Not too long back, an exchange on Twitter led me to the question – does continuing to play RPGs on a regular basis make you a better GM?<\/p>\n
I’m certainly in a position to judge, since I continue to run multiple campaigns and have, for most of the last year, been a player in a small Star Wars: Edge Of The Empire campaign, while in the past just prior to that, I spent many years purely as a GM.<\/p>\n
Before that, I was a regular player in a Lord Of The Rings RPG campaign, and a 7th Sea campaign, while still running multiple campaigns – and before that was another stint as a pure GM – and before that, I played in a Champions campaign, and before that<\/em> an Eberron campaign – still while running multiple campaigns. So I have regularly flirted with life on the other side of the screen.<\/p>\n In fact, it’s probably fair to ask if my stints as a non-player are the exceptions, rather than the rule, or is my default pattern of behavior not to play?<\/p>\n I think the circumstances under which the Edge Of The Empire campaign came about might just be pertinent to that question, at least. One of my campaigns wrapped up when both players and myself started to find regular excuses not to make it. At that point, it was down to only two regular players, and the dynamic simply wasn’t there any more. It needed more variety of PC input to keep all of us interested.<\/p>\n At the same time, I didn’t feel up to designing and prepping a new campaign – it takes a lot of work to do it right, and at the time I was putting a lot of effort into Campaign Mastery and into the campaigns that were still active, and knew that I would need to continue to do so for some time to come.<\/p>\n Somewhat half-heartedly I suggested a Star Trek campaign, not really expecting that to get off the ground (it didn’t) but one of the players from the former campaign then suggested that he thought he could run a Star Wars campaign, at least for a while – until my batteries were recharged, as it were. (Currently, I can feel the creative itch starting to grow, once again. It’s not acute yet, but in a few months it might be – at which point I will start thinking about a new campaign, and when that’s ready, offer the GM the chance to take a break from Star Wars. The plan would be for a relatively short, sharp campaign (not my usual epic), and then back to Star Wars for a while. But that’s a plan for much later in 2016).<\/p>\n Almost every GM starts as a player. I certainly did. And that, to me, suggests that the normal state of affairs for a GM is to do both concurrently – in different campaigns, of course, and assuming that time (and the number of willing GMs) permits.<\/p>\n But that brings me back to the original question: does playing in another RPG on a regular basis make me a better GM? And how typical is my experience in this regard?<\/p>\n Since I can’t answer the second half of that double-barreled question, how can I make sure that the attempt to answer the first is relevant to most readers? And how does examining the subject translate into Campaign Mastery’s goals – to offer relevant and practical advice to make GMs better at their craft and their games more fun?<\/p>\n The obvious answer is to reformulate the question, discarding the relative value judgment involved, and simply consider the advantages and disadvantages that come from doing both concurrently. That way, it doesn’t matter how valid my experience is, because others can determine for themselves how relevant each advantage and disadvantage is – and then tot up a balance sheet at the end to determine whether or not THEY would be better served going one way or the other, at least experimentally.<\/p>\n I’ve totted up ten advantages to being a player in one campaign and the GM of another concurrently. Some of these are only minor effects in my case – your situation might vary – and others qualify as very strong incentives. I’m going to briefly examine each, and give them a rating out of 5 for how relevant they are to me – and I’ll leave a space for you to write down your own scores on a sheet of scrap paper for how relevant they are to me.<\/p>\n The advantages that I’ve identified are:<\/p>\n I’ve also come up with a list of nine disadvantages – which makes it easy to see how close the final analysis might be. Assuming that the average rating of both advantages and disadvantages is more or less the same, it would only take a slight drift one way or the other to completely change the overall result.<\/p>\n The disadvantages that I have identified are:<\/p>\n To get some idea of just how finely balanced things were, I scurried off to AnyDice<\/a> (my usual tool for this sort of thing) and whacked up a probability curve for 10d5 minus 9d5.<\/p>\n As you can see, there is a slight bias towards there being more advantages than disadvantages, but one question going from a ‘1’ to a ‘5’ or vice-versa is enough to take a strong result one way and put the choice on a knife-edge.<\/p>\n That tells me that there is unlikely to be a hard-and-fast result; as a GM’s circumstances change, so the answer to the reframed question – “Do the benefits of concurrently playing in one campaign while GMing another outweigh the costs” – will respond, potentially quite sharply.<\/p>\n So let’s look at those advantages in greater detail. Some of them will be reasonably self-evident, others definitely require explanation.<\/p>\n Burnout is rarely uniform; its dependent on the game system, and the characters, and how easily you can come with new, fresh, and interesting ideas. When that starts getting difficult, when execution of those ideas that you do<\/em> have, and the prep required to implement them, starts to feel like a chore instead of an exhilaration, you are in the early stages of burnout. That means that you can suffer from “D&D Burnout” or “Fantasy Burnout” while your Sci-fi campaign keeps bouncing merrily along.<\/p>\n You can flirt with burnout repeatedly, growing frustrated temporarily while things aren’t running smoothly behind the screen and re-energized if and when ideas start to flow again, but when it becomes chronic, the mindset enters a downward spiral. Another solution that sometimes works is to introduce a new character that intrigues you and brightens up the prospects of working on the campaign – and sometimes that leads to the player of the new character being blamed if it doesn’t work.<\/p>\n Sometimes you can counter that spiral with a different campaign in a radically different genre and style; sometimes, you leave it too late. The biggest mistake that people make is to replace game sessions that are triggering burnout with ones that are going well – that risks spreading the problem from one campaign to another.<\/p>\n One of the most obvious ways of avoiding or recovering from Burnout is to play for a while instead of GMing. Even a slight easing of the workload (I went from 4 campaigns to 3) can be enough to keep you fresh in those campaigns that are not yet affected.<\/p>\n My Rating: 3\/5<\/em> Your Rating: ______<\/strong> <\/p>\n There’s a lot less responsibility when you’re a player, and that means less stress. Even if a campaign is going well, you can feel the pressure to ‘perform’, week after week. How intensely you feel that pressure depends on a whole host of factors, including how difficult you find it to live up to the standards you have set, how much stress you are feeling in other aspects of your life, and how much fun you find the whole<\/em> of the GMing process to be – from generating NPCs to plotlines to maps to props to actual play.<\/p>\n If you’re finding that stress is becoming a problem, there are two solutions: you can GM more, or you can GM less. GMing more works if you find that GMing is an outlet for your stress; some people find that it is. GMing less works the rest of the time. As usual when dealing with complex phenomena, sometimes there are no simple answers – you may find prep stressful at times but play is fine, or even vice-versa (a form of performance anxiety). If that’s your situation, consider hooking up with a co-GM or collaborator who is strong in the areas of activity that you find most stressful.<\/p>\n Personally, I don’t find GMing all that stressful except when several deadlines leap on me at once without warning – because I am perfectly willing to blow off a deadline if I have to. That willingness to miss a deadline when necessary relieves so much stress that it rarely inhibits me to the point where I actually miss a deadline – strange but true.<\/p>\n My Rating: 1\/5<\/em> Your Rating: ______<\/strong> <\/p>\n You have a lot more freedom to just go wild as a player – though you should bear your fellow players in mind and not do too much that impacts on them!<\/p>\n I learned a long time ago that I could alter my mood by changing the style of music that was being played, or watching a different type\/genre of TV show \/ movie. Satisfying your need for a “romp” to blow off some steam – even if you have to engineer it the hard way – has the same effect.<\/p>\n Personally, I don’t recommend this approach to an RPG unless both the other players AND the GM are on-board with the idea. Better to go watch something that scratches your itch before the game.<\/p>\n But still, we’re all occasionally in a silly mood, or a dark mood, or whatever. When you make the game a victim of such a mood, apologize to the others involved – and mean it – then get on with things as best you can.<\/p>\n I’ve even seen RPGs interrupted for a brief card- or board-game of appropriate tone just so that someone could get ‘an odd mood’ out of their system. Which can be worth considering if you find yourself stuck in an inappropriate emotional groove – ‘desperate times’ and ‘desperate measures’ comes to mind. If it’s a choice between a 20-30 minute interruption and the whole game session taking a left turn into the twilight zone, most GMs will be surprisingly tolerant. But you will owe everyone else at the table, big-time.<\/p>\n My Rating: 3\/5<\/em> Your Rating: ______<\/strong> <\/p>\n Just because you aren’t the one behind the screen doesn’t mean that you can’t and don’t learn. Most GMs, when they play, do at least some second-guessing of the GM who is running the game they are playing in – “how would I handle this?” “Why did he do it that<\/em> way?” “That hasn’t really worked – how could I have done it better in a similar situation?” It was thoughts like that (especially the latter two) that led me to abandon playing in the Adventurer’s Club campaign for a role as co-GM, when it became clear that I had the answers that the then-solo Blair lacked as GM. The result: the campaign that he thought might run for a year or two is now more than a decade old – and still going strong.<\/p>\n More importantly, because another GM will have different ideas to yours, and will get the PCs into different situations than you would, you are exposed to questions and problems that you might not ordinarily have to confront – and that makes for a solid learning experience.<\/p>\n My Rating: 4\/5<\/em> Your Rating: ______<\/strong> <\/p>\n When I have a game, the entire day before is usually given over to game prep – at a bare minimum. Sometimes, months of work have been invested in a few minutes here and a few minutes there getting prep done. I’m well-known for being a very organized GM, able to determine what prep I will need long periods in advance, but I frequently wish that I was still more organized – and had an extra day in the week.<\/p>\n There is virtually no prep required when you’re a player. Reducing my workload from 4 active campaigns to 3 – with one of them only occurring when the game is ready-to-run – almost doubles my prep-time for the games that I am still running. It means that I have time to stop and watch the occasional TV show, or sleep in once in a while – and STILL get more done than I would otherwise.<\/p>\n My Rating: 5\/5<\/em> Your Rating: ______<\/strong> <\/p>\n I would never have become a Pulp Co-GM if I hadn’t been a player first. I certainly would never have tried Edge Of Empire. My only experience of Call Of Cthulhu and Traveler have been as a player. Ditto GURPS and Rifts and Tunnels & Trolls and Star Trek the RPG, and the list only grows from there. Some of those games\/genres would have appealed to me, others I would never have tried if someone else hadn’t put their hand up and said “I have an idea for…”<\/p>\n That means that a lot of the diversity in my gaming experience comes from being a player – in fact, it’s probably 3:1 or maybe even 5:1. Yet, that diversity continues to enhance my abilities and repertoire as both a rules-maker and a GM virtually every time I sit behind the screen – sometimes barely at all, sometimes a lot.<\/p>\nIllumination from The Edge Of Empire<\/em><\/h3>\n
Re-framing the question<\/h3>\n
The consequences of concurrent activity<\/h3>\n
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The advantages of concurrent activity<\/h3>\n
1. Avoiding\/Recovering from Burnout<\/h5>\n
2. Less Stress<\/h5>\n
3. Letting your hair down<\/h5>\n
4. Learning from other GMing successes and mistakes<\/h5>\n
5. More time available for Game Prep & Other Activities<\/h5>\n
6. Trying new and diverse settings and systems<\/h5>\n