Game Masters’ Roundtable of Doom #5 – Your GM Big Picture Fu is Weak

The Game Masters’ Roundtable of Doom is a meeting of the minds of tabletop RPG bloggers and GMs. We endeavor to transcend a particular system or game and discuss topics that are relevant to GMs and players of all roleplaying games.

 

If you’d like to submit a topic for our future discussions, or if you’re a blogger who’d like to participate in the Game Master’s Roundtable of Doom, send an email to Lex Starwalker at gamemastersjourney@gmail.com.

This month's topic comes to us courtesy of Marc Plourde:

There are many different skills that come together to make up a GM. The ability to think on the fly, knowledge of the rules, plotting, etc. What skill do you think is your weakest? What have you done to try and improve that skill? What advice do you have to offer others trying to improve that skill set?

Being able to reflect on one’s weaknesses as a Game Master, as with any other part of your life, if no easy thing.  We like to know, and do, what we are good at.  Things where we kinda suck are not easy to dwell on.

The challenge with Marc’s question is, for me, that I find a lot to criticize myself about.  It is just the way I am.  I worry about making each thing work in a game, I silently berate myself as I trip over rules, I worry about making sure that each person around the table is involved as much as possible, and, while I am not solely responsible for each person’s fun, I am supposed to be, as it were, the captain of fun at the table.

However, despite these foibles and anxieties, none of my moment to moment mistakes with rules, player involvement, or improvisation are a key downfall.

I really have trouble connecting a big picture with the here and now action.  I find that some very rewarding forms of storytelling, the kinds of things to which I aspire, have this kind of linkage.  It does not have to pervade every little bit, but it should be helping to run things in the background.

I have a terrible time doing it.

This is really a campaign failing.  I want to give my players a meaningful campaign, with distinct story arcs, and larger meaning in events and action.

That turns out to be hard.  I really became aware of this kind of storytelling explicitly, from television, and specifically Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Each season had a defined arc, a villain, larger plot and metaplot elements, and supporting characters that helped move them along to the exciting or tragic or apocalyptic conclusion.  Buffy as a show certainly didn’t originate this, but it is the show where I became aware of this kind of master planning, which is distinct from the purely episodic nature of an older show like the original Star Trek.  One planet one week, some starbase the next, each episode almost always self-contained.  Like a series of, at best, loosely connected one-shot adventures that happened to include most of the same core characters.

Since before I became conscious of the modern showrunner style of television, I have wanted to have all the little stories add up to a big story.  I usually could come up with the big story, the ultimate goal at which to point the players.

However, this big goal was generally too lofty and remote, and I rarely could keep a campaign going to connect all the dots to get there, let alone provide the recurring NPCs, atmosphere and foreshadowing that might drive along one adventure after another to get to the mighty MacGuffin, the Big Bad, the Final Conflict.  My imagination just seems to exceed the grasp of my plotting ability, not to mention my ability to budget time and manage players through a coherent set of stories.

What to do?

In some ways, you have to learn to manage your expectations and also to murder your darlings.  Better yet, I have to learn that.

So, here are some coping mechanisms.  Dreaming big is fine, but two things are important to keep in mind when launching your campaign ideas.  First, you need to keep your mind open to all the ideas.  You can just catalog them in your Mind Palace (if you happen to be Sherlock), or otherwise, keep notebooks, journals, or, my favorite, random scraps of paper with your evolving ideas noted down.  In most cases, don’t spend a lot of time developing them.  Just keep them as a kind of fermenting yeast out of which something great may or may not come out.  This is because of the second thing.  Secondly, you have to factor in the players.  You may have the greatest ideas every (I know I do), but, since role playing is a cooperative and collaborative activity, it does no good to set your ultimate goals if what your players want out of the game experience is something different. 

Believe it or not, sometimes what players want is old traditional episodic television.  This week they are in a dungeon, next week they are in a town, the week after that, they are on a mountain.  Nothing much connects all of this, except that the characters are all together, and they are probably getting some loot and killing some bad guys.  If that is your group (and sometimes for me it is), then you can’t squash them into your sandbox setting, where they will explore through many adventures, meet dozens of NPCs with secret motivations, finally to win their place in the community and vanquish an ancient evil that has been pulling strings behind the scenes SINCE THE FIRST ADVENTURE.

It may turn out that nobody cares.

Big dreams have to be shared dreams.  Sometimes those big dreams come together organically, by working together with players and adding some elements from your imagination soup.  That may not be as seemingly coherent or satisfying as plotting out a series of story arcs, with specific beats and some clever triggered events, but what you and your players build together will be stronger than anything you can just come up with on your own.

I have definitely found that the story elements that games like 13th Age bring to the table provide tools for that dialog between player and Game Master.  A character creation process that helps show what is special about a character (13th Age’s One Unique Thing comes to mind), what motivates the character, and what that character’s story has been up until now, provides the fertile ground in which to plant my big ideas.  Add to that drawing links between the characters (one approach I like is the “guest starring” index cards used during team creation in Evil Hat’s Spirit of the Century; but Dungeon World’s Bonds also work, as does the fascinating process here,  here and here employed by RPG and GM innovator Rob Donoghue), and you get some wide open possibilities for your big story.

Now, everyone’s experience is going to be different.  Some GMs may be able to showrun their campaigns very satisfactorily.  But this is about my weakness.

And I am still working on it.  I have a bunch of big stories towards which my current game might move along, but for now, I am finding the connections between our different adventures where I can, and always looking to incorporate my ideas, the ideas of the players, and do a reveal here and there to make it look like I planned things all along, even though I mostly made it up as I went.

Thanks to Marc for this month’s topic!

Here are some other folks that participate in our Round Table, and where I’ve been able to, the links to the responses to this specific topic.

+Marc Plourde at Nuts & Bolts #31 - Game Masters’ Roundtable of Doom #5 - Crossing the Divide

+James August Walls at http://ilive4crits.blogspot.com/2015/05/successfully-offing-your-favorite.html

+Scott Robinson at http://strangeenc.blogspot.com/2015/05/encoding-improvisation.html

+Lex Starwalker at http://www.starwalkerstudios.com/blog/2015/5/8/game-masters-roundtable-of-doom-5-the-weakest-link-in-my-gm-toolbox

+John Marvin at http://dreadunicorngames.com/2015/05/09/wait-something-important/  

+John Clayton at http://blog.filesandrecords.com/

+Peter Smits at http://planeataryexpress.blogspot.com/2015/05/roundtable-5-gming-weakness.html

+Arnold K.  http://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/

Game Masters’ Roundtable of Doom #4 – To be or not to be . . . a Killer GM

Today I am venturing to The Game Masters' Roundtable of Doom.  This is my first foray (though the fourth offering of the Roundtable), so, we shall see how it all goes.  There may be some adjustments made to this post as I get a handle on getting things just right for the Roundtable.

The Game Masters’ Roundtable of Doom is a meeting of the minds of tabletop RPG bloggers and GMs. We endeavor to transcend a particular system or game and discuss topics that are relevant to GMs and players of all roleplaying games.

If you’d like to submit a topic for our future discussions, or if you’re a blogger who’d like to participate in the Game Master’s Roundtable of Doom, send an email to Lex Starwalker at gamemastersjourney@gmail.com.

This month's topic comes to us courtesy of Lex Starwalker.

There is a wide spectrum of lethality in RPGs, and there are GMs who fall on every possible point within it.  These range from GMs who run campaigns where PCs can never die to the other extreme –GMs who delight in killing PCs.  Where do you fall on this spectrum?  How lethal are your games and why?  How do you handle PC death if and when it happens?

This is a great question, and one that I think has an answer that is not just dependent on the Game Master, but also on the players and the game being played.  Know your audience and know your game.  If you run Call of Cthulhu, Dungeons & Dragons, and Star Wars, Edge of the Empire all exactly the “same,” I think you come out with some anomalies.  Of course, if that meets your players expectations, that might be fine.  There is never just one way to be a GM.  I do believe that the rule of fun should prevail.

Here is how I have done things in my present style of being a GM (because, as the poser of this month’s question, Lex Starwalker knows, being a Game Master is a journey of learning and change).  I think the most important thing is to know your players’ expectations (or if you don’t know them, you need to set them).  Fundamentally, I see role playing games as a way to have fun, and as the GM, you are in a leadership role to help create the fun.  If what you do violates the players’ expectations, or you go against the expectations that you set for the players, that conflict is going to reduce the fun. 

Some of the first GM advice I ever got, was from a few pages towards the back of the 1981 game, Stormbringer (from Chaosium).  In the “Hints for the Game Master” section in the first edition of Stormbringer, Ken St. Andre (with Steve Perrin) wrote a subsection entitled “The Deadly Game Master.”

The literary genre of swords & sorcery fiction is a particularly gory branch of heroic fantasy, and that is what this game simulates.  Inevitably, this means that some players are going to get into situations that they can’t get out of, and their characters will have to die.  It is important that they realize this before the game ever starts, and that they know that you bear them no personal animosity.  Then, when the character’s number comes up, kill him without regret.  As a GM it is poor form to become so fond of some character that you let him cheat death when his luck finally runs out.

Today, I agree, up to a point with Ken’s advice.  As you can see, the advice already assumes that you are in a particular genre of game.  It is not general advice for all RPGs, just ones in the “particularly gory branch of heroic fantasy.”  Also, it advises that you at least admonish the table and set expectations.  I think now, the Game Master and the players, at least in any long term game, need to agree on expectations.  Back in the day, I did kill a fair number of Stormbringer characters.  However, even with an agreeable audience and a lethal game, I do today tend to lean towards mercy at a cost, rather than outright kill a character, if that keeps the story and the fun going.

For the way I run things now, I have internalized the lessons of 13^th Age (by Pelgrane Press and Fire Opal Media) and Dungeon World (by Sage Kobold Productions).  In 13^th Age Rob Heinsoo and Jonathan Tweet suggest that player characters should not just die fighting some nameless monster, and instead offer their own (optional) Meaningful Death Rule.  I think I have generally internalized this approach for many games (with some exceptions, see below).  I think the advice in Dungeon World, that you as GM need to be “fan” of the characters is a complementary one this.  As a GM, on the one hand, you have to put up obstacles and provide threats to the safety and wellbeing of the PCs.  On the other hand, you don’t generally want death to be some random occurrence that does nothing to propel your story or motivate the other characters.  If you are a fan of the characters, such random and meaningless events are discouraging.  If a character that you like dies, you want it to be a great and glorious death, within the meaning of the game.

Fundamentally, though, my rule is know your audience, know your game (and be a fan of the characters).

So, if I am running Marvel Heroic Role Playing for a bunch of tweens, their expectation is that there is not going to be any player character death, AT ALL.  Sure, Spiderman or Black Widow might get knocked around, there certainly are going to be some narrow escapes and heroic rescues, but none of the player characters is going to get shot through the heart and die, game over.  This is reinforced not only by the audience, but of course by the game play.

On the other hand, if I am playing Call of Cthulhu with college friends, death and madness are expected.  The players know going in that a Call of Cthulhu investigator likely has a short shelf life, and those that manage not to die, slip increasingly into madness and disability.  Still, I have run some long Call of Cthulhu campaigns, and I have followed the advice from the early editions of the game.  If you have a choice of killing a PC or taking out an NPC to establish the danger and the threat, take the NPC every time.  It helps if you have established ties to the NPC and that the character is not just another faceless “redshirt.”  However, to get things started with something that causes likely instant death, you kill the guy next to the PCs, and not one of them.  Once the threat is established, you follow the play of the PCs.  Are they reckless and foolhardy, then they do deserve death “without regret” should it come to them.  On the other hand, if they play their characters and show smart play, as a fan, I am going to hold back on any instant death options, unless it really builds the story and is part of the fun of the game (because sometimes messy, or pathetic or horrific death is the fun of a horror game).  If danger is enough, then, we work with danger; maiming, near death, madness, that’s all on the table, but I don’t tend to allow random death that would inhibit the story.

So, what about something in the middle of the spectrum of Superheroes where no one ever dies (at least permanently) and horror, where everyone dies or goes crazy eventually?  This is where most adventure based RPGs reside: Dungeons & Dragons, RuneQuest, HeroQuest, 13^th Age, Numenera, Dungeon World, Dresden Files, The One Ring, and et al and etc.  I have to admit to mostly not killing characters.

Over time, I have certainly seen many player characters in these games die.  However, for the most part, I prefer to see the PCs flee, or get captured, or suffer some kind of loss other than death.  This is, I think, largely because I like to run campaigns.  Campaigns need continuity, and killing characters, and particularly the dreaded Total Party Kill, tends to disrupt what is happening with the story that I have been enjoying building with the players over time.  Where death does occur, the story of overcoming death becomes the next logical plot point (e.g. becoming indebted to the healing temple to return the dead companion to life, etc.).  So, usually, the holodeck safeties are, broadly speaking, on when you step into my campaign.  The optional Meaningful Death Rule is going to be in effect.  Characters face other losses, but death is reserved.  In part, that meets the expectations of my players.  They put time into crafting characters, their histories and motivations, and they grow them at the table.  If some wandering damage is likely to kill them, for little to no reason, that is neither fun nor motivating for the kind of gamer who usually sits at my table.

On the other hand, there is a completely separate and apart kind of play, and that is the one-shot.  This does not mean that I turn into the lethal “save or die” GM just because I am running a single evening game.  After all, it should be fun, and getting to play is what is fun.  If we have four hours of play set up and you die in the first ten minutes, how much fun was that?  If dying means no longer being involved, that rather cuts down on the fun.  You can set expectations that characters are disposable and can be replaced, much like clones in Paranoia, but then you are playing a genre of game that is not going to necessarily have wide appeal. 

You do, however, play a one shot to have a different experience and tell a different kind of story.  Lethality can be very much part of that story, and can really be part of the fun with the right group.  I do not, in general, go in for Deathtrap Dungeons.  I don’t think I run them particularly well, so why do something that does not serve the players?  Still, if you know you are going into a deathtrap, you know that death is part of the fun of the game.  It is exciting to escape the trap, but you know your number is likely to come up eventually, and spectacular death is one of the possible rewards of play.  I will give it to you without regret. 

I don’t mind playing a high character death game as a change of pace, but for me, RPG play and the stories it generates is really about having a significant chronical of events for the player characters.  That might, at times, be punctuated by a death, but that is going to be rare and meaningful.

Individuals and their Blogs Participating in this Discussion (to be updated as necessary; posts will be made for the Roundtable between April 5 and April 11)

+Marc Plourde at http://inspstrikes.blogspot.co.uk/

+James August Walls at http://ilive4crits.blogspot.com/

+Scott Robinson at http://strangeenc.blogspot.com/

+Lex Starwalker at http://www.starwalkerstudios.com/blog/2015/4/6/game-masters-roundtable-of-doom-4-how-lethal-are-your-campaigns

+John Marvin at http://dreadunicorngames.com/

+John Clayton at http://blog.filesandrecords.com/

+Peter Smits at http://planeataryexpress.blogspot.com/2015/04/pcs-and-killing-there-of.html

+Arnold K.