GM Tips: Scaring Your Players

GM Tips: It's easy to get into any number of RPGs as a new player, but getting started is a rocky, uphill battle for the Game Master, as he must wrangle player personalities, schedules, and the rules of the system in addition to developing his own plot. Hopefully, a few personal lessons will ease your GMing burden, or at least illustrate how one nerd shoulders the burden of the Game Master.

Last week I mentioned that I wanted to follow up on a search hit with GM tips for scaring one's players. With Halloween this weekend, now's as great a time as any to share my thoughts on the subject and impart a little advice. At first I had planned on sharing tactics to evoke a variety of emotions, but to keep this post focused I wanted to pare things down to scaring your RPG group. Fear is one of the harder emotions to evoke around the game table, so it's all the more important.

When players come together to play a tabletop RPG, they do so to entertain each other and socialize in a shared, imaginative experience. But that means that every role-player is interested in a certain amount of  goofing off and chit-chatting. That's fine, but it makes fear more elusive because your players' mindsets are in the wrong gear. Fear is about anxiety, and anxiety is an emotionally taxing state--it requires your constant attention and imagination. A horror movie or video game can cheat anxiety by throwing a grotesque image or gore at the audience, but in an RPG session this tack can be problematic--and smelly. The GM needs to be deliberate and reactive to his players to keep them afraid for their characters.

While I haven't led a lot of horror-focused games, all of my campaigns have featured fear and suspense as important factors. My current RPG campaign in particular--the one in the Myth setting--is thematically built on three pillars of tragedy, duty, and horror. I've also played and led a few games in a low-powered mortals campaign of World of Darkness, with all The X-Files creepy goodness that went with it. So I've stretched these GM muscles a bit in the past. There's a lot of interactivity in an RPGs, obviously, so anything you do needs to be tailored and responsive to your group. An easy shortcut to tailoring is to find out what other stories your players like. Do they like psychological horror? Throw thought puzzles and philosophical paradoxes at them. Do they like gory violent schlock? Give them a red-shirt or two and have them die in meticulously detailed scenes. Responding to your players is about two things: correcting wrong assumptions you made in the tailoring process and letting your players have a legitimate sway over the direction of the plot. This is the balancing act of fear in an RPG--your players want to exert control over the plot, and in so doing they are out to destroy any atmosphere of horror you might create.

Tell The Story

This is a fundamental issue for most RPG sessions. GMing a campaign involves a lot of work: mapping out locations; plotting out characters and adversaries; hammering out the mechanics of player options in-game. But once everyone is at the table, you're all involved in a storytelling experience, so don't forget to tell the story. Tell the frakking story. Don't give your players a mechanic or stat-value unless they have a description to justify it--and sometimes if you give your players a thorough description of the action, you can make some of the mechanics unnecessary. And don't fall into the trap of describing only the mechanically important elements of the story. It may be important that the room has a conveniently heavy desk near the only door, but does it have pictures on it? What about interior decoration? Do the drawers have paperwork that might entice the player characters to waste time investigating? These details help create a three-dimensional story that draws the players in and helps put them in a place where they're more likely to feel the tension and fear you're trying to create. Yeah, you need to do some legwork to get your players into the right mood for your fear-mongering to settle. Deal with it.

Don't Name It!

By this, I mean don't use the official rules-related name for your game's adversaries. This is especially important when your players might have a good idea of what a NPC is capable of once they get the monster's name (a particular problem for DnD groups), but it applies pretty much whenever that antagonist's name or title will give a hasty shorthand of their capabilities and/or motivations. Nothing kills the mystery of your average monster as much as seeing its Playboy spread. Sure, it might be convenient to refer to that level 3 Ghoul as such, but once your bring your monster into the light, you generally can't convince your players that it's a silhouette again. So don't name your monster unless it's absolutely necessary: that isn't a zombie--it's a twitching, pallid trucker in a torn plaid shirt and broken fingertips; that isn't a ghost--it's a flickering cloud of sighs and soft crunching of bones. This ties in with telling the story, as filling out archetypal NPCs with detailed, unique descriptions are a good way to add depth to your players' investment in the story.

Extending this principal beyond the monster's appearance and name, you can take this as a reminder not to give your players cozy answers to unsettling mysteries. Most serial killers and real-life horrors are scary because of the fickle, unfathomable motivations behind their acts. Only a GM, speaking with the voice of God, can give you that authoritative answer of firmly knowing that person X did for Y reason. Any person speaking with limited knowledge in your setting can only speculate what made your game's bogeyman don a slicker and go on a killing-spree, and that will make the thrill of hunting him down all the more tense for them.

Secret Dice Rolls

This is a simple one. I'm a firm believer in hiding things from players, especially to create a scary atmosphere. This dovetails with not sharing your monster's names with your players, as it's often important that your players don't know what certain dice results are. For example, if your players are making a check to detect whether that suspicious groundskeeper is telling the truth, it'd be pretty pointless if they got to see if their dice results yielded a success of failure in the 'detect lies' skill. Roll those dice in secret and then accordingly lie to the players about how charismatic and helpful the scraggly man is, and about how his offer of hospitality seems totally genuine. One of the potentially most immersion-breaking aspects of a tabletop RPG is getting to see how your dice fare--a meta-game indicator--rather than having to rely on the subjective report of actual effects--an in-game indicator.

I also like to sometimes extend this to making extra rolls in secret--that is, I roll the dice behind my GM screen for no point other than to make my players anxious. What was Ben rolling? Did we just spring a trap? If we did, why aren't we being attacked yet? What's following us? We should explore this room more. Maybe this NPC isn't everything he said he was. It's a way of subverting some of the mechanics of the tabletop experience to create a pavlovian response in your game group--secret rolls are a source of player-based tension, so it can be used to enhance the fear the characters should be exhibiting. Use sparingly--and not too much immediately after blogging about it.

Minimize Mechanics

Dice rolling and game mechanics are fun and deserve to form the lynchpin of your average RPG. But they're logical (hopefully), fair (most of the time), and balanced (somewhat), which are not really conducive to fear. When your players are thinking of game mechanics, they're thinking about modifiers, odds, and binary choices to narrow down the most likely route to success. They aren't thinking about mysteries or the mental image of the floating corpse with its lungs ripped out through his throat. And that's too bad. So do yourself a favor as a GM trying to scare your players by minimizing mechanics. Try not to look into your ten-pound gaming encyclopedia at the game table--if you can't remember a rule, wing it and double-check later. This won't work with some players without a good amount of persuasion, but I find it's a super helpful way to get players invested in the mood you're creating.

Add variety to the stakes

I hate saving the world. It seems like every movie, television show, comic, and game out there is interested in saving the world. Don't get me wrong, the world has some nice things to offer, but it's pretty boring to have stakes that are consistently raised to the max all the time. And it's also kind of hard to imagine what saving the world feels like, really. It ends up just being a ham-handed way for GMs to say that the players are now "Over 9,000!!!" How do they know they've reached the final boss? The GM gives them a narrative that it's all come down to this, the armies of the world are arrayed, and the final battle is about to begin. Then Shang Tsung descends and says "Fight!" and the players wade into a big arena fight with an over-powered yet obviously flawed boss character.

No thank you. How about a campaign to save only yourselves? That's a great horror objective. Or to save a loved one, if you have characters who aren't orphan-murder-hobos like those that are typically played in your average RPG? Or what about when the stakes are uncertain? Is this hostile trying to rob us, mug us, murder us, or kidnap us? Making the objective of the enemy uncertain throws a wrench into what retaliation is acceptable for the players, and that not only makes them hesitate but makes them internalize the details of the plot to digest the fearful elements better.

Also, the big bad doesn't need to be more powerful than the players. Making a threat boil down to someone who's simply more ruthless than everyone around him, or who has a better plan, or is more tactically cowardly, can be a lot more interesting than the huge thing that trades blows with the four champions of the free peoples of the world.

Control (or at least be mindful of) Ambience

I never GM a game without music in the background. I use it to set the mood of the game and also to fill in the silences in the action of game sessions. It's important to pick music that is spooky, scary, or terrifying and queue it up as needed to give your players the creeps, but I also think it's equally important to pick something that isn't too on the nose and overly popular. The Halloween theme is chilling, but everyone knows it and is inured to it, whether from seeing the movie too many times or from going to one too many Fright-Fests at Six Flags. Pick something relatively obscure and let it fine-tune your ambience. Also, remember that ambience is about more than just music. If you can, think about changing around your game room to make it spookier--dimmer lighting, closed doors, and even what's on your game shelf behind you can modify players' moods in your gaming space.



So those are my quick and dirty tips for GMs interested in scaring their players. Take your time to tell your story, go out of your way not to label your threats, use secret dice rolls, minimize the game and maximize the story, add variety to the stakes, and remember your ambience.

Myth Map Released

Just 'Cuz

Over the past week I had come to the decision, with a little encouragement, to release the full resolution version of my Myth map. Now, this might not seem too relevant, but as I quickly summarize my process and decision-making it might help you flesh out your own world-building process. You can feel free to use these maps for your own fantasy RPG--better than the generic D&D worlds, in my vitriolic opinion--or you can just use this as inspiration for one GM's process for map-making and world-building. First, a reminder of the official map with which I started:

I love this map. It's characterful and has a great texture to it, and the cartography does a great job of evoking the hand-made qualities of ancient map-making. Tolkien-forgive-me, but I think I like looking at this map more than most of the original Middle Earth maps. At the same time, however, it's an incredibly game-y and contrived map. Maps traditionally fit as much detail as possible into a confined space, and the sort of large gaps that define the map above would normally be indicative of a wild, uncharted region. And in the lore of Myth, that doesn't quite jive. So I'm left with a map that is attractive and evocative, but that at the same time pulls me back and says it's a game map.

When I sat down to change the world map, then, I wanted to ensure that there'd be a good and representative density to the map. If something was particularly bare, I wanted that bareness to say something about the setting. My tweak of the map was also going to be perfectly consistent: every civilized settlement of more than two thousand people would be on the map. This would assuage my anal-retentive GM obsessive compulsion, and it would mean that I could use the settlements on the map to estimate the population of the free world--very useful when your major antagonist is on a ten year plan to make it all burn. And finally, I wanted the map to be functional for journey-charting for the party. So this meant that as dense as I might make it, the map would still need to have enough space to mark it up.

Step one was figuring out the scale of the official Myth map. In The Fallen Lords, there's a quote that a runner from Willow traveled fourteen hundred miles to Rhi'anon. Of course, the quote might be dead reckoning or it might estimate the path the runner took. More useful, however, is another line that says Silvermines is one hundred miles away from Bagrada, the southernmost pass through the Cloudspine mountains. That let me scale the map and feel confident in slapping a scale key on it. Then, in determining how big the map would physically be, I wanted the map to be overlaid with a one-inch hex grid. Based on the width of the regions represented, I decided to make each hex 20 miles across. This would be an average day's travel, so for convenience the party might travel 1 hex per day.

The next major creative hurdle was filling in all the details. And that meant kicking up the number of named settlements on the map from about a dozen on the official map up to over 150 on the oh-my-gosh-how-long-does-Ben-plan-on-running-this-campaign map. First I had to add lots of small rivers and lakes to the map, though, because pre-industrial villages generally gravitate towards bodies of water. Yes, I really thought that far ahead. Once I had plunked down all the little land features however, I had a list of about 200 geographic sites waiting to be named. Poop. I hate being me. This is when a sane person would seek help and try to overcome their obsessive tendencies. But I just called it good GMing and started categorizing each feature by fictional ethnicity parallel. Yep, that simple. For instance, the Cath Bruig are the dominant human ethnicity in the setting. They have a number of character and place names gleaned from Celtic and Gaelic folklore, so I started pulling a list of other names I liked from there. I also happen to be madly in love with the Welsh language though, and it gives my inner sadist a GM-happy whenever I watch my players try to pronounce Welsh names, so I threw a ton of Welsh-inspired locations in the middle region of the map. The west was going to be a semi-independent former colony of the Cath Bruig, so I went the English route by bastardizing and crassifying the Bruig language to populate the Province. Yes, I meant to say crassifying. The northern tribes were straight-up Norse in their influence, and the easternmost kingdom of Gower was built around my wiki-knowledge of historical Turkish traditions. The dwarf kingdom and the forest kingdom of The Ermine required me to extrapolate my own language conventions based on what little we get in the official lore, in order to create a consistent standard.

Overall, it's a lot of work, and if you end up using it for your own games I'd love to hear that my GM lunacy saved you at least a little effort. So here's the long-previewed full resolution Myth map.

With Hex Grid overlay added

Note that I had kept this world map secret from my players until their characters bought a regional map at the first market town they came upon. This helped to reinforce the feudal ignorance I wanted to emphasize in my game, helped keep the players from feeling too overwhelmed, and made for a nice one-page print-up at full-resolution.

And yes, as I've reviewed the map for this post, it's dawned on me that I need to add more details here and there. I'm a sick, sick nerd.

UPDATE 7/31/2013: if the above images still aren't big enough for you, try this link.

GM Tips: Know Your System Expounded

GM Tips: It's easy to get into any number of RPGs as a new player, but getting started is a rocky, uphill battle for the Game Master, as he must wrangle player personalities, schedules, and the rules of the system in addition to developing his own plot. Hopefully, a few personal lessons will ease your GMing burden, or at least illustrate how one nerd shoulders the burden of the Game Master.


Before I get into today's tips for GMs, I want to point out that early yesterday morning May officially became the highest traffic month in the history of the blog. Woot! Also, with nearly two weeks left, May is going to be the first month to reach a personal goal for me since I started the blog. It's an embarrassingly modest goal, and I originally thought I'd hit it in month three of blogging, so I'm not going to share it right now. But I wanted to thank you guys for reading and to let you know that it means a lot to me. Now tell your friends, you anti-social dorks.

*fist-shakes*

As a completely pointless token of my thanks, here's a pic of something fun I made on Friday. Yeah, sometimes this is what I do, too.

Check out my under-moisturized hand and freaky ET fingers.

Okay, now to your almost regularly scheduled Nerdery: In GMing 101 I stressed first and foremost that you know your system. Knowing your system is an invaluable element of situational awareness as a GM, and it goes beyond the rules found in your core game book and extends to understanding your perceptions and those of your players. If you want the lay-abouts to enjoy the game, that is. If you don't, then by all means plow into whatever rules system you fancy and bedevil those silly fun-seeking players.

Here I'll provide some examples of RPGs that I own, their most important mechanics, and what factors normally lead me to play a game with that system. This is a good principle to ply when in the early stages of planning an RPG campaign, and it extends to any discussions you should have with your core players before putting too much work into a game. It really would be unfortunate to get three sessions into a new campaign to find out that your players, system, and setting are a poor match for each other. Unfortunate, but not atypical.



GURPS
Primary Mechanic: Roll 3d6 and total the rolled result, looking to get under your effective skill for the action.

For being so notorious for math and character-building minutiae, GURPS has one of the most straightforward primary game mechanics of any dice-based RPG system. You throw your three six-sided dice and want to get low results--at most equal to your skill for the specific action. That's it. Physically, a player is doing the same thing whether jumping a bridge or fast-drawing a pistol--throwing 3d6--and it's only the specific modifiers and player choices that change. Now, damage does call on players to roll different numbers of six-siders, but that's a small, clear deviation from the gold standard. GURPS players need no odd-sided dice, don't have to alternate between mini-game diversions for game mechanics, or hover over whether or not they want to roll high or low. You want high rolls for damage, and low rolls for everything else.

Now, that simple game mechanic has a whole range of applications, and because of that the core books for GURPS are really thick with well thought-out and detailed rules. And the huge library of supplements out there are usually an expansion and explanation of the simple guidelines in the two books of the core set. For instance, the Low Tech series of GURPS supplements build on the ancient arms, armor, and economic aspects of playing a gritty game in eras before firearms became commonplace. But there are basic lists of swords and medieval weaponry in the core books, but they tend to be a shorthand list meant more for simplistic and stylized games with action movie mentality--equipped with Low Tech, you can specify weight and cost for pauldrons rather than an entire suit of armor. This pattern means that a GURPS supplement often fits in well with the core set, but it also isn't as likely to be a game-changer as other RPG expansions. Depending on your personal sensibilities, this could be an asset or a liability.

Breadth: Anything.

GURPS is the Generic Universal Role-Playing System, fool. Of course you can cover any setting. And Steve Jackson Games has supported GURPS so well that there are probably multiple supplements to the rules to cover any genre or setting you might have in mind, whether it's spy action movie, transhuman punk sci-fi, or frakkin' Watership Down. GURPS has it covered. Now, it doesn't mean that GURPS covers all genres equally well--it's generic, so any game system that's tailored to a setting and well done should be better than GURPS in their specific goals. But if the governing factors lean the right way, you can totally get into just about any sort of game with GURPS.

Deciding factor: Weight and encumbrance.

The encumbrance system of GURPS is emblematic of what makes it unique as a system, and I find that if I'm looking to play a game where I don't care much about encumbrance, then GURPS might not be my choice. For example, if I were to play a super-powered genre game, I'd probably think twice about using GURPS. And this isn't just because I'd ignore the encumbrance system in a GURPS Supers game--the finite one-second resolution of a GURPS turn feels contrary to the pacing of a comic book story. The only way I'd want to do a GURPS Supers campaign would be as a gritty deconstruction of most genre conventions, but as a four-color game I doubt I'd use it. For my current GURPS Myth game, however, one of the central themes of the campaign is the journey and daily survival of the characters. The system's way of handling hiking, fatigue, encumbrance, and the deadliness of medieval combat were central considerations for me when planning the style and plot of the campaign. So even though medieval fantasy settings are the most common amongst RPGs, there's really no other system I know of that I'd consider using to run my Myth game.



World of Darkness
Primary Mechanic: Roll a 'pool' of d10s and count the number of dice that come up as 8, 9, or 10. The more dice that 'succeed' the better. 10s get rerolled and any extra successes added.

World of Darkness is a game tailored to a specific campaign style, and--while it's not strictly limited to the default setting--it is distinctly geared towards evoking the themes of the main setting. Called the Storytelling system, World of Darkness is geared towards a more conceptual method of role-playing games. Rolling in combat covers hitting, damage, and defense in the same dice roll. There's also a sort of mini-game related to characters' morality and sanity that is the cornerstone of the game, where PCs who commit immoral acts relative to their current level need to test for declining morality and any eccentricities or delusions they might develop at the same time. Finally, it's worth mentioning that World of Darkness is actually a collection of different related games all based on the storytelling system. One game focuses on vampire PCs, another on werewolves, one for mages, one for Frankenstein-type monsters, and so forth. They all share the same core rules and some straightforward variation of the morality system to represent the values peculiar to the sub-game's protagonists and their own eccentricities.

Breadth: Supernatural and occult games, especially ones based in a modern setting.

World of Darkness is nothing without eldritch, magical, or at least weird powers at play. There's also a lot of drama stemming from internal party and character angst, so if you don't want monster PCs to be at least somewhat conscious of their metaphysical problems, it might be a poor fit. A recent supplement, Mirrors, gives some high-level suggestions for porting the game into a fantasy, sci-fi, or post-apocalyptic setting. But even so they still need to accommodate or at least address the key themes above.

Deciding factor: the morality system.

I love the morality system, and because of that World of Darkness is one of those games I'm always interested in playing. Because the morality mechanic features a different set of standards for slipping morals, characters tend to skirt the fine line of sanity and ruthlessness in a world of monsters. It's evocative and rare, and to even try to make morality and sanity similarly large elements of other games takes a lot of shoe-horning and handwaving.

Dungeons & Dragons (or any D20 really)

Primary Mechanic: Roll 1d20 and add relevant modifiers, comparing the total against a target number.

D&D is the ultimate representative of RPGs for most people--nerd, gamer, or otherwise. But I'm another story. Sure, I'd always heard of D&D, but I didn't get into a game of it until I'd already gotten three or four other systems under my belt. It may be mitigated by my prior experience, but the core mechanic of D&D is kind of clumsy to me. The simple 1d20 mechanic is complicated by the addition of action points, which can be used for extra actions, special abilities, or to add 1d6 to the main roll. Then weapons' damage are based on any dice but 1d20. So even though it's a classic legacy game mechanic, it's really the least comfortable system for me.


Breadth: Niche stylized action and heroes.

Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition has little breadth in the main system--the company Wizards of the Coast is currently only making the standard D&D setting and Gamma World variation, which is a wacky post-apocalyptic setting. But there's Pathfinder and the True20 systems based on the third edition of the game, made by Paizo Publishing and Green Ronin Publishing, respectively. Pathfinder is still a traditional late medieval fantasy setting, but True20 is designed to cover almost as many settings as GURPS, albeit with less depth and scrutiny. But the core of all of these d20 games are still fundamentally limited to high action, low-grit campaigns.

Deciding factor: setting.

Frankly, I don't think I'd ever run a fantasy game with D&D. The rules are hamstrung by classes and mechanics that really take a lot of tweaking or handwaving to make it mesh with my approach to fantasy games. However, for a comic, irreverent, and ludicrously lethal short-run game, I love Gamma World as an easy game to get into. Ironically, the only game I'm really interested in running based on the D20 system is Mongoose Publishing's out-of-print Starship Troopers RPG. There, the class system fits military specializations reasonably well, the high-action rules fit with the war angle, and the tweaks to the core of the D20 system make it lethal enough for players to feel fragile in the face of their alien enemies.

GM Tips: GMing 101

GM Tips: I've presented articles extolling the role-playing game as a great past-time that is an intelligent, imaginative, and creative way to spend your time and money. It's a growing hobby that has become much more popular since the formative days of 1979, but there's still a huge hurdle to getting involved: the GM. It's easy to get into any number of RPGs as a new player, but getting started is a rocky, uphill battle for the Game Master, as he must wrangle player personalities, schedules, and the rules of the system in addition to developing his own plot. Hopefully, a few personal lessons will ease your GMing burden, or at least illustrate how I shoulder the burden of the Game Master.

As the year ends, the crush to get a few more blog posts finished mounts. Will the stress of publishing three (or more!) articles in one week make my head explode in a viscous explosive aneurism of productive overload? Only time will tell.

This article has been stewing for a while, and I'm quite ashamed to admit it. It's been promised to a young friend of mine for several months now. Well, reminiscing about early RPG experiences and then distilling them into productive advice has been an invigorating and frustrating process. I hope these tips, meant for brand new GMs especially, will help other nerds elsewhere pool their collective imaginations even more harmoniously due to their elegant wisdom.

Either that, or at least you'll get a better idea of how I personally harangue my players into serving my RPG plots.

The task of leading a group of RPG nerds as Game Master is a daunting one. As I mentioned in my Nerd Bread post about RPGs, the GM has to be outgoing, coordinated, extremely well abreast of the rules and plots of the game, and really has to do all of this at a pace that keeps his players entertained. But, while there are numerous responsibilities to being a GM, I find that most new GMs (myself included, once upon a spaceship) neglect to realize that they only need to be responsible for a few key elements of the game at a time. Below I have four manageable areas that are pretty easy to address and go a long way towards setting the foundation for a long, successful, and fun RPG campaign.

Know your RPG system.
This bit might be easy to overlook, especially when you only know a single RPG system, but it is important if you're a first-time GM or an old beardy fellow like myself with a dozen systems on the shelf and another dozen on the computer. The key to knowing your system is knowing the features of your chosen rules set. This is different from simply knowing the rules. This is about enlightened awareness, not empirical knowledge of your game's book. Your system of choice might have rules for survival in the wilderness, but you really should know if they work well if those rules might come up in play. Knowing what does and doesn't work in your system--or how certain things work--keeps gameplay smooth and well-coordinated.

For instance, when playing a game of the latest edition of Gamma World, I keep in mind that gameplay is supposed to be tough, fast, and fun. So I cut loose on my tendency to have overblown plots, well-developed antagonists, and hyper-detailed combat. Players might have a poorly placed botch result in the death of one or more PC, but in a system where character creation is just a couple of die rolls, that makes it fun and quick to get back into the game.

In a GURPS game, on the other hand, I keep in mind that the system is all about detail and drama. There's a tendency for combat to bog down if you don't manage it properly, as there's a large number of great-but-overwhelming options for players. So when I use the full combat rules, I use the NPCs to drive player actions and lead them in how to fight. I might emphasize that an NPC is getting desperate and using Fatigue to make rapid attacks to help nudge players towards matching their frenzy, etc. But in any case, I try to keep GURPS combats shorter than most other RPGs when you look at it turn-for-turn, and instead emphasize the heavy cost of those intense, short sequences of violence.

When I first started to really GM games, it was to the sweet western tune of the Serenity RPG, which uses the Cortex system by Margaret Weis Productions. It's a fun, cinematic system that really dials in the dynamics of the TV show that gives players the ability to spend plot points to modify dice rolls or even spontaneously add plot twists to the story. At first I led this as I did other games I'd played in the past (notably Dungeons & Dragons 3.5), and that was an okay start. But when I started to properly direct the plot point dynamic by giving players unfair challenges that forced out-of-the-box solutions, that created some fun moments that my players still reminisce about nearly seven years later. Conversely, my early attempts to learn and memorize the nitty-gritty paraphernalia of the rulebook met with failure and frustration--remembering a lot of the fringe rules off-hand is nowhere near as important as mastering the system's core dynamic.

In any case, the habit I have formed for my own games is this: obsess over learning and refining the game's rules right until a session starts, and then stop. Once the game starts, I try to forget about the stack of rulebooks on my gaming shelf--it's just my players, our story, and my rules. Anywhere from twenty to fifty percent of all the judgments I make in a game are off the cuff, and while they're informed by the rules I read doggedly in my free-time, I try not to obsess over an abstract sense of whether I made the 'correct' call or not. I'm the GM; all my judgment calls are correct. Except when they're not.

"...remembering a lot of the fringe rules off-hand is nowhere near as important as mastering the system's core dynamic."

Know your setting.

Knowing your setting is all about having the principles of the fictional universe well-established, even if the canon itself is hidden. It's a key to good fiction and to good role-playing. This doesn't mean you need to know every little detail about the farmer's outhouse in that little hamlet on your world map--it means you know why things work the way they do. That way when your players ask you an unexpected question--like how many strawberries they can buy for the party with ten shillings, or if they could hit an enemy boarding shuttle with the armored underside of an unarmed transport--you can come up with a reasonable, consistent answer even if the rules are coming out of your keester.

And this ties in to preparation. Preparation is good, and if you are thinking about the world and campaign as a whole, I don't think anything is wasted. That said, if you've got a game coming up and you've only put in 30 minutes of work into the upcoming session, don't panic. Don't panic. Just play the game, and let player decisions and curiosity fill out what you didn't plan. Besides, the average group of players will probably destroy your plans about one hour into the session anyways, so no need to stress over a little ad libbing. A lot of times when you find yourself making spontaneous GM calls in the moment you'll find that you make the game feel even more responsive to player choices and consequences, and that's the heart of role-playing in the end.

And another note on knowing your system, which I'll expound upon in later posts: change stuff. Make house-rules, redesign character sheets, cut and paste your own GM screen, and do anything else that makes the game more intuitive for you. Just because you're playing with professionally-made materials doesn't mean they best fit your gaming style or preferences--nerd up and make it fit.

"...it means you know why things work the way they do."

Know your players.

No matter how well you do as a GM, you need your players. Even if you have a totally antagonistic play-style where the players huddle together and say, "oh sh1t, Benz got Trow nao, we're hozed"* you still need the players to enjoy the session if you want them to bother coming back. And if they come to game expecting a well-balanced combat-heavy experience and you instead deal a dramatic plot with high-minded social interactions, they will cry "OMG, hackz."**

So know what your players are expecting, and make sure you give them a good idea of what you have in store for them--in story terms, in content, in pacing, and in game mechanics. A number of GMs out there even go so far as to make prospectuses while planning out a new campaign, distribute it to interested players, and gather feedback before the first session even begins. That's a little overboard, but if you don't do something similar in an informal manner, at least, you're asking for trouble.

In describing the story to your players, let them know what stories inspire you, but also what specific elements inspire you. Saying you like The Lord of the Rings isn't as helpful as explaining you love the details of the journey, managing supplies, and crossing diverse terrain that is emphasized more in the book than the movies. Also be sure to give your players an idea of the content you'll be including in the story. A general movie rating is helpful, especially if you go by category: "PG language with R-rated violence" for instance. In my grittier campaigns, I like to plum the depths of my personal knowledge of anatomy when describing violence, and that's not something you should generally spring on unsuspecting players in my experience. Pacing is an after-thought for a lot of campaigns, but if you have unusual pacing in your games you need to be aware of it. I think most RPG players expect 1.75 fight scenes per session: two in an ordinary session, with one large boss fight every four or so sessions that takes up the majority of a night's game. My current campaign so far has had about .5 fight scenes per session: we might have two or three sessions pass without combat altogether, and then have one adventure dominated by a single fight scene or a couple of brief, violent ones. The pacing is sometimes dictated by the game mechanics and your own interpretations of rules, which is why it's important you spell that out to players ahead of time, especially if they have their own copy of the rules.

I'm good friends with the members of my core gaming group, so I've been lucky on these counts. Before starting our current game, for instance, we had a couple of nights where we just hung out, talked about the setting and their character ideas, and watched movies that I explained were inspiring to the composition of the campaign. Our first RPG together, however, was a more special case, and it helped me learn the lessons described above. Being a Serenity campaign, we already had a few of the elements of story, pacing, and content laid out for us, and since the Serenity RPG rules had just been released, I thought that was taken care of as well. Note that uncertain qualifier. The inaugural game night began with the players assuming a mix of ship crew and prisoners on a penal transport ship that struck disaster while under-weigh. When I described the grisly scene of one crewman who'd suffered explosive decompression, I realized that--while the women players' looks were tremendously rewarding--I probably should've warned them. Eh, tough cookies. Later in their adventures, the players balked at the prospect of buying food and fuel for their ship--issues that are normally dire but still glossed over in the movie and television series--when I prompted them to do so. And, even though the rules were designed for the setting, I still needed to house-rule after-market modifications to spaceships, specific strength limits, and the running rate of slaves on Whitefall. All lessons learned.

*Computer-gamer language, personally associated with the worst habits of RPG players.
**Hackz: Petulant players will usually attribute unexpected or unjustified defeat to being the victim of aggressive cheating through game-hacking.

"Even if you have a totally antagonistic play-style... you still need the players to enjoy the session if you want them to bother coming back."

Know the atmosphere.

GMing the right atmosphere is that little something extra that--when done right--can make a game session truly special. Good atmosphere--and being aware of it--can be the difference between a game of fantasy epic goodness and a night of combat-guessing-games. You can make atmosphere through vocabulary, voice, sounds, sights or even food. Vocabulary is one of the fundamental ways of creating atmosphere, but it is more often a pitfall for bad RPG atmosphere, because you and the players are improvising and it is therefore easy to say something ridiculous. For instance, in a medieval European setting (or any of the countless fantasy iterations thereof) your average town guardsman should never be heard to say, "You've gotta be frickin' kiddin' me!" no matter how apropos it may be. If you can manage a passable accent to fit a character, do so, but even if you're lousy at accents, a good GM changes his voice to match distinct characters if only to differentiate them from the dozens of speaking roles he will assume.

Sounds are my favorite tools in crafting a good gaming atmosphere. I now have nearly 9 hours of music in my iTunes Myth RPG playlist, and I've even split up the list into music appropriate for general mood, action sequences, tragic moments, or scary scenes. With the click of a button, I can queue up a good theme to supplement a grand speech or a disturbing dirge to set my players on edge in a dark cavern. I also have a couple dozen tracks of ambient sound effects--rainfall, campfires, marketplace noises, and battle clatter--that I pull up whenever players spend much time in a given setting. Sure, it requires a bit more preparation, focus, and coordination to play composer for your RPG, but it makes the emotions of your game run a bit higher.

Food can also create or interfere with atmosphere. As someone who personally doesn't snack, I don't usually choose to provide snacks in game. Fortunately for my players, my wife and one of the other wives who plays with us are big into bringing or making snacks for everyone. But crunching into a bag of Doritos when the player-characters are marshaling for grand battle can really tank an atmosphere as well, so I try to make sure every session has some low-key time that works for snacking. That manages the disruption of food on gaming atmosphere, but food can help improve gaming atmosphere, too. You can eat food that, if not the actual food  eaten in your setting, invokes the same mood you're trying to establish. For an RPG session that coincided with my birthday in real-life and a winter holiday in our Myth game's timeline, for instance, we ate a meal that would be typical of citizens in the setting: coney and civey (rabbit stew) and Italian panforte for dessert, two entrees that date back to medieval times. It was a good meal, and made for a very focused gaming experience.

"Good atmosphere--and being aware of it--can be the difference between a game of fantasy epic goodness and a night of combat-guessing-games."

So there you go, GMing 101. Just remember: know your system, know your setting, know your players, and know your atmosphere. These are good principles for the preparation and execution of your games, and they span GMs of all rules sets and abilities. Next set of GM tips will probably provide some more concrete examples of how to make your game your own.