Dear Fledgling GM,
I was going to start this letter by saying, “I was once where you are now,” but then I realized that you are probably not an awkward sixth grader living in the 1990s. You are also probably not forcing a heavily house-ruled version of D&D on friends who only put up with your shenanigans because they are all first timers too. To put it another way, you probably already know a lot more than I did when I got into gaming.
And you have come to the hobby at a good time. There are more high quality RPGs now than there have ever been, and it’s far easier to find people to play with than it once was. Not only that, but the hobby has taken on an element of respectability that it didn’t have when I was a kid, especially as more and more celebrities ‘come out’ as fans of games like Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder. Van Diesel and Stephen Colbert have both publicly discussed their affection for roleplaying games, and Will Wheaton and Felicia Day have become geek celebrities.
You probably know all this already. And maybe you don’t really care, but you should because this is an exciting time. Tabletop rpgs might just be getting to where comic books were in the very early 90s: within spitting distance of being taken seriously by at least a few influential people as an art form. I don’t just mean the sourcebooks; I mean the actual sessions themselves- the collaborative acts of story-making that have the capacity to do for their small audiences all of the things that good art always does, but in a way unique to the art form. But I will save my rant about why tabletop roleplaying is an art. I assume you aren’t here for that.
I assume you are here for advice. Frankly, if your players love your game then you’re already doing it right. Nevertheless, here are a few big-picture pointers that might help you if you are just starting out.
1) Never forget that your game exists for the players.
This might seem obvious, but it is remarkable how many game masters forget that their first responsibility is to their players. Be especially careful not to behave as though the purpose of your game is to tell your story. This approach assumes a passive audience and can frustrate players who want to participate in shaping the narrative. If what you really want to do is tell a story, write a novel instead.
Justin Alexander, who writes a prestigious RPG blog called The Alexandrian, argues that roleplaying games are “happenings,” rather than stories, which might be a helpful way to think about your game. Nevertheless, in many ways a good RPG campaign IS a story: it needs to have conflict, rising action, climax, etc; however, in an RPG, aspects of the plot must develop organically as a direct result of how the PCs behave and what they decide to do. It is important to know enough about your NPCs and your world for you to improvise on the spot, but don’t be so married to your ‘story’ that you deny your players the chance to be collaborators in your art. After all, it’s their art too.
2) Don’t Railroad Your Players
This is such a commonly given guideline that I would feel silly including it were it not so frequently violated. “Railroading” your players is forcing them through a narrative that they have little ability to affect. New GMs are often guilty of this because they haven’t developed the confidence to improvise on the macro-level, or because they already ‘have a plan;’ however, it isn’t that hard to improvise even on the macro-level if you just stay relaxed and open minded.
And there is nothing wrong with having a plan, (in fact you should,) but it has to be flexible. It’s totally fine to lay a trail of breadcrumbs for your players as long as you don’t force them to follow it if they choose not to.
Many of the problems you might be tempted to avoid with railroading can be avoided instead by giving your players some very basic guidelines to ensure that they make the kinds of characters who will be willing to work together and to pursue whatever big picture goals drive the campaign. There is nothing wrong with telling your players to make characters who are sworn to recover a particular artifact, or who are members of ‘the Sore-foot Knaves,’ a traveling acting troop which is really gang of thieves for hire. But once your players have made these characters, they should be free to act as they wish, rather than obligated to follow a particular path.
3) Make Your World Bigger Than What Your Players See
The best way to avoid railroading and still end up with a “happening” that is also a good story is to create a dynamic world that is always a little bit bigger than what your players see. This means that you always need to know more about the history, politics, and geography than they do on both the global and local level, so that when the PCs make unexpected decisions you can respond quickly with good material that is part of a consistent larger whole.
It may help to have a few extra well developed NPCs in the wings so that you aren’t scrambling to come up with a description and personality for that urchin your players unexpectedly decide to befriend. A list of culturally appropriate names is also a good idea, as are short descriptions of locations that you don’t actually expect them to visit.
But wait! There is danger here. Having created a deeper and more nuanced world, you might be tempted to show it off by making sure your players don’t miss out on any of it. (If your NPCs start laying on the exposition, or you start giving long accounts to the mage concerning the history she ‘learned at the academy,’ you may be guilty of ‘world-flashing’.) The point of creating a complex world is so that your players always have something new to discover autonomously. Make your peace with the fact that if you do it right, your players will never see the iceberg of your genius, only its shinning summit peaking above the waves.
4) Good GMs learn from other GMs
No matter how creative and talented you are, you can learn a lot by playing with other game masters. We have all heard the saying, “good artists borrow, great artists steal.” Great game masters are also great thieves: they steal setting details, NPC personas, clever ways of using mechanics, strategies for dealing with difficult players, even jokes. You can learn more from playing a single session with a really good game master than you can in thirty hours of reading online articles like this one. Even bad game masters can be instructive. There is nothing like a really frustrating game with an out of touch GM to help you learn what not to do, (which is every bit as important as know what works.)
You might be thinking that this all sounds well and good, but you don’t know any local game masters. If fact, maybe the reason you became a GM to begin with is that you want to play RPGs and the only way to do it is to run games for your friends. Fear not. All you have to do is get yourself to a couple of conventions.
Any big gaming convention will have hundreds of sessions of RPGs with at least dozens of different game masters. In a single weekend, you could easily play in four or five different games. If you want to maximize your chances of finding someone really good, ask around. Con regulars often know whose games are not to be missed.
Your local game store might also be an option; many have websites or corkboards where local gamers can announce they are looking for a game.
5) Try out different RPGs
Like most people who play tabletop RPGs, my first experience was with D&D; it’s a great game, which is probably the reason that it is without a doubt the most famous tabletop roleplaying game of all time. That said, the world of RPGs is vast and wide
There are high fantasy games, gothic horror games, sci fi games, steampunk games, post-apocalyptic games, historical games, and games that bend the boundaries of genre. Each RPG offers something a little different from everything else on the market or it does not survive for long.
When players at conventions talk to vendors of new RPGs, they generally ask: “what’s the setting? What are the mechanics like?” And “who can I be?” There is tremendous variety in the ways different games answer these questions, so if you have only experienced one way, you’re missing out.
Even if you ultimately decide that you are only interested in playing one or two different RPGs regularly, you can learn a lot about how to be a better GM from playing and running other games, as each requires you to think a little differently about setting, mechanics, and character. Even D&D, the game that spawned the hobby, has changed considerably over the years to incorporate some of the best innovations from other RPGs. If the folks at Wizards of the Coast can learn something from this approach, so can you.
