Pure, distilled, good advice for GMs
Mar. 24th, 2008 01:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kilroyI'm leaving this here so that I can read it before I run any game of anything. It's all from Spirit of the Century.
"Before you -- the GM -- call for a die roll, it is critically important that you stop and do two things: imagine success, and imagine failure.
It sounds simple, but it can make a critical difference. Success is usually the easy part, but failure can be a bit trickier. You want to make sure that both outcomes are interesting, though interesting certainly doesn't need to mean good.
If you cannot come up with a way to handle either outcome, you need to rethink the situation.
It's as simple as that, because there are few things more frustrating to a player than making a skill roll and getting told that it nets them no new knowledge, no suggested course of action, no new development for the story, and so on.
So, whenever you call for a roll, be absolutely certain you understand that this is a branching point in your story, and what each of the branches entails. If one or the other branch does not suggest a course of action, then calling for a roll is probably a bad idea."
"Step back and think of the game as the story of the characters. This seems simple enough, but consider the implication: just like the protagonists of a book or movie, the most interesting story is wherever they are, and is the story best suited to these characters in particular."
"Whatever the players are interested in is more important and better than anything you came up with. If your ideas are so good that player input ruins them, you should be writing novels instead of playing roleplaying games."
"If all those questions the players are asking are off-target, it's very likely because you didn't make the target big enough. If they're sitting around and unsure of what actions they can or should take, you probably didn't give them enough cues as to what their options are.
[If they think there's nowhere for them to go,] it's because you didn't show them what the destinations were. Show them!"
"Even if you can see several holes in a [player] plan, don't go taking advantage of those holes right away. Villains can have blind spots; they're not perfect either. Jeopardize the holes, certainly, to increase the drama, but don't go after them to the point of unraveling the plan. If it's even halfway decent then it's going to make for a solid, entertaining element of the story. Support their plan -- like it -- and be glad to be a part of it!"
"At no point have we talked about how to keep information from players. There's a simple reason for that-- it's a bad idea.
This returns to the core responsibility of the GM as the provider of information, but here is a basic rule of thumb: if there is a piece of information to be found, a player should find it, the only question is when and how. If there's a secret door in the complex, then it is not the player's responsibility to find it, it is your responsibility to show it to them."
"If the characters already have a dramatic situation, but they're gathering information because they don't see the clear path of action, then they should find a tell which helps provide the clarity."
"Before you -- the GM -- call for a die roll, it is critically important that you stop and do two things: imagine success, and imagine failure.
It sounds simple, but it can make a critical difference. Success is usually the easy part, but failure can be a bit trickier. You want to make sure that both outcomes are interesting, though interesting certainly doesn't need to mean good.
If you cannot come up with a way to handle either outcome, you need to rethink the situation.
It's as simple as that, because there are few things more frustrating to a player than making a skill roll and getting told that it nets them no new knowledge, no suggested course of action, no new development for the story, and so on.
So, whenever you call for a roll, be absolutely certain you understand that this is a branching point in your story, and what each of the branches entails. If one or the other branch does not suggest a course of action, then calling for a roll is probably a bad idea."
"Step back and think of the game as the story of the characters. This seems simple enough, but consider the implication: just like the protagonists of a book or movie, the most interesting story is wherever they are, and is the story best suited to these characters in particular."
"Whatever the players are interested in is more important and better than anything you came up with. If your ideas are so good that player input ruins them, you should be writing novels instead of playing roleplaying games."
"If all those questions the players are asking are off-target, it's very likely because you didn't make the target big enough. If they're sitting around and unsure of what actions they can or should take, you probably didn't give them enough cues as to what their options are.
[If they think there's nowhere for them to go,] it's because you didn't show them what the destinations were. Show them!"
"Even if you can see several holes in a [player] plan, don't go taking advantage of those holes right away. Villains can have blind spots; they're not perfect either. Jeopardize the holes, certainly, to increase the drama, but don't go after them to the point of unraveling the plan. If it's even halfway decent then it's going to make for a solid, entertaining element of the story. Support their plan -- like it -- and be glad to be a part of it!"
"At no point have we talked about how to keep information from players. There's a simple reason for that-- it's a bad idea.
This returns to the core responsibility of the GM as the provider of information, but here is a basic rule of thumb: if there is a piece of information to be found, a player should find it, the only question is when and how. If there's a secret door in the complex, then it is not the player's responsibility to find it, it is your responsibility to show it to them."
"If the characters already have a dramatic situation, but they're gathering information because they don't see the clear path of action, then they should find a tell which helps provide the clarity."