Category Archives: GM Advice

I read this article and after finishing it realized that it sounds like a situation that a bunch of PCs would be put in. Okay switch around a few of the names and what the medals are for and you have a game all ready to go. If you never heard of Aqua Regia (latin for royal water) there are rules for it in the Player’s Handbook.

Bonus points if your players decide to precipitate the gold back out of the liquid and then have it cast back into the awards that it originally was.

In a setting that uses gold as currency, the players may have to hide loot. Have them dissolve it.

Just a thought.

Once the game is over with a wise GM will finish up by gauging how they did. There are many ways to do this, I’ll outline a simple method here but there are many others so if this isn’t really doing anything for your group, look into some other ways of giving yourself a grade.

What you don’t want to do is simply ask “Did I do ok?” or “Did you guys have fun?”. Unless somebody hated it, they’ll just say yes without thinking. Even if they hated it they might say yes to try and be nice. You need to be more specific in your questions.

Here are some questions that can give a good idea of how you did.

Did you get to at least try to do what you wanted this game? – The more yeses you get the better try for 100%

Was there a point in the game you felt your character was in the spotlight? – Again go for all yeses.

Did this game play out the way you expected it to? Was that a good thing? – This will be highly variable but will give you a better idea of what the players want.

Did this game move to slow, too fast or just right for you? – Take the comments and try to implement it. If they say the game was slow, streamline your method of making determinations or pair down your dialog until the players are satisfied.

If you could change one thing about the game today, what would it be? Why? – Most answers will likely be something like not missing an important roll. No matter how trivial the complaint may be, try and address it. Can the player use XP to raise a skill or attribute so that they’re less likely to fail next time?

You could go on for another hour with questions like this but keep it short. Players probably are tired at this point and burned out so go easy on them. Take some time to commend the players for things you feel they did well at. Try not to focus on one player no matter how much they dominated game play. You want all the players to have fun, recognizing a struggling player for what they do may encourage them to grow.

If the game allows for a character or characters to advance at the end of the game, help the players with the process, looking up any rules that they may need to use. You may need to hold their hand in this process several times before they’re able to do it on their own. Take into account what the player will be interested in before making any suggestions on how to apply things like XP. You might want them to advance in a certain direction that they do not want to move into.

So those are some general tips and tricks that probably aren’t in the “How to GM” description in the book. Let us know how these suggestions work out for you.

In part 3 I mentioned not forcing the players to only focus on the game. That made me realize I hadn’t mentioned anything about player management so here goes.

In Character Vs. Out of Character

When playing an RPG a player can speak as if they were their character or In Character (IC). They can also speak as themselves or Out of Character (OoC). Saying things like “My name is [insert character name here], I’m pleased to meet you.” would be In Character. Saying things like “Hey I downloaded that new song from [insert band name here]” in a historic or fantasy setting is Out of Character.

This can get a little confusing at times. A player may exclaim “What are you crazy?” and mean it to be said In Character. They may have been just commenting on another player’s decision and therefore OoC. There may be no way of telling unless you ask “Are you really going to say that in game?”

Speaking OoC is necessary at times but it’s generally considered good form to keep it to a minimum. That said, most GMs allow a moderate amount of OoC conversation between players. It helps to mitigate player tension and most players will want to converse and joke during a game. There are some hardcore groups that are very strict about not allowing OoC conversations but from what I’ve seen they’re probably the minority. You may however have a player or two that would like OoC conversation kept to a minimum while others want it.

Tension

Player tension is something that a GM needs to learn to gauge. Each player has a different way of expressing the tension they’re under so it gets even trickier. On top of that, having tension in a game is important to a lot of story styles but too much tension is stressful and no fun.

Tension is the emotional feeling that the players have in connection to the difficulties their characters face. No tension means they don’t care what happens. To much tension and players start getting upset and arguments break out. Both extremes need to be avoided, so how do you do that? There are no surefire ways but there are methods that can help.

The first is having a social contract. The simplest form of a social contract is to explain what kind of game you want to run and asking the players if that’s the kind of game they want to play. Things like how dangerous is this game going to be? Will characters die often, occasionally, rarely or never? Are players allowed to harm each other? Should the GM have total control or should the players have an input on how the story unfolds? Will the characters be allowed to make major changes to the story world? Will the rules in the game book be strictly adhered to or only loosely? There are any number of things that can be in a social contract. There’s plenty of reading that you can do on this subject so if you need more pointers, they’re out there. A social contract is important for a new group to run smoothly.

Communication is also important. The players may not express displeasure at something right away out of courtesy. Maybe they hope that you’ll move on to something they like, maybe they feel if everyone else is enjoying the game they shouldn’t say anything.

Pay Attention

As a GM, it’s a good idea to look at facial expressions and pay attention. Five of your players may be smiling and having a great time while one is withdrawn and has their arms crossed. It’s really easy to see the enthusiastic players and somehow miss that one of the players is no longer having fun. Pause the game and privately ask the withdrawn player why they aren’t enjoying things. Do this enough times and they’ll freely ask “Can I talk to you a minute?” the moment they don’t like how things are going. This is a good habit to get into. Don’t argue with them about their point of view. They can’t be wrong about not having fun, they may not express it well and they may not know how to fix things but they’re right that they’re not having fun even if you don’t agree on why. Approach these situations with the goal of making the game fun for them again. Seeing results from these conversations will improve their feeling of Agency which can greatly improve their investment in the game.

Up Last – The After Game Follow Up

So your players have characters, you’ve played a starter game and now you need to start thinking about the next game. You may have followed the advice to jump straight into action for the last game. Now is the time to start flexing your story muscles.

Coming Up With A Story

I’ve heard a few first time GMs panic about trying to come up with a “good” story. If you try and come up with something worthy of a novel, you’re going to be frustrated and things will not happen the way you want them to. You only need to come up with a few story elements, your players fill in the blanks.

So what are those elements? There are three basic elements, goals, hooks and challenges. Lets define each one.

Goals – The goal is what the player characters need to do to ‘win’. Things like “Rescue the princess and escape the castle.”

Hooks – A hook is something that draws the players in (think of a fish hook). This concept is a bit more nebulous, a hook that draws in one player, may not interest another player.

Challenges – These are things that stand in the way of the player characters getting to their goal. A challenge can consist of many things. It could be a lack of information (or too much). It could be a mountain range is in their way or it could be someone (or something) literally standing in their way, challenging them.

The good news is that all these elements are pretty intuitive. You may already have thought about some of them already but didn’t know how to put them together. Players may even set their own goals, which can make things easier for you, although usually they will look to the GM for some kind of goal or steps to reach their goal.

I usually recommend three challenges per game. This is usually what most groups have time for if the challenges are well matched against the characters. If everyone is completely focused, they might be able to get through them in two to three hours. If there’s a lot of chatter, it could take longer, usually twice as long. Don’t try to force the players to be completely focused though. I’ll try to explain why in a later post.

The simplest hooks are rewards for reaching the goal. Something like “I’ll pay you five thousand dollars to deliver this package.” actually has two hooks in it. The most obvious one is the lure of the money. The second one is the question of why would someone pay that much to deliver a package? Both may arouse the interest of the players. Hooks in essence are the story set up.

When it comes to reward hooks, don’t blow the players out of the water with your offer. You want the reward to be interesting enough but don’t make the players independently wealthy on the first game. Some players may even be motivated by gratitude. A town approaching them and pleading for their help may be enough for them. Just remember, you have to really give them the reward, the town needs to be grateful. The kind of gratitude that the player characters can come and visit the town any time and people will feed and shelter them for free.

So now you need to start thinking about what elements you want to put into your game and how they go together. There are several ways of doing this. You can let the goal define the other elements. With this, you take a goal and then try to imagine why the players would want to achieve it, this gives you the hooks. Then you think about what would get in their way and this gives you the challenges. You can work this in any combination. The hook can lead to a goal and then challenges or a thinking about a particular challenge and why it’s there and why the players would want to overcome it connects a hook and a goal to it.

There are of course other story elements, like twists. You can include them at this point but I’d recommend against it for now. A twist is only fun when you’ve experienced things straight before. If there’s always a twist, the players come to expect it and it’s no longer interesting, it’s a pain. I’m not saying you can’t, it’s just that you have a lot of other things to learn to balance now, you don’t want to have worry about gauging player frustration yet because you did a bait and switch on the player characters. That’s a good way to make sure there isn’t a third game. For now stick to your word, if the players have been promised a reward, give them the reward and a hearty well done. Get them to feel good about the game, you’ll get to confound them later.

Details

Now that you have the outline of your story in place, you need to start thinking about details. Things like locations that will show up in your game. Maps for those locations are a really good idea especially starting out because you’re not practiced at explaining where things are in relation to the characters. It’s harder than it sounds, getting it wrong is the surest way to have players demand a do over. I’ve GMd for decades and I still get it wrong from time to time.

Another detail to have in place is quick access to NPC stats and names. If an NPC is human be ready for the players to ask their name. It may sound trivial for Guard #2 to have a name but it will quickly burst the player’s suspension of disbelief if you name all the NPCs “Joe”. On the other hand, if you respond with an authentic sounding name for a meaningless guard, your players will be immersed in the story. Names are powerful to a story.

You might groan and think “I can’t come up with names for everyone.” You don’t have to, just come up with a list of five to ten names that you can give to the players when they ask. Each game, replace the ones you’ve used with new ones.

Up Next – Player Management

For the first time GM that first game can be difficult but not because of the reasons you might imagine. It’s not usually a mastery of the rules or a compelling story that makes things hard. It’s usually more mundane things like time management and judging what the player characters can handle that trips up the first time GM.

For the first game start simple. Don’t do anything complicated. A simple encounter can be all that’s needed. If you think you’ll need a map for the game, get it ready before you get together to play. Part of the GM’s job is pre planning, you may learn to make up games on the fly later but for your first game it’s good to pre plan. You also may also have to adjust what you plan if the players have not made characters yet.

The Characters

For the first game the players will need characters. In a good number of games the process of character generation can be slow and possibly crunchy (meaning a lot of numbers to crunch). Even if the system for making characters is not difficult, players usually have to make choices, which means reviewing the options. Some players will move quickly with making decisions because they know what they want. Others will languish over options that may or may not have any real effect on their character.

Unless a system is very “rules lite” usually meaning there’s some core mechanic and the rest is left up to the GM and players, character creation could take an hour or more for three to six players. That’s really okay, most players enjoy making characters. It’s a creative process that often has unusual results. Don’t rush it to get into the game, let the process be part of the fun. The role of the GM at this stage is limited, usually to answering questions on how things are supposed to work. That’s fine but at this stage it’s a good idea to be watching what choices the players are making and what interests them. That can help inform you later on what they will find fun.

This is also the time to ask the players what they think of their characters. If their reaction is positive, ask them what they like about the character and what they’d like to do with that character. If their reaction is negative, again ask why and if there is anything that would repair the character for them. There may be options in the game for fixing low stats, if there isn’t try and come to a solution that the player will have fun with. Sometimes adding story to a character can restore the player’s opinion of the character, sometimes it’s better to just roll up a new character if the player isn’t going to enjoy playing.

On To The Fun!

I do mean that, I’m going to make a suggestion that is a bit anti-story but don’t think I’m against having a good story for the game. Don’t worry about a lot of explanation of back story and even skip over that scene where the players get offered the job that will lead to adventure.

Remember that part of the game that you looked and and said “Yeah this will be fun”? Skip right to that. Let the players know you’ll be doing this but skip to it. Get the players into the most fun part of the game you imagined right away.

After they’re done with it, retroactively explain how they got in that situation. Obviously the crazier the action the harder it will be to just explain it away but it shouldn’t be impossible. They don’t have to have amnesia or any of those tropes, just tell them they’re getting the story out of order so they can skip straight to the fun.

So why do it this way? One, the players just got off a slow process of making characters. They’re ready to go, you don’t want to tell them a long dissertation on the game they’re going to play. Two, it limits the number of monkey wrenches they can throw in the game and believe me, any monkey wrenches a player has at their disposal will be thrown. You don’t need that on the first game. You will have to learn to deal with it later though. It actually starts to get to be fun when you get used to it.

In any game, the players will have more fun if they win but don’t make it seem that they can’t lose. That will kill any sense of accomplishment they have. NPCs shouldn’t help them unless they absolutely need it. There is a lot of advice out there on not having your own “darling” NPCs that outshine the players. First time GMs are often enamored by the idea of a great über NPC to be the player’s friend that can rescue them when they need it. The problem with this is that the players don’t actually get to win, the GM wins for them and they’re just a side show.

Up Next – Your Second Game

This is where I’ll talk a bit more about making a full fledged game.

There’s a lot of advice for GMs out there and that’s great but that advice doesn’t usually go all the way back the beginning. To that first game where someone said “Hey wanna GM?”

There are two probable situations that you’d be in if you hear that. Either you’ve played a RPG for a while and now have the opportunity to GM or someone found a game on the internet or in a bookstore, thought it looked interesting and now someone has to GM. If you’ve played for a while, you have an idea of what you need to do. If you’re just picking up a book, you might not know what to do next. I’m going to describe things from the later situation because I think that potential GM will need the most help. There is usually a “How to GM” section of a book but that section is usually competing for pages that could be going to other things.

The Big Scary Book

Usually the first hurdle to vault over is all the reading you need to do in the rule book. From what I’ve seen, usually well before anyone even knows you want to play someone is reading through it trying to wrap their head around it. This works if you’re making progress but the tragedy is that what can happen is the reader hits a snag and then never plays because they don’t know how to get past it.

The better solution is to bring your players in early. When you’ve just decided you’d like to try this, reach out to some friends and say “I found this game and I’d like to try it out.” First explain what made you interested and then what you’ve been able to figure out so far. If the game is a PDF and it’s legal to do so, give all the potential players a copy of it. If it’s a hard copy or you can’t copy it, that’s okay too, get together and read through things while everyone else hangs out. When you get to something you don’t understand pull someone off to the side and discuss it with them. Saying something like “Hey look at this, I’m not sure how this is supposed to work, how would you use this?”

When you find something you think will be fun to use, show it to everyone. Explain why you think it will be fun, it could be a bad guy the players may have to face or an ability they could get or a rule that looks like it will make game play interesting. Share that early on and get the players excited.

This does two things, I lets you offload some of the difficulty but it also gets the players somewhat familiar with the game well before you play. If one or two of the potential players take particular interest in how to play then that’s great. Their interest will translate into knowledgeable players that can help those guys that aren’t really paying attention.

What Do You Need To Know?

First of all, don’t overload yourself right off the bat. There’s a lot of effort put into making detailed worlds in RPGs, you don’t have to have all of it under your belt. You also don’t have to use every rule that’s in the book, it’s usually fine to read through and say, “I’m not sure I want to start off using this,” to some rules if they seem complicated or confusing.

The biggest thing you’ll have to tackle is character creation. You can’t get very far without it and it will probably be what takes up your first session.

The next thing you need to know is how the system determines what your characters can do. This is sometimes called event resolution. For an example if a player says “I want to jump over this pit” how do you figure out if their character can actually do that? There is usually a core mechanic used to decide success or failure. You’ll have to get a good understanding of how that works. Thankfully that’s usually pretty simple by itself.

Up Next – Your First Game

We all have laughs around the game table but it’s usually from players making comments or suggesting ridiculous plans or . . . okay there are a lot of reasons we laugh but what about laughing because the game was funny?

I haven’t played a game like that in a while, we’ve been doing gritty and realistic. I tried doing funny as a player in one game but the GM was new and didn’t know how to react so it just confused him. It’s much easer to set the tone for humor when you’re the GM.

We used to play a space opera game that I started writing when I was in my early teens (some 23ish years ago!). We played serious some times and funny other times. We had been listening to the Hitchhiker’s Guide radio plays and so our games were full of computers that had weird personalities and really bizzare aliens with even weirder ideas of how to get by in life. The odd thing is that we would slip from one serious to humorous with the same characters and we didn’t think anything of it.

It was mostly absurdist humor that we practiced and I think that large universe Sci-Fi is a great place for that because there are plenty of places that you can throw in something ridiculous and how do you know that aliens don’t really think like that? There a suspension of disbelief because you can’t truly cry foul. We had zany moments in a few other games but they were rarer.

Those were great games, not much happened in them but no one really cared because just getting the airlock open was gut bustingly funny. So how can you have a humorous game for yourself?

Components

The first thing you need to do is know your players. What kind of comedy do they like?

Are the players ready for this? Don’t make my mistake and try to drop a funny game on serious players.

Start small have one wacky computer or servant and get a running gag going. Don’t have them be a pain, make them indispensable but to get the benefit from them the players have to put up with some zany antics.

Now, once the joke is well established, let it start to spread. Make more unusual characters start popping up. Once one character is established and the players are getting a laugh out of them, they’ll roll their eyes and say “Oh no! Another one?” but they’ll go with it because they know where the goofiness is going.

For a long time, do not have the humor harm the players in any way. You may never have it harm the players directly but at least don’t slow down the PCs with it until there have been several sessions where the humor is now an accepted part of the game. Even then if you decide to cause the PCs problems start small with just minor frustrations.

So that’s the plan, what do you think? Do you dare to open this can o’ worms? Let us know in the comments.

Ahem, sorry, felt like being a little dramatic.

Have you ever wanted to have your players roll for a skill check but didn’t want them to be tipped off that they failed something? I used to say to roll for your players behind your screen and only tell them if they succeed. Except players can get funny about the GM rolling for them. Players can sometimes feel like they might have passed a roll that the GM failed. It is possible but statistically there should be no difference who rolls for the character. Still, the perception persists and an annoyed player is a player not having fun.

Enter The Box!

Sorry, again with the drama, I gotta get that fixed. So can you have your cake and let the players eat it too? Yes! Here’s a simple solution to the problem that you can use.

Cut a small cardboard box so that it makes a shallow cover, with one side open, just tall enough to allow most dice to slip underneath.

Now when players need to be kept in the dark about the result of their rolls, they get to toss the dice into the BOX OF DOOOM! *cough* *cough* (Man, I gotta call my doctor!)

The GM can then lift up the box in an ever so sneaky way and see the result of the roll.

So try it out! Let me know if you make your own BOX OF DOOOM!

When I was writing the Are Your Games Too Long? post I wanted to dive into this subject as part of it. I didn’t because it would muddy the waters a bit. So if you’re thinking of running shorter games or you just want to keep the players thinking about playing, here’s a way to keep the game going after you get up from the table.

First let’s acknowledge what sitting everyone down at the table is good for. Table time is the best place to handle rules heavy content. Normally this would be combat. My thinking is, keep the rules heavy parts of your game there. Don’t mess with it.

Now, there are also parts of the game that don’t really use a lot of rules but take up a lot of time. The biggest example of this is social interaction. There may be some bluffing rolls or intimidation rolls but they’re not used all the time. There’s also less of a turn structure when in a social situation. Players planning is also an example of a low rule part of the game.

In these situations with the right framing by the GM, the game could keep going even after everyone has got up and left. For instance, the PCs are in the town resupplying and healing up, they also know that the townsfolk know little bits about what’s been going on so they really want find out what each one of them know. At the table, as a GM, I would normally summarize what a group of the townsfolk know because role playing a large number of encounters with people who don’t really know much would be frustrating. If you take away the pressure to get the game going because the interviews are taking too long and spread it over a week, the role playing situation changes. Now you can hand the players small obscure clues, they can think about them and discuss them. The time consuming becomes intriguing.

So how can you implement this? After a game session, we all go our separate ways. Maybe you see people from your game group, maybe you don’t. How can you keep it going? One, people have to live their lives too so keeping it going can’t interfere with everyday life. Second you don’t want someone to have an idea about the game and have to sit on it for too long. You want them to think of the idea, carry it out and then keep going.

My solution for this is the humble text message. When a player wants to tell the GM or other players something, they pull out their phone and send a quick message. The GM gets the message and play moves along, slowly, but it’s moving. Having the right social contract for this kind of play is also important. Most groups will probably want to enforce the understanding that you don’t have to reply right away to a game text. This is where interfering with real life comes into play. Replies will come when the recipient has time to respond, expect it to take a while.

Some people may want to use twitter as a similar tool but that would need everyone in the game to have access to twitter. Most players will have access to a phone that can text.

A few shorthand rules can be useful. Putting a simple “g” at the beginning of the text will also help the recipient to process this text is about the game. They then can read it or store it for later. Agree on shorthands that will work for your game and the options for what the players can do in these away sessions will open up considerably.

The format will be different. There are new challenges to playing like this but when used in the right scenes, it can also open up possibilities that are hard to carry out around the table. For one, players might have more patience for little details. They have more time to mull over puzzles. They may also think more laterally about problems because the pressure to keep moving isn’t there.

GMs will have to think about who they’re not hearing from. Some players could easily dominate play this way and other will be lost. If the GM sends a clue to a player that they haven’t heard from, it may get them involved.

Playing over text message will take adjusting how you structure you games. It may take some thinking to get used to the idea. Try it out and let me know how it went in the comments.

“We don’t have enough time to play a game. Lets just watch a movie.”

Have you ever heard that? At least something similar? If you started playing RPGs when you were a teen you may be like me, expecting games to take 4-8 hours to finish. Then real life started and your games started to get harder and harder to get together.

Now let me ask you this, would you actually get to play more if you played less? Instead of a four hour session once in two months, would you be able to play six one hour sessions?

There is a problem with this if you have a low show up rate. If people are not showing up for 50% of the sessions then they’re back down to 3 hours and they’re still getting less time playing. Not to mention the problem of trying to keep everyone in the loop if they don’t show. So be wary of that and be prepared to discuss it with your players.

How To Play A 1 Hour Game

Playing a one hour game is mostly psychological. The first thing you need to do is set your sights lower. Instead of a story arc completed in one session, only play one scene. This can be really hard to do, especially if everyone is having fun. I know that I want to keep on going. Our last game was 6 hours long, we were having fun and didn’t want it to stop.

You may need to do more planning also. When I GM I have some fuzzy idea of how the game will go, we traditionally play until the PCs meet their goal. To be able to stop mid-story, I need to have intermediate goals planned out. Something concrete that will be a satisfying end point.

If you have players that are used to long sessions, be ready to defend the idea of short games when you say “That’s it for tonight.” Remind them of the last time you played and the time before that. Explain how much momentum is lost when you have to remember what was going on weeks ago.

What about experience?

One of the things that can be thrown off course by having short games is experience. Unless you are awarding according to monsters killed or treasure found (shudder) the normal rate of awarding experience could be thrown off. There are several ways of handling this. One is to allow for a high rate of progression to sweeten the pot for these shorter games. Another is to give a few experience each session and then at the end of the story arc award the balance of what would have been earned. If the players are willing, they may be fine with no experience until the end of the story arc but I’d ask the players if that’s okay with them first. If they are at all reluctant, do something to give some experience in between.