what they felt they needed to know, and we’d go from there.  Shortly after, I got fed up with the crunch-heavy system and we adopted a different system.  That one lasted longer, but we ended up piecing one together that worked by the end of the campaign.

My goal as a GM for this one, beyond playing the game to an end, was to play a modern-ish (really more like a Blade Runner style world) game.  I love modern settings.  Supernatural, Buffy, etc. are all shows I love.  But there’s a problem when I try to translate those to roleplaying.  I suck at running modern games.  I feel stupid when I’m trying to justify a group of people infiltrating an office building and killing a businessman and then escaping because… well… what kind of sense does that make in this world?

This was an attempt to get that monkey off my back and run a modern game where the players could do outrageous things.  Because let’s face it, they do outrageous things in every genre.  It’s just easier to hide them in other genres.

The other thing I wanted to do with this game was try my hand at running a series of shorter stories.  One session “crimes” to solve with a vague overlying plot.

I managed to succeed at running the full game in a modern setting with a Supernatural bend to it, but outside of two or three sessions sprinkled here and there, I did not succeed at a “monster of the week” type campaign.  My tendency to want a large inter-woven story took over and I started piecing together parts of the small stories until they all became one large plot.

The Gods – Scion

Having proven that I could run a modern game, I wanted to return to see if I could run it a second time.  I was trying to run a superhero game, but instead I went with Scion and gave it a more mythological bend.  The premise of Scion is that the characters are literally the children of gods of a certain pantheon.  In this case, the Greeks.  But I wanted the players to go through a bit of uncertainty and exploration of who they were.

The plot here involved government conspiracies, the old Greek gods, other Scions of the Greeks, other nations and their Scions, and the Titans of old.  I tied the story of the world back as far as WWII with the allies and axis utilizing different strains of genetic manipulation to try to create super-soldiers, of which the characters were the third generation of the American version.

After Alpha/Omega, I decided I was going to pick a single system and stick with it all the way through, even if I didn’t end up liking it completely.  Also, after having a couple of great scenes from Alpha/Omega involving the back-stories of a couple of characters, I decided this time I would make sure to tie every character’s background into the plot one way or another.

I was able to achieve this with varying degrees of success.  Interestingly (though not surprisingly), the characters who were tied in more tended to enjoy the game more.  One character in particular I struggled and struggled to get involved in the game.  In the end, his was the least involved character, and I think he was fine seeing the campaign end.  Even still, the other characters got pretty well involved and enjoyed the game.

Legend of the Five Rings

This is the campaign I am currently running.  I had a few goals when I started planning this one, and time will tell if I manage to hit any of them.  A lot of my goals are based on refining previous goals, or continuing my more successful plans through to this campaign.

Foremost, I am building a campaign that hopefully does not favor one style of character over any other.  Specific sessions may favor one over the other, but I am trying to make sure every character type has equal time to shine.  In the midst of a battle to save a city, for example, the courtiers were able to negotiate treaties with other clans present to get assistance to have direct impact on the battle.

I am also taking my plans from Scion to incorporate every backstory.  Since I consider myself having failed at that last time around, I am endeavoring to put more effort into it this time around.

Finally, I am trying to plan for the long term a bit better.  Every session I create I have a list of things I am trying to accomplish beyond moving the plot of the game forward.  One session may have the following notes on my page: make sure the characters meet X and don’t like him, make sure they learn about Y event happening elsewhere, and make sure that Z happens near the characters.  I may not have devised exactly how those things are going to happen in the session yet, but keeping those in front of me helps to make sure my long-term plans actually work out well.

To achieve all of this, I have had to be far more organized than I have been before.  I am writing out all my sessions, recapping them afterwards to make sure I don’t forget what happened, and writing notes to myself for what I want to happen in the future.

While not a goal, one interesting thing about this campaign is that for the first time in a long time, I will actually know the system better than the people playing it.  I have found this is very advantageous.  Often in the past I have favored story over the crunch that goes along with it.  It might just be my point of view, but I feel like I have a lot more internal consistency this time around because the system of the world is consistent and something I understand.

I like to consider myself a good GM.  My players tend to enjoy the games I run.  We still tell stories about different sessions or scenes that we remember.  But the same as any skill out there, becoming a better GM requires one to put in the effort.  Not all of my campaigns have high responses from others, but the more I run, and the more I vary my style each time, the better I get and the more I enjoy it.