Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 1 - So You Want to Be a GM

Episode Date: March 1, 2020

Do you want to be a GM?  Are you stuck being a GM?  Are you nervous about it?  Pour yourself your drink of choice and give this episode a listen!

This episode of the Taking20 Podcast is brought to you by air. Air, it's what you're breathing right now. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Taking20 Podcast, episode one, so you want to be a GM. I'm Jeremy Shelley. Let's dive right in. The Taking20 Podcast will provide short, bite-sized episodes of player and GM advice. It will be tips, tricks, interviews, and the goal is to make every single episode 20 minutes or less. So hopefully you can digest it in a single sitting, like during a day's commute or maybe while you're preparing for an evening's gaming session. So thank you for listening. If you haven't already, please subscribe and rate us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or wherever fine podcasts

like this are given away for free. So you have a gaming group, and it looks like you're going to be the game master or GM of that group. Why? Maybe you volunteered. Maybe you've always wanted to be a game master. You've always wanted to do some GM work and wanted to see things from the other side of the screen, and now is your chance. If you did volunteer for it, fantastic. Those of us that are GMs thank you because some of us like to play every now and then. But then again, maybe you were the last to say not it. Maybe you have a big gaming group and maybe the group all decided that someone needs to GM and you were just the slowest on the draw. Maybe you have the most experience with a certain gaming system. Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, Starfinder, Star Wars, Shadowrun, or whatever

game system that your group wants to play. Depending on what gaming system you're using, you get to be the Game Master, Dungeon Master, Referee, Game Operations Director, Storyteller, and you're unsure what to do next. I'll word about some terms. On this podcast, I will use terms like Game Master and Dungeon Master interchangeably because honestly, they mean the same thing. Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, for example, refers to the person who is the creative force behind the D&D game, sits behind the screen, and runs the game as the Dungeon Master. However, Paizo products such as Pathfinder, Pathfinder 2e, and Starfinder refer to this exact same person as the Game Master. Those two terms I will use interchangeably during this podcast. Whatever

advice I give to one can inevitably be rolled over to the other. So what is a GM or DM? If you look at some of the definitions on the popular published game systems, they include, for example, from 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons, the Dungeon Master is the master of the world, master of adventure, and master of the rules. The Dungeon Master creates adventures, places monsters, traps, and treasure inside dungeons, layers, caves, and other areas where players can go kill things, get loot, and level up. Sometimes a Dungeon Master is an actor, a voice for any person in the world that's not

currently playing at your table. The people who are playing at your table run a group called the Player Characters, or PCs. The Dungeon Master becomes the voice for anyone who is not those characters. Those are the non-Player-player characters, or NPCs. Examples of these could be the innkeeper Bob, Lorelei the elven princess, or could be Krang the witch that's at the edge of town. Other roles of the DM or GM include educator of rules. While an encyclopedic knowledge of rule set is not required to be a GM,

you do at least need to understand the basics. You're not going to know every rule going in. If you do, you have a much better brain than 99% of us. Most of us understand the basic rules and sometimes occasionally have to look things up between sessions and to adjudicate really unusual situations. Those of us that are a little longer in the tooth, remember the grapple rules from D&D 3.0 and 3.5 editions. Yeah, you needed a three-page flowchart and a PhD to try to figure out how to throw someone off a cliff. It's so much easier now. If I ever start reminiscing about, quote, the good old days of RPGs, I'll usually think about this concept and snap back to reality. The other roles of the DM or GM is inventor, storyteller, improviser, referee, sometimes even

a writer. Sometimes you're privileged with the ability to write the adventure that the players will be participating in. In the future, there'll be an entire episode built around homebrewing and generating your own worlds and your own adventures, so that'll come later on down the pipe, and I hope you're still listening then. From the Pathfinder 2nd Edition Core Rulebook, the GM is in charge of the story and world. You describe situations that the player characters experience, you consider how the actions of the player characters or PCs affect the story at large, and you interpret the rules. In short, GMs are storytellers. You and the PCs collaborate to tell a story about the adventure of this crazy band of people that are leading a very dangerous lifestyle choice. So I know what you may be thinking. I can read the book just the same as you can, Jeremy. What's the point of telling me what a GM is?

Now that we have a definition of what a GM is, let's talk about what makes a good one. The most important thing you should be concerned about as a game master or GM is one question. Are you and your players having fun? Period. Hard stop. There's a lot of discussion and a lot of nuance to exactly what that means. In general, we GMs are our own worst critics. All you remember is the fact that you flubbed the saving throw rules, you're flying by the seat of your pants, you barely remembered half the published adventure, you skipped two or three encounters accidentally and completely forgot the name of the NPC that owns the shop. You gave the party a completely different name, the players

called you out on it, and you had to scramble to make up something on the fly. Oh, oh, that's because he died and his daughter's now taken over. That's okay. It's a great gaming session if your players are smiling at the end, if they had a good time, if they're talking about the combat, talking about maybe some new NPC they met, and they're collectively excited for the next session. That's your standard you're shooting for, and go for it every single time. Not every session's going to be a home run. Sometimes you're going to have sessions where the energy level's down. Someone's not feeling well. Maybe the campaign is going a direction that your players aren't as into and they're looking to get back towards the combat aspects of the campaign.

Sometimes a gaming session goes completely sideways and maybe you'll get some feedback from your players to the end of it. That's also okay. Listen to that feedback. Tweak some things for next time. Try to make sure that your players are put in a position where they can have the best possible time. In short, player and DM fun is more important than whatever carefully crafted story you've made, which is more important than the rules of the gaming system. Okay, now hear me out.

I can already hear stop buttons being pressed and people saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. The rules are there and it's the most important thing. Every single table has a different feel to it. You as the GM need to work with the players to find out where that balance needs to be. I tend to play with a lot of players that appreciate the, what we call, rule of cool, where the rules can take a little bit of a backseat and can be modified to adjudicate a very interesting action or heroic moment. I want to jump over the table and fire both guns at the bad guy behind the bar. There may not be specific rules for exactly how that

happens, so hey, make me an acrobatics check and then let's make a couple of attack rolls and see what happens. You adjudicate the situation on the fly and give them an opportunity to do something straight out of an action movie. Some GMs will tell you that their story is the most important thing to them, but they want a particular experience to be given to the players and that the players should enjoy the experience for what it is. In my mind, that's closer to a novel than a role-playing game. If you have a great idea for a story and you don't want a lot of player input to what the story should be, then my suggestion to you would be to sit down and write that novel because I'm sure we'd all love to read it. Finally, there are GMs who are most interested in making sure that the rules are adjudicated

properly. Finally, there are GMs who are more interested in making sure that the rules are adjudicated properly, and that's even more important than the story of the character's experience or maybe even whether or not the players are having fun. There are a lot of very crunchy rule systems out there that are numbers heavy, rules heavy, and require multiple tables just to adjudicate whether an attack hit, where exactly on the body you hit them, what sort of damage you did, and what that causes. If your players enjoy that type of game, that's fine. Run it for them, but make sure they would enjoy it before you force them into it. What else makes a good GM? Well, one of the most important things to understand

is that you are not playing against the players. The vast majority of tabletop RPGs, Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder included, are not players versus the DM. Playing games are best when you work together to tell your story. Role-playing games are best when you work together to tell the character's story. Now, the DM and GM does put challenges in front of the players. Those challenges should be sufficient to make the players feel like they have to work to get what they want. The players experience the world through the DM's descriptions of the world and the people and the places that are in it. If the DM attempts to actively fight against the players and actively work against

their success, then the DM will be tempted to withhold critical information or maybe even adjudicate rules in the most negative way possible for the players. That's not really your job as a GM or DM. Your job is to provide the challenges, describe the world, allow the players to experience it. Whether you're describing the highs of overcoming those challenges as the last arrow fails the dragon, or the lows of tragic failures as your cleric tumbles off the cliff because of a failed check. One of the other things you need to do to be a really good GM is to be able to read your table. Emotional intelligence is what I'll generally call it as part of this podcast. You need to understand the emotional state of your table. You're going to have players with widely varying sets of personalities. You have some people who are the glory hogs. They like to be the ones that stand up and steal the spotlight and be the white

knight that charges over the hill to save everyone. That's fine. Use that. You also have players that are shyer, quieter. They don't accept the spotlight with as much enthusiasm as others. You as the GM should make sure you give every type of player the opportunity to have the spotlight, even if they choose to shrink away from it. For example, when you're designing adventures and you know you're going to have a traditional party of a cleric, sorcerer, rogue, fighter, make sure throughout the adventure each one of those has a time to shine. Clerics have better healing ability and usually knowledge of religion or whatever your game system calls it. Make sure at some point they have the ability to use that knowledge and use that healing capability to advance the story.

Same thing with rogues. It's always tempting for parties to treat rogues as the trap finders. You, you get in front and find the pressure plate so I don't die. In many game systems, rogues also have access to front and find the pressure plate so I don't die. In many game systems, rogues also have access to a number of skills that maybe other players don't, or maybe the rogues have more of them. Give that rogue the opportunity to use her skills to resolve a major story arc, or maybe just be the hero for today. Regardless of the makeup of your party, whether you have two PCs playing in your adventure or seven. Give each one the opportunity at some point to be the big damn hero. Another quality that makes a good GM is to let your players drive the story. You may think the most important thing for the players to be doing

right now is to venture to the extraordinary dungeon you've created, get the MacGuffin, and further the plot. Perhaps the PCs see something else as a priority. Whenever possible, give the players those reins and allow them to run that to ground. Prime example, in a campaign that I recently finished, there was a big bad evil guy that was trying to summon this dark eldritch horror to destroy the world. It was a race between the players and the big bad guy to find out which one would collect most of a set of seven artifacts. While in my mind, it was key for the players to go to the tomb of a lost elven prince

to retrieve a magical set of boots that could do amazing things, the players looked at me at the beginning of a session and said, we need a home base. We're going house shopping. I freely admit it caught me completely sideways. But did I deny them and say, no, no, you need to go to this dungeon? No. I said, okay, well, where do you want to live? So they started talking about some of the major and minor cities that were around, picked one of the cities that was somewhat in the middle,

and started asking how much houses would be in various districts. Was I prepared for this? Absolutely not. While they were talking, I'm frantically flipping through a rulebook, trying to figure out how much houses usually cost. But you know what? Players had fun shopping for houses. So on the fly, I whipped up an NPC realtor named Steve Earl, the gnome realtor. Sir, tell me what sort of house you're looking for, chief.

Steve the gnome will find your home. Stupid. Corny. Players had a blast. Next thing I know, they're looking for three-bedroom, one-bath townhomes in the major religious district to see if they could find anything close to it. They eventually had to move out to the suburbs because the price of housing inside of the major cities were very expensive. They eventually settled in a very nice two-bedroom house out in the suburbs with a nice garden and convenient access to a small market district. How did we get here? The point is, the players made a choice. They wanted to go house shopping,

and in no way was I going to take that choice away from them and force them into a dungeon I'd prepared that evening. I just stuck that dungeon in my notebook and we shifted it to the next session. Players had a good time talking to Steve the Gnome, and that's my bar for success. That brings me to the next point about what I think makes a good GM. Be flexible. No matter what plan you set in motion, no matter what ideas that you have about what the players will do in the next gaming session, no matter the grand design that you have for the way the plot can unfold, your players are going to find that plan, torpedo it, sink it, swim down to the wreckage, and blow that up too. It's what players do. It's not a bad thing.

It makes you think on your feet, and it actually sometimes results in better plots than you even had devised. Be flexible with what the players want to do. Allow them to carry the plot forward. In a future episode, we'll talk about how to design a big bad evil guy for your campaign, the arch nemesis that the players are trying to combat or find or bring to justice. In a lot of the campaigns that I've run, I haven't even picked the big bad evil guy until maybe session 5, because I want to find out what's important to the players and what direction they want to take the campaign. One of the last things I want to mention for this episode is how you handle conflict.

The most common conflict that you'll have inside the game is players versus monsters or players versus NPCs, where the players are on the road to Spaceport X, and there's a group of rebels that want to try to steal the fusion diamond from them. Or there are a group of orc raiders on the quarry road and it's critical to the city if those ore shipments arrive unmolested. That's the most common conflict. Your game system will have good rules on how to handle this. Just make sure that the players understand the environment that they're in when the encounter happens so they can make the most informed choices. Another conflict to understand is players versus the world. One of my favorite phrases to players is that the world is always moving and doesn't stop when you leave. Things are always happening in the world and the players should understand that their actions have repercussions. Some players want to be murder hobos, which will be a topic that

we'll talk about again in a future episode. They want to go from place to place, killing anything and everything they can before they move on. There should be repercussions if the players want to go to a small village, kill a shopkeeper to take all the inventory, and then jet off to the next town. That should definitely get some attention. Not just from that small town, but when something like that happens, maybe the small town has connection to law enforcement from a larger town in the kingdom. The small town sheriff alerts the authorities, and the news of these murderers spreads out like a spider web from there. How quickly, how dramatically, and what the effects are will be up to you.

There can also be table conflict, and what I mean by that is conflict outside of the gaming world. Player versus player. There are going to be entire episodes of that in the future, but what I want to recommend in short is that if you have two players who cannot get along for whatever reason, and they seem to always be at odds with one another, pull them both aside individually. Make sure you have a conversation with each one to try to find out what the problem is.

Ideally, talk to them individually first, understand where they're coming from, and then meet with both of them together to see if you can try to reconcile the two. they're coming from, and then meet with both of them together to see if you can try to reconcile the two. The last conflict I'll talk about is player versus GM. All GMs are going to have this happen eventually, where a player sits down at the table, they don't enjoy the game for whatever reason, or maybe they're a GM themselves and feel like they could run it better. Maybe they have a friend who runs a different style of game and that's what they would prefer. Talk to this person. Again, it's about communication. Explain to them what type of game you're running. Encourage them to buy in and be a part of it.

Now, a lot of the topics that we covered today, we've barely scratched the surface and need a lot more thorough coverage. Trying to limit this to 20 minutes means that some of the future episodes, we will dive deeper into a narrower focused topic. On the next episode, for example, we'll talk about what you don't have to be to be a good GM. We'll also talk about how to get from where you are now to being the good GM you want to be in the future. I hope you tune in and give this handsome man another shot. Once again, I want to thank our fake sponsor, Air. Air, now with more carbon dioxide. Thank you again for listening to the Taking 20 podcast episode one. Please take a moment to subscribe to us, rate us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or wherever you happen to

be listening to this fine podcast. Until next time, I've been Jeremy Shelley, and here's hoping your next game is your best game.