This entry is part 3 in the series Basics For Beginners (and the over-experienced)
Part-3

Frame: Freeimages.com/Billy Alexander;
Dice Image: Freeimages.com/Armin Mechanist;
Numeral & Compositing: Mike Bourke

I’ve been asked a number of times what advice I have for a beginning GM. This 15-part series is an attempt to answer that question – while throwing in some tips and reminders of the basics for more experienced GMs. This will probably be the last in the series for a little while, I don’t want to exhaust myself (or reader’s attentions) on the subject.

There’s always a danger when you write big, comprehensive articles like those that appear at Campaign Mastery that you will say all that there is to say on a subject, and I have to admit that I was concerned that I might have already said it all on the subject of Prep. After all, and setting aside articles on specific types of game prep, I’ve already given my best advice on the subject – and linked to the articles in question in the course of this series, to boot.

In a nutshell, that best advice would be:

  • Know how much time you have available for prep;
  • Know how much time each element to be prepped will require to achieve the minimum possible satisfactory standard;
  • Know how to prioritize the elements that are most important for the next session of play;
  • Know which prep will have a life beyond the immediate session of play, rewarding an investment of time in achieving a higher quality of result; and
  • If necessary, plan and schedule prep sessions before the results will be needed.

Most of this advice is incorporated into two articles, as I said in the last post: the first is Fire Fighting, Systems Analysis, and RPG Problem Solving Part 2 of 3: Prioritization and the second is Game Prep and the +N to Game Longevity. Choice number one is simpler, and so easier for a Beginner to use, but makes no distinction in terms of quality of prep; choice number two is more useful because it does incorporate those different standards of prep. Try them both, choose the one that suits your best, and learn when each of the techniques is going to be most useful to you.

On top of that, this is a perennial favorite topic for RPG blogs, making it still harder to find new insights to offer. Nevertheless I’ve found that I do have a couple of insights to share. Some of this applies specifically to beginners, and represents practices that I explicitly don’t recommend for experienced GMs attempting to improve their games (unless they feel a need to go all the way back to the basics, which does occasionally happen). Other points will be equally applicable to everyone.

The intimidation of experience

It’s an inevitable fact: being a beginner GM means that you are inexperienced at being a GM. That inexperience can seem overwhelming in the face of greater expertise. There are two ways that experience can intimidate, so let’s get them out of the way up-front.

The intimidation of experience: Players

I’ve seen a number of potential GMs who lacked the confidence to even try getting behind the GM’s screen, simply because the potential players were all far more experienced than they were. Experienced players can take over your campaign if you let them, it’s true; but you will learn more in a single session, even if that happens, than you would in a year of playing with people closer to your own level of expertise.

But the intimidation of experienced players goes beyond even that concern; you might even question why experienced players would even be interested in playing a campaign being run by a novice GM. I have three answers to that:

  • First, gaming is a social activity, which means that most players feel a certain level of responsibility to the activity and the society that has grown up around it; this is not only why GMs are almost always thrilled to introduce new players to the hobby, it is why they are enthusiastically in favor of giving a new GM their start. See my article, Bringing on the next generation, Part Two: Gamemaster Mentors.
  • Second, you might be brilliant at it, and no GM worth his dice would pass up the chance to have fun gaming – whether they were behind the screen, or not; and
  • Third, an awful lot of advances are achieved not by the experienced, who know all the reasons why something won’t work, but by the amateur who doesn’t know any better – and who then finds a way to make it work. GMs join other campaigns, especially those run by beginners, for the chance to discover something new that they can expropriate and add to their own toolkits.

And, of course, there’s the ego-boost of being able to show off your experience, which is just the cherry on top.

Seek out the most experienced players you can find, and offer them a one-off game (so that it doesn’t matter if it goes off the rails or you find yourself out of your depth, and learn. Soak up as much second-hand expertise as you can find. (If you do this, make sure to leave plenty of time for a session debriefing after the game, ask these experienced players what they would have done differently, and why, and what they found original or interesting about your game so that you can feature it more prominently in the future).

Don’t let yourself be intimidated by experienced players; treat them as a compliment and opportunity.

The intimidation of experience: GMs

But don’t expect to run before you can walk. I was mortified when one of my players once told me that he didn’t think he would ever be a GM because he didn’t think he could live up to the standard that I set behind the metaphoric GM’s Screen (as well as being greatly complimented); no beginner should ever expect to have to compete with someone who’s been investing time and effort into an activity for decades.

I’ve known five other GMs for about as long as I’ve been gaming; One spent long periods as a player, even though he was a published game author; one stepped away from gaming completely for a solid 20 or more years. We’re all pretty set in our ways, to the extent that we can read each other’s playbooks fairly well even before we sit at the table, we know each other’s strengths and weaknesses and styles. New ideas enter those playbooks from three sources: New game systems that emphasize something different to what we’ve mastered – a minor but regular source; New campaigns – if we’re open to letting them take on a life of their own, and simply learning from the experience, which happens less often than you might think; and new Players and GMs, that show us the old things from a new perspective.

Don’t try and compete with experienced GMs; learn from them! Enlist their help from time to time; ask them to join as a player; give one a difficult or complicated NPC to run as a “guest player” every now and then; even get one to co-GM. (My article, An Adventure Into Writing: The Co-GMing Difference spells out how the co-GM of the Adventurer’s Club campaign and I collaborate). Use the expertise of an experienced GM to enhance and supplement your originality.

Over-committing

A common mistake that results from the intimidation effect of experience is to try and make your campaign more complicated and richer than you are able to handle at your current levels of expertise and time. This is always a recipe for disaster; game prep requirements always grow, and grow far faster than improvements in skill and technique make room for more. At least initially, aim for a four-to-one ratio between play time and prep time, including time invested in creating the campaign. Don’t try and do it all in advance; leave things flexible and let them grow with your skills.

Find a child and play a game of “let’s pretend” – aside from the very basic initial premise, how much creation happens in advance, and how much on the spot? Zero and 100%, right?

More mature game-play requires a little more than that, but only a little. Avoid over-committing; no-one expects a first adventure to be on the scale of The Lord Of The Rings.

There are also advantages to choosing a genre that both interests you but in which you are NOT an expert. If your primary experience as a player is D&D, explore Pulp, or Sci-Fi, or Superheros, or whatever; the fact that you aren’t an expert means that you won’t be too entrapped by your past experiences as a player.

Your biggest and grandest concepts will always derive from the genre that you know best. This is a trap, because you will usually know just enough to get yourself trapped, bogged down in detail, and over-committed. Save your grand ideas, develop them in the background even while you are cutting your teeth on something else. This minimizes the intimidation effect.

If you feel you absolutely have to stay in-genre, look for a simpler set of rules than those of the game you usually play. That way, you won’t be as tempted to use your best material right away, before you are ready to execute it to the standard you want to achieve.

Starting with an RPG based on a TV show, novels, or a movie can also help by giving common frames of reference between players and GM.

Start with improbable media mash-ups and develop the resulting ideas until they are neither of the original sources. For example, what if the Stargate team emerged into the world of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, or the Charmed Ones teamed up with Sabrina in a Scooby-doo adventure? Make sense of the results and you’ll have something original and different.

Core Prep

Most of the advice that I’m offering today doesn’t actually derive from the best practices or practicalities of generating prep, it comes from the subsequent usage of that effort. Too often, it seems that game prep becomes viewed as this activity that is necessary in its own right, and while there is an element of truth in that, it sends the wrong message to the beginner.

Most prep is strictly unnecessary, performed either because it will (potentially) enhance the game experience, or yield dividends at some point in the future. The number of beginners I have encountered who thought that NPCs needed to be prepared to the same standards of completeness and game mechanics as a PC is astonishing. No, no, no, a thousand times no!

Characters need only to be built to the minimum standard possible, abbreviating and abstracting as much as possible. How is an NPC going to be required to interact with the game mechanics? Prep those aspects, and give them a personality, and move on!

Similarly, adventures and plotting – something that I’ll deal with in more detail in a later article in this series – all you Need to spend time on is the central, essential, core; anything beyond that is simply window dressing and polish. Is the game improved by doing so? Yes, if it actually manifests within the game in a favorable way; but the more you invest in an idea, the more you subconsciously push towards that idea manifesting, even if you have to force that path onto the players. This is the road to disaster, paved with the best of intentions!

At its core, all you need to know is:

  • Who is participating in the plot;
  • What is their personality;
  • What they want to achieve;
  • What is stopping them from achieving that goal;
  • How they are going about removing or overcoming those obstacles; and,
  • Where is it happening?

On top of that, and purely as a convenience during play,

  • What key metrics and values will the character use to interact with the game mechanics?

If you are building a villain for a Hero System -based campaign, that means that you need to know what powers the bad guy has, not how much that power costs to buy according to the appropriate character construction mechanics, nor where they got the points to build it.

Here’s why this principle is important: time is a precious and very limited commodity, and there is always more prep that you can do. It follows that aside from the absolute essentials, you need to focus your expenditure of time on the areas that will yield the best rewards for your efforts; and those rewards are measured by the quality and entertainment value of what happens at the game table. The problem is that every GM is different; every Campaign run by that GM will be different; every adventure within that campaign will be different from all the others, and just a little different even from similar adventures that may have occurred in other campaigns by this GM. Even changing the players or PCs without altering a single word of the adventure will take it in a different direction. That, in turn, means that no-one else can tell you what is going to be needed for a particular game session, no matter how much experience they may have; and that poses a genuine problem for the beginner, who has not yet found his “voice” and style, and so doesn’t know, either.

Deciding what prep you need before you have the tools and experience to make that determination is not a case of chicken and egg; it’s a case of cart before horse. At best, you might make a lucky guess or two; at worst, you will unknowingly force yourself down an unproductive path of personal development as a GM, continuing through inertia and enthusiasm for a while until the whole thing grinds to a halt. I’ve known some quite promising GMs who have simply given up when they have hit rocky ground that was entirely self-inflicted.

Identify your core requirements; see to them, to a minimum acceptable standard; and learn from actual play what areas you can most profitably spend time enhancing.

Applying The Central Core

Your goal is to make sure that the adventure is as much fun as possible; to some extent, that means that characters have to be consistent in the pursuit of their goals, and that when players go off-script (as they inevitably will), you need to adapt your adventure to suit. Once you have the adventure Core, as spelt out above, use it as a guideline to assessing what happens in the game, and how you – and your NPCs – will respond.

It doesn’t matter whether your players take the high road or the low road from A to B; you simply need to ensure that each step along the way leads to a satisfactory resolution of the current plotline. If the next vital piece of that plotline is at C, that’s where the players ultimately need to go.

So, let’s say the players decide to go to “F” instead, for reasons that seem good to them. That might be a matter of deciding to investigate something that seems superficial or even irrelevant to you; it might be undertaking action against a side-issue that they feel is more important than you considered; it might be that they have swallowed whole a red herring that you expected them to see through; or it might simply be pursuing some goal of their own, ignoring the plot completely.

Or it might be that an idea occurs to you for something an NPC might do.

Whenever this happens, there are four possible responses for you to choose from.

The A answer: Yes

If the point is for the PCs to get an important piece of information, say “yes” if you can rewrite the adventure on-the-fly to let them earn/acquire that information from whatever they are trying to achieve. If the PCs are chasing moonbeams, put a signpost back toward the plot. If they don’t think whatever is going on is as important as it should seem, look for a way to make the plotline matter to them. If there is an opportunity for the villain to advance his plot by doing something, say yes to the opportunity presented.

It’s always important to remember what’s been established as fact within the campaign, and what is merely “potential fact” in your core notes. Be prepared to completely reinvent an NPC if you can see a way to do so that keeps the main adventure on-track and the established facts are not contradicted in a way that cannot be explained away.

Always let the players do whatever they want to do, and find a way to make that choice deliver the adventure to them (or vice-versa) in a completely natural way, as a consequence of their choices. Rewrite the adventure a little to achieve that result if you have to.

The B answer: No

If there is no way to connect the plot’s next stage to whatever the players have chosen to focus on, or if the opportunity doesn’t advance the villain’s plot, the answer will be no. That doesn’t mean saying “no” to the players, it means linking the adventure with some obstruction to them achieving their immediate goals – so that completing the adventure becomes a stepping-stone to the PCs succeeding.

In other words, never use a straight “no” to a player. Instead, use an implied “no” with a qualification: “No, but…” or “Not yet…” or “Not until…”

Oh, and never ignore the possibility of the villain making a mistake or a misstep. Consider: the villain has identified the PCs as a threat to his plans, and has some reason to suspect that they know what he’s up to (they are often a paranoid bunch). because in the plot set-up, they stumbled across part of his operation, and shut it down. Instead of pursuing that operation, they have chosen to head for a nearby city (the “F”) – in pursuit of their own goals, though the villain doesn’t know that. Instead, he suspects that they have identified some advantage against him that they can gain from there, even though he doesn’t know what it might be. He will then act accordingly: Sending agents to disrupt whatever the PCs are trying to do, sending other agents to simply try to stop the PCs, slowing activities that might be vulnerable to exposure as a result of assuming the worst, while hastening other preparations in case the plan has to be brought forward and implemented prematurely. A perfect plan has to be baked perfectly in order to succeed, just like a good meal; without realizing it, by ignoring the plot, the PCs have disrupted it slightly and earned the direct attentions of the villain, exactly as they might have done by pursuing the plot!

The C answer: Maybe

Choosing “yes” or “no” on purely deterministic grounds is all well and good, but what do you do when the right answer is “maybe”? If this occurs, tactical considerations and goals are no longer relevant to the GM deciding what happens as a result of the in-game development; instead, we’re in the province of personality. If the villain is the obsessive, driven, type, he will probably just go about his business. If he’s the vengeful type, he will risk disrupting his entire plan just to be sure the PCs don’t interfere again.

If there’s no obvious path from what the PCs are trying to do to the next part of the plotline, create one. For example, if the PCs are chasing a red herring, at least consider the possibility that the red herring is the real plot of the villain, and the two simply got mislabeled in your adventure planning – remember, if it’s only a “potential fact” than you can rewrite it completely as necessary, so long as you don’t conflict with an established fact in a way that you can’t explain away! Or perhaps the goal doesn’t need to change, just the means by which the villain is going to achieve it.

If that doesn’t work, due to such a contradiction, let the villain adopt a tactic of feeding the PCs enough rope, expanding on the red herring, and playing games with them at the expense of pursuing his goals – which will only make the players angrier at the NPC when they eventually discover the truth.

None Of The Above

And if none of the above gets your plot back on track, invent a new one and insert it. Perhaps the villain’s plans conflict with the plans of some new enemy (that you are inventing purely to advance the plot) – and that second villain plans (whatever they are) are going to be thwarted by whatever the PCs are doing. “The enemy of my enemy” then comes into play – with the original villain discovering the existence of the second through the PCs actions, and perhaps even trying to manipulate them into dealing with the unforeseen problem.

In the past, I’ve even had a Villain become a hero of a plot, and a hero become the real villain of the plot, because the PCs backed the wrong horse or skewed off in some strange direction. No-one ever expects the Spanish Inquis – err, the Spanish Pimpernel!

The Index Snippet

When you synopsize a story, you do so by extracting selected snippets. These key excerpts “index” the story. I use this process in reverse to write (refer One word at a time: How I (usually) write a Blog Post, but you can also use the concept in other ways to benefit your game.

  • Every adventure should have an iconic moment that encapsulates and brings to mind that entire adventure.
  • Every game session should have an iconic moment that encapsulates and reminds of events.
  • Every adventure should also start with some memorable moment relatively early on.

Investing extra time and effort in these “moments” has cumulative, sometimes intangible (but nevertheless very real) benefits for the overall adventure and for the campaign as a whole. Sometimes, though, the real key moment will come as a surprise.

In a Zenith-3 adventure from a year or two back, the “iconic moment early on” came as the PCs were going through a list of stolen property – wealth and collectibles in various forms – and one of them discovered the following on the list (transcribed from table form into narrative): “Stolen in 2029, police report 2029598407, from Mrs Adela Evangelina Love, property valued at £44.5, one hand-puppet: the original “Kermit The Frog” manufactured by Jim Henson for the Children’s Television Workshop.” This so outraged one of the players that to recapture the moment, I simply had to mention the theft and the player’s motivation to solve the crimes was instantly renewed. There were many items of greater value on the list, but it was that personal reaction that became a capstone to the entire adventure.

To show the power of them, here are a few iconic moments that should be immediately recognizable:

  • “Darth Vader. Only you would be so bold!”
  • “Vader betrayed and murdered your father.”
  • “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for…”
  • “We’d like to avoid any… Imperial entanglements.”
  • “That’s no moon, that’s a space station!”
  • “No reward is worth this!”
  • “Use The Force, Luke!”
  • “You’re all clear, kid – now let’s blow this thing and go home!”

I would lay odds that each of these snippets of dialogue brought a key scene from Star Wars to mind – and between them, they synopsize just about the entire movie. They were so memorable to me that I was able to create the list from memory (hopefully without errors) – which is, of course, the point that I’m making.

Movie trailers use this technique all the time, to sell audiences on the idea of seeing the film. To maintain suspense, you might leave off the last two, but you get the idea.

The writing process that I use generates these all the time. I look for them, and spend a little extra time enhancing, and (where possible) illustrating them. This helps cement them in place – so that showing the image while relating the synopsis of past events helps recapture them in the mind of the players.

Because of the compounding effect on immersion, look-and-feel, and verisimilitude, these amply repay a little additional effort.

Let The Prep Take Care Of Itself

Aside from these few items, I would advise beginners to let the prep take care of itself, at least initially. That isn’t to say, do no prep beyond the minimum – but don’t obsess about it.

There will always be prep that you consider necessary for any given adventure, whether its a map or a diagram or whatever. Learn what gives you the most bang for your prep time “buck”, and don’t try to do it all; it can be an advantage to be under-prepared, encouraging flexibility and experimentation.

So long as you have a broad outline of the adventure and the Core taken care of, everything else is window-dressing – nice to have, but not essential. If there’s one tendency that almost all beginners have in common, it’s being too invested in creating prep, considering too many things to be essential that really aren’t. Develop your improv skills and articulation and the other fundamentals of delivery first, or when you find yourself caught short by real life with your normal prep unfinished, you will be at a loss.

I also strongly recommend leaving some prep time in reserve – you never know when you’ll need it!

Find Your Campaign’s Own Style

As you develop your own style as a GM, you will discover strengths and weaknesses. Use prep to compensate for the weaknesses and to enhance the strengths. Keep track of the time it takes for each type of prep and each item of prep, be it a prop, a handout, a detail, a passage of canned dialogue, or whatever. Pay attention to what your players respond to – and to what prep lies unused at the end of each day’s play.

Over time, a campaign develops its own playing structure, the equivalent of the format of a TV show. Teaser or not? Cliffhangers or not? Tight continuity or a more episodic approach? Synopses at the beginning, or reminders as they become necessary? Quick cuts between scenes or a more natural progression?

Support these with the use of prep to enhance. Prep is never as important as play, and beyond a certain minimum, never as important as GMs think it is. That changes with time, as the complexity of the campaigns that you run grows; but unless you over-commit, running a campaign should never take over your life.

With three parts now under my belt, it’s now time to take a break from this series. While I feel like I’m just hitting my stride (Part 3 took half the time that each of the first two needed to write), and I therefore expect no real trouble in writing parts 4, 5, and 6, I’m concerned by the possibility of getting up to, say, Part 9, and running out of steam – with half the series still to write.

Fifteen parts is a LONG series!

Next week, then, expect to find something completely different! But fear not, if you’ve been enjoying this series so far; it will return. Parts 4, 5, and 6 are already scheduled – and while I might tinker with that schedule, any change will only serve to bring them forward in time.

 

Those used to the regularity of my usual publication schedule, or to whom I promised that this post would appear at a certain time, may have noticed that it is a little late in going public. I regret this, which is the result of internet connectivity circumstances beyond my control.



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