Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 2 - So You STILL Want to Be a GM

Episode Date: March 1, 2020

Since it was too much for one episode, Jeremy continues his discussion on what makes a good Game Master / Dungeon Master.  Have you finished the drink from last episode yet?  WELL WHY NOT?

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the second episode of the Taking20 podcast. Today will be a continuation of the previous topic, so you want to be a GM. On episode one, we talked about some tips, some tricks, some advice about being a GM. What it is, what you actually do from behind the screen of being a GM or a DM. We talked about the importance of players having fun. We talked about why this is a collaborative experience, not a players versus DM. We also talked about the ability to give each player the spotlight. But now that we've talked about what does make a good GM or DM, let's talk about what you don't have to be. And the first thing I'm going to mention may be a little bit controversial, but stick with me a minute. What you don't have to be is Matthew Mercer from

Critical Role. For those of you that have listened to Critical Role or watched it on, you know, whether it's on their YouTube channel or watch their Twitch streams live, you know that Matthew Mercer is a diem par excellence. He's probably one of the best of the current generation that we have. par excellence. He's probably one of the best of the current generation that we have. His voice acting is second to none. He is extremely talented. His world building is amazing, so much so that Wizards of the Coast have dedicated two books to his world, Exandria. You may watch Matthew Mercer and be intimidated immediately. I could never be that. I don't have that many voices. I'm not that dedicated in my world building. I don't have all those details. I'll never come up with an NPC as memorable as the one that he just made.

Part of being a DM and part of being a GM is finding what you're good at and giving your players that unique experience of you as a GM. Just because Matthew Mercer is the top of the top of the top 1% of GMs that may ever walk this earth and you can't be that, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be a GM. Another person you don't have to be is Chris Perkins from Acquisitions Incorporated, Dice Camera Action, and numerous other places. He is an amazing game designer. He knows the rules and applies them in really creative fashions. And he's an amazing DM. He has his skills. He has his unique abilities. And just because yours are different, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't enjoy being a GM.

Don't think for a second that people wouldn't love to have you as a GM just because you don't have the grapple rules memorized. Another one that I definitely want to call attention to that you don't have to be is Matt Colville from The Chain. The best way I can describe him is he's an amazing strategist. He is a very thoughtful GM. He puts a lot of time and effort into thinking about the strategy behind his monsters and the plots that he sets up, and he expects the players to do the same. You don't have to be Matt Colville to be a good GM. Calling out a couple more names, Debra Ann Wall from Relics and Rarities. She is a wicked puzzle

designer. I've watched some of her streams and some of the things that she hands to her players and thought, I will never be that. And you know what? I will never be that. That's okay. Her skills are not my skills, and your skills are not hers. If you like some ideas of hers, obviously borrow those just like you would borrow from Matt Colville or Chris Perkins or Matthew Mercer or anybody else I'm going to name. You don't have to be what they are. You don't have to be Troy LaVallee from Glass Cannon who is charismatic and hilarious and engaging and great personality and a wonderful advocate for Pathfinder. Every one of those DMs and GMs have the right tone and the right skills for the

type of game that they want to run. Matthew Mercer's game, Critical Role, is very role-play heavy, where the expectation is that the players stay in voices for extended periods of time and the like, whereas you and your group may not want to come up with character voices. You may just want to treat it almost like a video game. Go here, kill monsters, get stuff, level up. None of us are these DMs that I listed. None of us are Matthew Mercer except for him. None of us are Debra Ann Wall except for her. If you're willing to GM and you focus on the players, you're 90% of the way there of being a great GM. Over time, you'll find the style and what works for you and your players. For example, my games tend to be a little lighter on the role-playing, the voices and the whatnot,

and heavier on comedy. There's a lot of comedy aspects to it that other DMs may see as environment-breaking, if you will. But when it comes to finding your style and finding what works for you and finding what makes you comfortable, hopefully this podcast will help you along the way. So you still want to be a good GM, otherwise you wouldn't be listening to me ramble. So how do you get there? Let me start with rule number one, or zero if you like Unix and Linux. Rule number one, focus on your players. Your players are your game. That's going to be an episode of its own that I have planned in the very near future. But focus on your players, focus on their fun, focus on their ability to shine, be in the spotlight, and enjoy spending time with one another.

I think one of the key aspects of being a good GM is have what we call a session zero. This is a get-together before the actual campaign proper starts so that you can communicate with the players to find out what they expect. you can communicate with the players to find out what they expect. You can set your expectations around the table as to what rules that you feel like you're going to enforce and which ones you're not going to enforce. What the rules are for not the characters, but the players. For example, allowing or disallowing things like smoking and drinking and that kind of thing. You can also establish the rules for the campaign that you're going to run. Maybe you're going to run a pirate heavy campaign and the expectation is that the paladins really probably won't have a good time because there's going to be a lot of looting. Maybe the campaign is going to be more classic

heroes charging over the hill to turn the tide of a war. Set that stage in that session zero and that way the players kind of all know what to expect. Another thing you should do is set the campaign stage. Where is this going to be held? Where's your campaign starting? Where do you plan on it going? Is it going to be on one plane of existence, or is it going to be plane hopping quite a bit? There's a completely different type of campaign that you can run if you set it in a deep elven forest or a far future space station or even maybe somehow the players have been transported into ancient Egypt here on earth and they are the only creatures on the planet who have any sort of magical ability. In that session zero the players can discuss what types of characters they want to play and they can actually

discuss in person what classes they're going to run, what races they're going to be. Doing that in person instead of via email just does it a lot faster, and it cuts down on a lot of possible hurt feelings when somebody shows up with their elven gunslinger that they've always wanted to run, and you tell them, ha ha, no guns in the campaign. Give the players advice during that session zero. For example, if you're running a campaign that's kind of piratey, you may want to let them know or give them advice that you may want to take ranks in whatever skill or feat that gives you the ability to pilot a ship or swim if you fall off. If this is the first time that you're GMing, my one piece of advice would be to use a pre-built adventure.

Customizing encounters, adventures, maybe even entire campaigns is an art as much as a science. So I always recommend the very first time that you DM or GM, use a pre-built adventure or adventure path. It makes the preparation work a lot easier. All you really have to do is read the adventure path and understand the abilities that the NPCs and monsters have. You don't have to worry about doing a lot of balancing work, doing a lot of changing or designing things on the fly. It's already there for you and it makes your life a lot easier. First time DMing? Good. Rules, read them, use them as a guide. The rules as written, and this will probably cause somebody to turn this podcast off, the rules as written are a guide, not a hard and fast

must-do-it-this-way. If a character wants to do something that you're not exactly sure how it should be done, make a ruling and move on. Use time during the break or time between sessions maybe to look it up and see exactly how it should be done. Then discuss it with the players at the table. Say, hey, we did this wrong. I said you had to do a dexterity check when it really should have been a saving throw. Fix it going forward. Don't retcon it. Don't go back and try to undo it. You made a decision at

the time and it kept the game flowing. There's nothing worse than having a campaign or a game stop dead while you listen to people flip through 600 pages to figure out exactly what destructive harmonics does. Make your ruling and move on. You are the arbiter of the rules, but the key thing to remember is that the story belongs to you and your players. Make sure that the rules, as you are enforcing them, reinforce the fun. Another thing to remember, player agency is paramount. So what's player agency? Player agency is the ability for the person sitting at the table decide what their character does. It is your job to tell them what happens when they choose their actions. Don't ever just tell a player what his or her character does. Let the player decide what

the character does, and then you adjudicate whatever that decision would be. Another thing is you don't let players use skills and spells to force another character to do something. Now, the classic gross example of this is, I cast Charm Person on this other PC because I want to sleep with her. No, that's not fun. Okay, you know what? Let me correct that. Maybe all of your players are there to live out some sort of repressed sexual fantasy. If so, happy spanking. Most of the time, that's not true. Don't let players' characters use the intimidate skill to force another player's character to do something that maybe that player does not want to do. Your players have agency and their decisions should matter. Another thing you should never do is humiliate or insult a player or character at the table.

Know your table. You know the people that you're playing with. If you're playing with a bunch of strangers, obviously take this very, very cautiously. But for the vast majority of the time, you'll know most of, hopefully all of the players at your table. Don't use the game to insult or humiliate a player or his or her character. Sometimes the dice are really unfriendly. Sometimes you're going to roll a natural one, or they're going to roll multiple natural ones. Those critical failures, or whatever your game system calls them, where someone rolls the lowest possible result, they're opportunities for humor. They're opportunities for interesting story moments. They're not opportunities for embarrassment. Good communication between you and your players

is absolutely critical. I mentioned earlier you have to understand what your players are looking for. I would recommend meeting with every single one of them one-on-one and asking them a very basic question. Why do you want to play Starfinder? Why do you want to play Dungeons and Dragons? Why do you want to play the Star Wars RPG? Find out what their expectations are for the campaign. Do they want to be big damn heroes? Do they want to live out a fantasy world where they have some sort of empowerment that maybe they don't have now? Maybe they just want to get together with friends, drink a few beers, have some snacks, and have a good time. Set those expectations, find out what their expectations are, and make sure they stay pretty much in line with what you provide

them. So good communication, one-on-one, starting out, can save a lot of heartache later on. Especially early on, keep your house rules to a minimum. A lot of new GMs will do things like, I'm going to ignore encumbrance or weight rules as long as you keep it fairly common sense. I usually do this in my campaigns because I jokingly say we're playing Dungeons and Dragons, not Dungeons and Cost Point Accounting. So I usually ignore a lot of the encumbrance rules unless players want to get completely stupid. There was an adventure that we were running where it just so happened that the players stumbled upon an armory that had a thousand arrows in it.

And one of the players said, I want us to take all thousand arrows. That was a moment where I said, you know the encumbrance rules? Yeah, they'll come up if you start carrying that much. They took a reasonable amount of arrows, I believe 40 if I remember correctly, and moved on. In short, don't make the first time that you DM your attempt to roll out this brand new rule about hitting certain body parts on certain

swings with certain numbers. Keep your house rules very simple early on. Later on, as you get more experience, if you want to roll more house rules in, talk to your players about it, and if everybody's on board, go to town. While you're DMing, write stuff down or record the session as you go, because believe me, in the moment when you're trying to remember how many hit points this bugbear has and exactly how many shots he has left on his laser rifle and exactly how far away he is from the wizard in the back, things can go a little crazy and there's some stuff that can happen that you'll completely forget about. A lot of times your players will ask you a question, oh what's the name of the barkeep?

And you go, Bob. You have to remember that that's Bob. You've told the players that and they're, somebody's probably writing it down. So make some notes or record the session because in the heat of the moment you may have to make something up on the fly and it can easily get lost. One thing it's important to enforce with the players is that the world does not sit still. This is not a video game even if you play it like it is one. In a video game, when a player leaves an area, that area a lot of times will unload, and the NPCs and everything that the players have been interacting with effectively go away. They completely disappear.

That should not be true in your world. So if a player comes into a bar, doesn't pay his tab, punches the serving guy, and storms out, there should be repercussions if he tries to come back to that same bar. Maybe the bar owner has gone to the cops. Maybe there'll be a Starfinder police there waiting to have a nice discussion with a person who ran out on his 300 credit bar tab. Time marches on is what I always say to my players and decisions have weight. If they decide, for example, in a previous campaign where they were chasing MacGuffins, if they're chasing MacGuffin number three, they may lose out on MacGuffin number two. Things have a weight to them and make sure that the players understand that sometimes choosing

to do A loses the ability to gain B. Last piece of advice for this episode is to keep the game moving. Stay in the conversation. Make sure that you're paying attention to what the players are doing, even if you're looking something up in a book or looking something up online. If a player says they want to do a certain action, make a quick adjudication of the rules and keep the game moving forward. Don't let the PCs languish and anguish over decisions that they may have to make. There's a term called paralysis by analysis, and so many players and adventuring parties succumb to this. They're presented with multiple options and there are multiple ways to proceed forward, and they just don't know how to do so.

So many times it's because of a desire for the optimal outcome. They want the absolute best possible result for every decision that they make. Encourage players not to get lost trying to achieve the best possible outcome. Encourage them to make decisions based on what their character would do in that moment. As a DM, this is going to be a perpetual problem. Heck, one of the groups that I am DMing right now, if I let them, would spend 20 minutes arguing over which 5 foot square to occupy during a round of combat. In situations like that, it's easy for players to get bored or lose interest in what's going on and maybe start paying attention to their phone or what's on TV or other distractions that happen to be around the table. Keep the game moving. It keeps

all of the players engaged. Possible solutions to this. It's concepts like danger dice where when players loiter too long, they actually accumulate a higher percentage chance for wandering monster, avalanche, a Meteor Shower, whatever happens to be appropriate for the area where they're adventuring. This seems like a good place to wrap this topic up. Very quickly, I wanted to thank our sponsor, Breakfast. It's what's for dinner. You've been listening to the Taking 20 podcast. I hope you've been entertained and enjoyed. Please like, subscribe, leave us a review on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or wherever you're listening to this fine podcast. Also head

on over to taking20podcast.com where you can listen to past episodes and provide feedback to us and just let us know how we're doing and what we can do to make it even better. Thank you again for listening to Taking 20 and next, we're going to flip the screen and talk about what it means to be a good player. Hope to see you there, and hope your next game is your best game.