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.
