GMing?
Rush Wright:
I've lately been GMing some RPGs. Though I do quite a bit of forethought and I come up with some nifty plot lines, I never seem to be able to implement them into a fun game. I recently designed a campaign in quite a bit of detail. I previewed in my mind every scene. Yet, come to play the game, I wasn't able to find convincing NPC dialogue, wasn't able to transition between scenes, and my explanations just ended up hopelessly incomprehensible.
Also, I'm having trouble making interesting challenges. Somehow the only challenge I can figure out to give to the players is simply combat.
Some help here?
Thanks,
TS
Chris_Chinn:
Hi TS,
Welcome to the Forge!
What game were you playing? Can you talk a bit about a previous time when your GM'ing worked out well for you and compare to what happened (or didn't happen) this time?
I've found out that the style of GM'ing that involves preparing a story ahead of time often requires a lot of work and is very difficult to pull off well. What I found worked better, for me, personally, is instead of having detailed prep, I go for flexible prep. Every week the players show up and improvise on the spot, so my focus has generally pushed me towards games that let me do the same thing as a GM, or, applying those tools to games in general.
Many years back, I was running a Feng Shui campaign. Feng Shui has some simple advice about having "one point" to any given scene or plot twist, and that way, you can be very flexible as a GM as long as you hit that "one point".
At some point during the campaign, I somehow stumbled upon the fact that, I had enough interesting NPCs who were motivated, that all I had to do was simply play the NPCs like PCs, and suddenly I was improvising left and right and interesting things were popping off without me doing much prep at all.
This may or may not be a good choice for you, so tell us a bit more about what you're doing and what you'd like to be doing.
Chris
Rush Wright:
Thanks for the quick reply, Chris!
I was playing a Wushu campaign with a setting somewhere between Cats and Dogs and G-Force.
Thanks again,
TS
Chris_Chinn:
Hi TS,
Can talk a bit about when your GM'ing has gone really well (or, you've played in a game where someone has GM'ed in a fashion you're looking for) and compare it to what happened in your game?
Also, in the game you played, it sounds like that was an interesting genre mix thing you had going on- how did you get the group on the same page about what that would look and play like? Was everyone excited about it?
Chris
Rush Wright:
Wow, thanks! I certainly didn't expect something like this for a reply.
My GMing hasn't exactly ever gone very well. It's gone okay... sure, we had a considerable amount of fun playing an incredibly violent Fate game, but lately my friends are starting to get bored of the dungeon crawl "Kill everything that moves" approach to role-playing games. I am, too, to be honest. The only decent scene I've managed to GM was in a tavern, where the players were trying to break free of two gangsters in search of their money. Another pretty interesting scene was a sneak through an enemy camp.
The RPG that got me hooked on role-playing games was a D&D campaign. One of my friends was the DM, and he did a very good job. It was an intrigue/adventure campaign, with plenty of allies who weren't allies, and enemies who weren't enemies. The highlight of the game for me was a tense diplomatic negotiation with a Halfling we had attacked earlier by mistake. One of the party members, a cleric, provoked the Halfling's son to a duel, and another of my party members, a fighter/barbarian, went into a rage and charged the Halfling. It was a truly fascinating incident, one that I'll remember for a long time. I can't even compare it to any of the scenarios in the campaigns I've GM'd, unless you consider the two scenes I've outlined above.
About the campaign's setting: we had both (there were only two of us) watched both Cats and Dogs and G-Force, so we both knew what to expect. Essentially how I made the campaign work is that the player started as a wild rabbit. He was caught by the "Pet-catcher" (something along the lines of the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang), and put in a cage in a pet store. When the owner had left, three small animals burst in with high-tech equipment to free the PC. The rabbit then joined the group as a hacker (after he had read a Hacking 101 book that happened to be in the animals' high tech library). Unfortunately, from the point that the animals burst into the pet shop, my mind blanked, and I turned what could have been an interesting scene into a miserable failure. The campaign went downhill from there and we quit it half an hour later. About the level of excitement surrounding the game, I would say it was approximately average, at least at first. After my initial mediocre GMing incident in the pet store, we both began to lose interest.
Thanks,
TS
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