How do you like things GMed?

silverfox

So I've never even seen a tabletop game (I have heard of them lots! But I've never even been in the same room!) so I'm so so so sorry if I ask stupid questions because I don't have that background.

That apology given :

What do you usually do to start a scene, or if you are building something larger than one scene, how do you begin that?

Tinuviel

@silverfox said in How do you like things GMed?:

What do you usually do to start a scene, or if you are building something larger than one scene, how do you begin that?

The first step, I would say, is to learn all you can about the characters and players you want to draw in. You're designing the scenario (be it one scene or a long-lingering plot) for both their fun and to tell your story. There's no use in running a plot full of investigation and intrigue for people that only like hitting things, for instance.

Once that is mostly done I usually start with thoughts for the plot or scene's end. Sort of.
What is the ultimate goal for the scene/plot/whatever? That goal might never be reached, and might change as things move on, but it helps to ground the middle bits and the beginning - as having far too much freedom can send my mind mind racing, so that I obsess over the middle but never get to the end - and planning (not setting down a definitive plan, just planning) helps to establish reasons for why the players and characters involved will want to keep telling this story with you when things go wrong.

faraday

@silverfox Far from stupid. This stuff isn't easy.

I agree with what @Tinuviel said about starting with how you're going to draw people in. You could have the best plot idea ever, but if there's no way for players to engage with it, it's not going to go anywhere.

Tinuviel

The keyest of key things about becoming any kind of GM is that you need to be open to criticism. That doesn't mean you should just tolerate abuse, but you definitely need to be okay with one of the players in your story coming to you with something that's bothering them or concerns them.

You also need to become comfortable with the idea of approaching players, if their behaviour is bothering you or if you don't feel that they're participating as well as they might. Engagement and such things are all part of your job when you take on this role.

Ghost

Lots of good advice here. Here's another piece:

CHECK OUT OTHER GMs

Nothing is stopping you from asking another GM if you can tag along and help run parts of a scene for them, especially if they're a GM who does things that you admire. Find what seems fun, what would excite you as a player, and adapt these methods into what will be your comfort zone as a GM.

There are a lot of YouTube channels that show roleplaying sessions (Critical Roll, HarmonQuest, Acquisitions Inc, Geek and Sundry), podcasts (Role-Playing Public Radio, Fandible Actual Play), and websites/forums loaded with advice and examples of fun games and good GMing.

I personally recommend RPPR actual play podcast, Fandible actual play podcast, and Critical Roll/Geek and Sundry.

Oh and look, I've gone through the trouble of hunting down a web series of GM tips from Matt Mercer.

Matt Mercer GM Tips

Tinuviel

@Ghost I can also recommend Matt Colville's Running the Game series. It's rather longer than GM Tips, but good if you want detailed information on worldbuilding, dealing with adversaries, and so forth.

Tinuviel

I will also say, as a double-post, I am far more campaign-oriented than scene-oriented as far as my GM-ing rules go. Scenes don't really need rules. Take an idea, run it. People will like it, it'll be resolved, or they won't and it won't.

Ultimate rule: Learn by doing. If you want to run a thing, run it. It might not be your magnum opus, but every attempt is one more step to mastery.

Lotherio

I'm late to this tea party but wanted to throw in a couple of cents.

Goal oriented or open ended can both be fun, it depends on the GM I think. If we're in a war campaign and our goal is to defend the last bridge, and half the story is getting there .... I expect the GM to lead us there even if we go a round about way, eventually point A (Cologne) leads to point B (Remagen). What if we saved Hohenzollern Bridge in Cologne (our demolitions expert cut the wires for those charges on March 6th)? Well, the armored infantry we need to the push over the Rhine are still tied up at Remagen with no way to navigate the 10 miles up to Hohenzollern in Cologne, the charges failed there on March 7th naturally and we need to clear that bridge before the remaining German charges arrive, so we force march over night and have a battle of Remagen just the same. Some details changed, but we still did point A, some battles in Cologne, and we still did B, a large story point of saving Remagen and getting armored infantry over the Rhine. Was it gated or railroaded, I don't know, but we fought some Nazis along the way and everyone had fun.

That said, my personal style is open ended. @Ghost covered this pretty well, offer a beginning, don't write in the end. @Botulism said how I feel about it, if all steps from A to D are planned, just write the story. Players are their to make their own direction. I prefer the nugget style of open ended. Nuggets of interest are offered (potential beginnings) and they players take the nuggets or not. As staff, and players on open BG games, we have the best nuggets available, players BGs. If I'm in super hero city, they players may not want to save starbucks (we can give a little remorse later, saying x people died in the blast cause 911 response was 2 minutes too slow or something). But maybe Johnny was bullied by Fred which lead to Johnny having a strong hero complex, but what's this, Fred is now a super villian. I think Johnny will buy into that. And if I'm not certain (as players don't like random Staffing as much as they used to), I will contact Johnny before hand via page: hey, mind if I start something involving your bg. If he needs details I'll work them out, but sometimes players just want that little heads up something is coming, instead of Fred showing up at group date night at starbucks to blow it up when they were just planning to walk out for minigolf across the street or whatever.

Both are fine, I think player buy in and GM communication helps in both.

Ghost

@faraday is totally right. She and I have different approaches to GMing. She's also a fantastic GM and I recommend people pay attention to her games and play them. She's probably the fairest and most balanced GM in the hobby, IMO.

On BS:U, she did scenes involving her players the right way. IF your character is in the scene, then you have to put them on equal footing in terms of screen time with the other players. She never made the scenes about her characters in the scene; her character just happened to be a part of the scene. She never railroaded her character into being the one who solves the problem, and never used scenes she ran involving her own character as vehicles for driving her character's agenda. She shared the scene and seemed very comfortable letting the room of players be the deciding factor.

Personally? If I have a character in the scene, I tend to put them in the background or not in the scene at all, probably because the temptation to make them important is real and I just prefer to avoid it as a means to mitigate the risks. That was my preferred method on Mutant Genesis.

So in that? It's good to write a story and have an idea how you would like it to end. You can plot out things ahead of time. Faraday isn't wrong at all.

My preferred way of inserting railroaded content, if needed, is to treat it like a cutscene. I tend to use a lot of movie and tv methods, because Stephen King said: Good writers borrow, great writers STEAL.

So, say I want to implement a bad guy blowing up a building as a plot element. I could create a story where the characters have a chance to stop it from happening, but if I as a GM need that building to blow up due to future plot elements for the group, I don't put the PCs in a position where they can stop it. The PCs will always want to succeed, so if I send them through hours of RP to keep the building from blowing up and then mandate that they failed, they'll think I'm a motherfucker.

So? STEAL. In this case? Batman: The Dark Knight.

Joker put 2 bombs, one on Harvey Dent and the other on Rachel. Batman thought he was saving one, but he saved the wrong one. Right?

So I'll have the characters storm the building and fight their way down to the hostages and what they suspect is 2 tons of explosives that they have to disarm. I'll have them fight down to the mini-boss, perhaps beat the mini-boss, rescue the hostages and find...no bomb. Instead they might find a TV connected to a camera feed that shows the ACTUAL target. They won! They beat a bad guy, saved hostages, and then go "ohhhhh shiiii-" as...

...the other building blows up.

Now the bad guy is the motherfucker and I get to unveil that later plot point without railroading, and have just made my players really hungry for finding that sonofabitch. Like Pro wrestling...I would have just made the players really invested in Macho Man beating the Undertaker at Wrestlemania. They didn't fail and I didn't railroad; I just gave them more plot for future gaming, and players mostly want to be invested in the story. So, in a weirdly sociopathic way, through the lens of the bad guy, I would have done just that.

I cannot understate the importance of great villains.

Lotherio

@Ghost said in How do you like things GMed?:

I cannot understand the importance of great villains.

Just a quick note on this idea. If I want Fred to be the villain at some point, from an open ended standpoint, I don't make a series of events that lead to Fred (and again, good GMs that go that route do make it fun). I have Fred do something dastardly. Then I let the players plan the route and help them along the way, often times listening for what they're planning and incorporating it with other ideas that pop into mind. I didn't plan the end, Fred's demise, but I set the course by having him be the dastard. I guess that's the gate that was mentioned, but in open ended, I'm fine if Fred's demise isn't the final part of that arch for the players. Heck, if they let him go, I may use him for a nugget later (or if it is super hero city, he'll return anyways). I don't plan for it though, I react as the world at large for what the players choose to do.

Ghost

@Ghost said in How do you like things GMed?:

I cannot understate the importance of great villains.

@Lotherio correction. UNDERSTATE. My phone autocorrected it to understand.

Villains are super important, I totally understand their importance. I cannot understate their importance.

Lotherio

@Ghost said in How do you like things GMed?:

UNDERSTATE. My phone autocorrected it to understand.

Heh, I read it as understate too. This is what happens when a dyslexic person goes with the auto-corrected word without double checking their own reading comprehension (I understood it, it looked right to me).

Ghost

@Lotherio DYSLEXICS OF THE WORLD UNTIE!

Killer Klown

I don't know that there's any hard and fast rule for this since everything's pretty fluid - and some of the ones I can think of might actually seem contradictory. For example, it's important to keep in mind who you have playing in the scene. If you have a bunch of combat monkeys, a social or investigative scene probably won't be very enjoyable. At the same time, it's important to not make the scene overly reliant on a specific skillset. If everyone automatically 'won', there'd be no point in gming it. Likewise, if there is only one person in the group with a sufficient level of skill and they drop the ball for whatever reason <miss the roll, don't show up for the scene, etc>, it could derail the entire thing.

Flexibility, really, is the key factor. Have a decided start point and an ideal end point; but understand that things might not always start when and where you want them to, that players will invariably take the smallest detail you mention and assume it's going to be something major, and they will find some unusual method of solving the problem that you didn't account for. Above all else, don't steal victory from the players. Make it hard, make it challenging, make it something that normal methods wouldn't be able to solve - but if the players come up with something, prepare sufficiently, or otherwise have an answer for everything that you throw at them; let them have it. For that, always have a backup plan. The villain that you had intended to be the main bad guy and escape, but that the players inconveniently killed off, was in fact just a pawn for some extradimensional horror that won't be revealed until a couple of sessions later <when you've had time to come up with it>. The massive plot they foiled did, in fact, save the day and win the battle; but it left a power void in the criminal underworld that another group was all too eager to step in and fill once the PC's turned their attention away, etc.

I think that, more than anything else, is something I rate as extremely important - sometimes the players will win. Sometimes they will dominate the enemy <especially if it's a long-standing or high powered game. Power levels are relative, after all>; never let them feel that their efforts are wasted or ineffective - if they fail, they fail forward (Stealing a term from Wrath and Glory); but if they succeed, they succeed forward too. The individual scene is less important than what comes next, what's waiting in the wings, or what challenge awaits.

Ganymede

@Ghost said in How do you like things GMed?:

On BS:U, she did scenes involving her players the right way. IF your character is in the scene, then you have to put them on equal footing in terms of screen time with the other players. She never made the scenes about her characters in the scene; her character just happened to be a part of the scene. She never railroaded her character into being the one who solves the problem, and never used scenes she ran involving her own character as vehicles for driving her character's agenda. She shared the scene and seemed very comfortable letting the room of players be the deciding factor.

Also, she was the medic, and we kept on getting fucking shot apart.

Of course, Faraday's game also had FS3 with a combat engine. You literally cannot steal the limelight in that engine. It treats PCs like meat no matter who is playing.

faraday

@Ganymede said in How do you like things GMed?:

Also, she was the medic, and we kept on getting fucking shot apart.

Lol, she was also the medic with the worst luck, who got shot more than anyone.

But I think @Ghost is right - if you're going to put your own char into a scene you're running, you've got to be careful that you don't hog the limelight. Nobody wants to come to a scene just to be window-dressing. That doesn't mean you can't ever do anything cool; but you do have to share the coolness with others.

I think that same philosophy applies to plots too. If the PCs are just there to be window-dressing in whatever story you're trying to force down their throats, that's not fun. But if you present them with a cool challenge and give them a chance to shine and do something cool, most folks can have fun even if the outcome of the challenge was pre-ordained. The journey often matters more than the destination.

Seraphim73

@Killer-Klown said in How do you like things GMed?:

If everyone automatically 'won', there'd be no point in gming it.

This is one bit that I wish more people were good with. In the best stories, nothing ever goes perfectly smoothly -- or if it does, then the enemy planned for it to go smoothly. And yet on too many games, everything succeeds every time. Now, it's hard to spend 3 hours doing something and lose with no progress, but I would love to see more scenes end in losses that still provide some progress through the storyline. I would love to see more scenes of heroic rearguard actions ... that still require that the PCs retreat at the end. Like, I don't know, somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of scenes, with the other 2/3 to 3/4 being straight-up successes.

@faraday She was also the medic who always seemed to get targeted by the "extra" enemy (I do that to my own PCs too if there's no IC reason to target someone else).

Killer Klown

@Seraphim73 True, though I don't think anyone wants to lose either. The statement applies just as much to GM characters as it does PC's; and while the GM does have a story to tell, they also need to keep in mind that they're dealing with real live players - and they need to plan for the fact that the players won't stick to a script and may, in fact, outsmart or outfight the bad guy du jour.
More than failure, though, what I (and a number of folks who have talked to me over the years regarding scenes where this was a factor) find more egregious is the sense of wasting our time. This isn't the same as failure or not accomplishing something; but rather a point where you end the scene in no different a position than where you began. Most often this seems to happen when the big foozle is either somehow untouchable despite everything the players try, or has some equally mysterious trap door to escape at the last minute that the players had no way of detecting or stopping; but there are other non-combat related instances that I've seen it come up, too. Failure might irk people in the immediate sense, but getting a feeling that you're inconsequential or that the GM has a story to tell and will tell it regardless of what the players do or where the dice lead usually means people will just stop showing up for scenes. In my experience, most scenes (especially in things like Mage or Werewolf) involve a lot of time and effort beyond the few hours devoted to the scene itself. People do a lot of pre-planning and preparation; be it setting up spells, acquiring/creating items, researching the area or target, or what have you. That can span days, or even weeks, before the scene itself happens - and having all of that lead up to nothing leaves the players with both a sense of failure and that none of it really mattered; which does tend to get frustrating.
This goes back to what I was saying up there about 'failing forward' (A term I first saw used in WH40k: Wrath and Glory - which is rapidly becoming one of my favorite underdog games and is one of the best RPG representations of the settings I've seen), where everything is focused not on success or failure, but on advancing the plot; and it applies to both the GM and the players. If the players succeed, the GM needs to have a contingency in play that can continue their story without removing the feeling of success that the players might have. Even if they fail in the overall goal, though, the players still do need to get a sense of some kind of accomplishment; and it's up to the GM to work unexpected actions on the players part into the plot without removing the sense that the players can actually affect the world around them.
As an example, something that happens fairly often in WoD games - a murder plot. Scenario is that there's been a lot of ritual-style killings around town; bodies flayed, arcane or obscene symbols drawn in blood, the whole nine yards. To break it down in WoD terms, the individual sessions would be players investigating these murders, piecing together clues, building a profile. The GM's job here is to dangle enough carrots for them to keep up the investigation, while not letting them have the whole fruit basket in a single session.
From there the Chapter ends with them finding out who the killer is, where they lair and - if supernatural - what their habits and vulnerabilities might be. They close in, engage and fight the guy. Fight could go one of two ways; the dice are not with them or they didn't take everything in to account and the foozle whomps them. They take some losses but, if they're smart, manage to pull back and extricate. Even by losing, though, they've found out some valuable information on the foozle - more about his capabilities, or that their initial assessment of what he was was wrong, or maybe someone recognized something in their lair that led to a different line of investigating.
On the other hand, they could win.
And if they win, yaay. They won. However, when they loot the corpse they discover that the foozle kept a scrapbook, and in that book are newspaper clippings of similar murders going back hundreds of years - and some more recent ones that happened in other locations at exactly the same time that the ones the players had been investigating. Or maybe a few days after the fight, a player catches a news report that the killings are still going on. Maybe the foozle can be in multiple places at once. Maybe he's back from the dead. Or, maybe, he's part of a larger cult; or just a patsy for a greater evil. Maybe that foozle was completely inconsequential and the real killer is still out there. Either way, the players might have succeeded in their stated goal (kill foozle), but ultimately the scene failed in it's objective (stop the murders); while still allowing a way forward to further chapters to find out about and, ultimately, confront whoever/whatever's really in charge.

Losing the fight still allowed the players to accomplish something; while winning it didn't put an end to the killings, even though the players preparation and dice paid off.