New Game Moderators Q&A

Hey everyone!

With the RPG Starter Kit coming out soon, I wanted to start a thread aimed at new GMs! For those of you who are complete RPG novices, GM stands for "Game Master" or "Game Moderator", and is the person responsible for creating all of the content in an RPG that is not controlled by the individual Player Characters. You can think of it kind of like being the Computer in a video game RPG like Final Fantasy.

Anyhow, being a GM is my absolute favorite part of RPGs, and I've been doing it pretty constantly for over half of my life. When we started working on the Sentinel Comics RPG, it was very important to me (and Christopher) that we make the game really fun, engaging, and non-intimidating to new GMs. A lack of someone willing to be a GM and able to do a good job is the biggest barrier most people have to playing and RPG, and we want to fix that with ours!

I want to use this thread for GMs, especially new GMs, to ask questions about running games, and for everyone who has ever GM'd a game to share and discuss their experiences! I suspect that there will be more questions after the Starter Kit comes out, but I wanted to start out the general discussion now! A few questions I have for you all:

• If you have never GM'd a game, what is the biggest barrier to you trying it out?
• If you have GM'd a game, what were the biggest challenges you faced? What did you find most and least enjoyable?
• If you have played in an RPG, what was the best thing a GM ever did while running a game?

I'll jump in. I much prefer GMing over playing and something that remains a consistent challenge is gauging how long players will take to do something.
Before I started GMing though, I'd say my main barrier was thinking all GMs did amazing voices, had contingencies planned for all situations and knew the rules inside out. Now, of course, I know better.
 

I do have some articles up on my website for new GMs (and players) that I can share if people want me to.

I've never played a pen/paper rpg before. I've never really even seen one played, and if I have I was not paying much attention. My normal groups of folks I played games with never have either, especially the ones I consistently play SotM with. 

If I bought the Sentinel RPG and tried to sell my normal SotM group on trying it out, what exactly do I need to do to prep to make sure the experience is fun enough to keep with it? What does this entail on my end? 

My largest barrier to this product is have exactly 0 idea of what is needed/expected of myself and how to convey and manage those expectations for other new folks to this game genre.

Speaking for myself, as the GM you'll need to have a good understanding of the adventure as presented in the Starter Kit. All that entails is reading the rules and the adventure a few times so that you know where the story should go next, but you should not be afraid of improvising things when necessary. Telling your own stories requires a different manner of approaching things.

At the end of the day, role-playing is a form of storytelling. It's a game in that it has rules and an unspoken agreement that you're going to work together towards the goal of having fun, but it's incredibly free-form.
 

There are many different ways of running and playing role-playing games though. Your/your player's experiences and enjoyment sources will most likely be greatly different from my own.

My main trouble during my aborted attempt at GMing was trying to keep up with improvising whenever the plot went off the rails from whatever I had planned. (Which tends to be a lot harder than improvising as a player when the plot goes off the rails. >_>;)

Which was my biggest barrier in general; that having to come up with a whole plot versus just getting to react to whatever happened...

I don't know if there's any one specific most awesome thing a GM ever did, but I think the best campaign I ever played in general was where we were all trapped on a space station with an overseeing AI that had gone completely off the rails and was turning literally everything on the station into a malevolent thing out to do us in. (Flinging cars through space as missiles at our shuttle, espresso machines spitting hot coffee at us, animating the spacesuits of dead employees to have them attack us, having baggage carts trying to run us over, the blasted sentient man-eating housecats where when we trapped them in one of the bays I had to set the password to the entire lyrics of "American Pie" because they were managing to figure out anything shorter by trial and error...)

Although now that I think about it, my favorite part of that campaign might have been the very start of the game where the GM had us all take a parodic and yet still weirdly resonant employee assessment test that he came up with.

1. Your best friend has just shared a secret that could make a large amount of money if marketed properly. Do you:

a. suggest to your friend that he could patent that and recommend a good patent lawyer?

b. offer to be your friend's business partner in a new joint venture?

c. quietly patent it yourself then sue your friend for royalties?

d. arrange for your mafia friends to kill him and dump his body into a concrete foundation, then hunt down and destroy any and all your friend's associates until the secret is entirely yours, then use it as the core to your new plans to take over the world?

It could easily be summarized that my greatest blunders as a GM have come when I've tried to control the story too much.

However, my other games that have failed utterly, or at least the events that caused them to do so, have also come from the Players. I've had players who made characters who had connections that made the game nearly impossible ("My boyfriend is a God because my character is part angel" was an early one that I still remember) or they made characters who just didn't exist in a state I could work with. Making a character who is a social pariah with no skill in talking to people in a game where I needed them to have conversations, or a shut-in who refused to leave their house when I needed them to go exploring.

My point, is that it is a balancing act. You need to give the players freedom to make choices, but you also need to keep enough of a grip to prevent things from becoming an unworkable mess.

The other big thing I've been learning is that despite wanting to give utter freedom to the group, every group I've ever played with has done so much better with a goal. Every game of "Here is a world go explore it" has felt directionless and uninspiring, but a game of "You have a Bounty out for this Bandit" gives them a goal to pursue and keeps them focused on moving instead of floundering.

Oh man, I understand this perfectly. Everything always takes longer than I think it will, until they decide to skip over everything and just blaze through a section.

I'm a literal person, to my detriment at times, and part of my answer to you is I don't know. Every system is different and the types of things you would need to prepare for a game of Dread is vastly different than the information you would need to prepare for DnD 3.5 or 4E.

However, general advice is different from specific.

You don't need to know exactly what is going to happen, barring perhaps the first 20 or 30 minutes of a given game. For Example, I have a game session tomorrow for a Steampunk DnD setting. I know the first few minutes of that game is going to be the players going thru the wizard's lab and finding magical items, because that is where we ended last week, so I've obviously prepared it. I've fleshed out the area they are in, because they've been in this abadoned facility for two weeks and I knew that there had to be certain rooms, like a dining hall and a bed room for the master.

Outside of those obvious things, I'm not certain what is going to happen. They are planning on going to the Dwarven City, so I've considered the types of challenges and encounters that might exist within that space, but I haven't put a lot of work into it, because they aren't there yet.

All of this to say, prepare a little bit of the story. IF you're running from the adventure, be familiar with the adventure, but then do what makes sense. If the players decide to go off the rails, build what you can in front of them to make sure it seems like this was all part of the plan. It doesn't even have to be that good, most people will give you a lot of leeway, because they can tell you're working behind the screen.

So, at the core, know what you can about what is happening in the world, know the rules, and be ready to improvise when the players turn left and start blazing a new trail. Really, it is increbily easy in some respects, and from what I've seen of the system, a lot fo the pitfalls you would normally fall into are paved over, but the hard part is feeling comfortable enough to go off script and be ready for anything.

I have GM'd a lot of different systems. One of the biggest "obstacles" is my players. Not in the way that they are a problem, but when running a game the players will always, Always ALWAYS think of some way to try to do uh... the thing... that you either didn't think of or didn't account for because trying to do it that way is pants on head retarded.

On the other hand, that makes things fun and interresting. For example the Star Wars Edge of teh Empire game. While coming in from the ground or waiting to pick of the outside to gain the element of surprise are both ways that would've worked to get into and take out the Imperial outpost, what my players wanted to do was steal a tank, hot drop the thing into the middle of the thing & start blasting everything that looks vaguely Imperial while ALSO crawling through the sewers to get the info they wanted while the tanking was going on the surface. However, as wild as the whole thing was, the ease of runnnig the game; and all the rules that let me easily create and introduce unique challenges on the fly lets me keep up with whatever wild and wacky plan the players come up with. 

The second part that I Loved about the FFG Star Wars system was the fate system. There are lots of other systems that use similar things. In the new star wars system you can use these Fate Points to quickly heal yourself, help with a check at the last moment. Or in my oppinion more importantly, use these points to retcon things they forgot. Like if the group didn't SAY they brought night vision goggles but that's a thing that would've been reasonable to prep they can just spend a fate point and Yep, Johnny totally packed those before we left, Definately; Hand 'em out. This helps the party in situations without stressing or forcing them to write out everything they can concevable think of that Might be a help eventually. Meanwhile, when someone flips their fate point the GM can then use those to cause complications on the fly to help create tension. Like oh, nope you can't just grab the death star plans here you have to climb up & get them, Oh your door hacking droid just got shot you've got to find another way to open the door.

Overall the most important part of running rpg's is knowing your party, if they want a more structured vs a more abstract game, and what type of mood the adventure should maintain

I'll jump in on this.

I've mentioned this to several forum-goers, but I'll put it here for posterity.

My name is Andy Klosky; you may also see me via my pen name, A.P. Klosky.  I'm the author of "Cold Steel Wardens: Roleplaying in the Iron Age of Comics", which is available through Studio 2 Publishing right now.  I've worked with a number of rpg companies out there, including Fantasy Flight Games ("The Investigators of Arkham Horror"), Cubicle 7 Entertainment ("The Laundry Files:  The Mythos Dossiers" and "Cultists Under the Bed") and a number of other small-press designers.  I've run games in more systems than I can count and I've been GMing since I was in 5th grade.

I'm also the founder of the Wittenberg Role-Playing Guild, a gaming organization at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, which will be holding its 15th consecutive WittCon this coming March.  For quite a while, I upkept the rpg-related blog "Scrolls of the PlatinumWarlock", which has since been discontinued, as I've focused on my own designs and additional freelance work.

For those of you who are new to GMing, I'm totally at your disposal.  Feel free to pick my brain, ask questions, or bounce ideas off of me.  

This is a very real issue, and I think there will be a lot of SotM fans in Foote's camp.  Even I, who have played half a dozen different pen & paper RPG's, am not sure how the Sentinels RPG will really play out.  I'd prefer to do a demo at a con, but that's just not practical to hold out for.  There are some Twitch videos of people playing the game, but they're just streaming the roll20 video component of it, which is a very different experience from playing in person.
 
I think it would be a  really good idea to stream some actual, in person, live gameplay  before the Kickstarter goes live, and ideally before the starter kit hits the shelves.  Have Christopher run a game for some other >G staff/friends with varying levels of experience with Sentinels RPG or pen & paper RPG's in general.
 
And I think it would be even better if you followed up a gameplay session with a character creation session and a GM prep session before the Kickstarter.  Have two people sit down and build characters–just two, so it's not too chaotic but so we can get a feel for different approaches–and talk the viewers through the process.  Then have two different people design an adventure together, again talking the audience through the process (two so that there's some banter–I find it very hard to listen to just one person doing commentary on anything most of the time).  Then run those two characters, plus a couple more to fill out the party, through that adventure.

To answer the introductory questions:

Dealing with characters going off the rails is a big challenge, but it's more of a challenge in certain game types.  A combat-heavy, rules-heavy game with a scripted plot is easy to derail.  One with more freeform design and plot advancement goes much more easily.  But a lot depends on the dynamic between GM and players.  The biggest problem is when the players expect one of those types of game and get the other.  A group that expects a scripted plot to play through can get lost when provided with too "open" of an environment.  A group that expects freeform play can choose not to bite on an adventure hook and make hours of prep become wasted.

The best thing I've seen some GM's do and not others is encourage the players to tell their own stories.  Come up with a backstory, describe themselves in detail, narrate their own actions more than just "I cast Fireball at the goblins."  During each "downtime" section or roleplay encounter, focus on each player at least briefly and prompt them to describe something completely mundane: what they're eating, who they're paying attention to during a conversation, what they're doing with their hands as they talk, etc.  That helps a lot to turn a page full of rules and numbers into a memorable character.

So, to answer the starting questions:

From the perspective of a player, at least, RPing is basically a lot like performing a play except that the vast majority of the script is improvised by the actors with a basic outline from the director (who also acts every needed character the other actors aren't playing).

This! Clear communication about expectations is incredibly important.
Re: narrative design and plot advancement vs. player responses, I try to have a few things I want to happen per session and fit those into the direction the players take the story, rather than forcing the players into a certain course of action.  It's a fine balancing act to find, being able to provide direction to the players whilst giving them agency and power over the ongoing story. As is mentioned upthread, knowing a few sections of the session ahead is more important than knowing everything in detail, but with published adventures, the more you know what is planned, the easier you can react to the unexpected. Don't be afraid to alter the published material to end up at the same place.

This is what I use all the time to help with player engagement and immersion.

And, the other question:

• If you have played in an RPG, what was the best thing a GM ever did while running a game?

I've been lucky enough to play with some phenomenal GMs over the years, in a number of genres and systems.  In the end, all of those GMs have one common thread:  immersion.  The best GMs make you feel like you're a part of that world, like your decisions will change the setting, and like you yourself are witness to the story being told.  This feeling of immersion can be achieved in a number of ways.

Firstly, there's something to be said for the physical element.  Props, music, hand-outs, and other physical items bring in atmosphere, helping to get players to buy in on the game world itself.  If you ever manage to make it to the Origins Game Fair, I'd encourage *everyone* to play in a game run by the Rogue Cthulhu organization.  Their ability, as a group, to provide a unique table experience is unsurpassed in any organized play group that I've ever known.  I've watched players literally hiding under their table, reading their character sheets by flickering flashlights--horror, indeed!

But immersion doesn't simply come in terms of physicality.  Dramatization--even something as simple as using the first-person, rather than the third-person viewpoint--can go a long way towards bringing players in.  While it's easy to say something like, "The chief of police tells you that they apprehended one of the Citizens of the Sun", it's so much stronger to say, "Well, Bunker, we've got Citizen Doom locked up in one of our holding cells, but I don't think we can keep him here much longer.  Are you able to escort him to the new Block?"  Even if you can't do voices or take on some affectation, that simple level of immersion builds your players' investments in the world and encourages them to respond in-kind.  Done well, that's where the mechanics can just melt away as both you and your players enter that world whole-hog.  

Q1: If you have never GM'd a game, what is the biggest barrier to you trying it out?

A1: My biggest abrrier is thinking on my feet. I have a hard enough time with my own character, working with multiple NPCs, and communicating with everyone seems too daunting.

Q2: If you have GM'd a game, what were the biggest challenges you faced? What did you find most and least enjoyable?

A2: N/A

Q3: If you have played in an RPG, what was the best thing a GM ever did while running a game?

A3: Making it about everyone, and giving some people a time in the limelight. Also, has lots of patience with slower (me) players.

One of the biggest problems I've seen with new GMs is them misunderstanding the job.  I view GMing as directing a movie.  I've got a story to tell and while the players can and will come up with their own interesting solutions to the quandries I put before them, they're still essentially walking the path I'm laying out and we're all focused on the same thing -- having a great time experiencing a well-told story.

When I see a GM start the night by asking players to make up whatever random characters they want, with conflicting backstories and motivations that often as not work against the story I'm telling, I know there's going to be trouble.  I know it's not impossible to have fun with an adventuring group comprized of a fanatically pious paladin, a backstabbing assassin, a thief who only wants to steal the other player's stuff and a bard with a delusion that he's living inside a play, all while I'm trying to tell a story about political machinations between two rival guild factions, it'll be tougher for sure.

I know there's a trend towards modern roleplaying games focusing heavily on the storytelling aspect, with their rules being purposely light with the goal being that whatever serves the story is OK to do and you only roll dice in limited situations.  From my limited exposure to the Sentinels RPG, it seems like that kind of game, with a light rules structure holding together a storytelling-based experience.  Even though I love storytelling, I'm not a fan of those kinds of RPGs.  I was raised on old school GURPS and D&D, which had enough of a rules framework to give the games structure but enough flexibility for me to tell the story I wanted.  Often, I'd find a fun rule in the book for how to handle exposure to the vacuum of space, or how characters were affected by extreme temperatures, and I'd build whole encounters around exercising those rules, using the limitation imposed by the rules as a challenge to the players.  But when the game is essentially "tell me what you want to do and if it seems like there's a chance you maybe can't do it so we'll roll some dice", I'm not as interested.

(sorry for the double post)

I think new GMs may benefit from remedial storytelling advice.  Maybe they could use an actual recipe for a good adventure -- (1) setting the scene, (2) building action, (3) the big confrontation/potential setback, (4) recovering from the setback and saving the day -- with a couple of important to-dos thrown in -- (1) make sure everyone has a chance to shine at least once in the adventure, (2) give the players leeway to play their characters but don't be afraid to steer the ship if it's in danger of going off course, (3) avoid too many "because I said so" moments, both in terms of being too generous to the players and too punitive.

If a new GM follows the recipe, they can feel confident they'll have a solid adventure.  And as they get better at the job, they can start to add their own spice to the mix.

As has been said, ensure everyone's expectations are set before you start playing. I've had this not only kill campaigns, but also make them not enjoyable for folks who just put up with it – but make it very frustrating for everyone else. 

Our regular group has a workbook with categories we review and everyone provides feedback on what they want out of the game. We then have a few conversations, basically negotiating through our thoughts and interests. The categories are things like duration (open-ended, short, etc.), involvement level (e.g., is it just set in a city or will the group be called upon to save the world/multiverse?), power level (juvenile, realistic, heroic, epic, or divine), structure (Episodic or sandbox? Have short arcs throughout? Have a campaign-long arc?), and finally a battery of campaign scales: Rating from 0 to 10, how much will the campaign be Whimsical, Gritty / Rough, Creepy / Horrific, Dramatic (in a non-combat way), Combat-oriented, and Involve Mysteries. 

Obviously, not everyone needs to go to this level of ridiculousness.   It works really well for us, though! 

One super easy trick to counteract this having only a single NPC on the screen at a time.

Sure, you could have the team meet with the Chief of Police and six other officers and try and juggle all that, or you could have them speaking with the Chief alone in her office.

Doing it the second way means you've only got one character to focus on playing, just like when you are a player. The other cops are backward noise, they exist as extras on the screen, but don't pull them into the foreground, they aren't who the player are interacting with yet.

Following this trick is just breaking things into multiple "scenes" in your head. Sure, Bunker is talking to the Chief while Legacy is chatting with the Mayor and Tachyon is investigating some science. Each one is a seperate scene, give a few mintues to Bunker as the Chief, then turn to LEgacy and switch scenes to the Mayor. You might goof, but honestly, just admit it if you say something and then realize you were thinking of the wrong character. Your friends may razz you a little, but they generally understand. They can see you donnng and doffing the different hats and they aren't going to be disgusted if you slip once or twice.

IT sounds hard, and maybe it is to get started, but eventually it just flows naturally.

My old group was kinda the opposite of Spiff's, it seems. We used d20 but tended to run very roleplaying-heavy games with rolls mostly focused on skill use and combat being only a handful of setpieces in a lengthy campaign (and I've even played in a campaign that technically had only one combat scene, which of course was the one time I chose to play a fighter but I digress). So something like Sentinels might have possibly been too combat-heavy for my old group to want to run ironically.

But yeah, chalk me up as another person who gave up GMing because I couldn't think on my feet well enough and had trouble coming up with actual longer plots beyond the first few scenes.

While I understand that improv and short-form storytelling isn't everyone's cup of tea, if this is something you struggle with, why not have shorter plots? Have a plot per level, say, and have something from each level's plot carry over into the next. Have callbacks to earlier plotpoints, re-use NPCs, do whatever you can to provide the illusion of a whole, seemingly pre-determined storyline.

This means you don't need to have everything mapped out to start with, lets you react, and tailor, things to your players' actions and cuts down on a lot of stress if planning long-form storytelling isn't something that comes naturally to you.

At the end of the day, the players won't know that you didn't plan everything out from the start unless you tell them.

My group was odd in that we didn't do the "a single adventure each session" thing, but we had one big overall plot that we sorta progressed on however much amount we ended up progressing during a session. My group was known to do things like spend an entire four hour session checking into a hotel. So I could come up with scene after scene but it'd eventually have to lead up to something, and it was that I was struggling with since I started running out of ideas for scenes after a while. (Had an eventual goal in mind but no idea how to get to there from here.) So I gave up and went back to just being a player and left GMing to our more creative minds.

I don't do a single adventure per session in either the group I play in, or DM/GM. I've always played/written overarching plotlines with small arcs in within each segment, but a lot of the time I just react to the players and write the next bit of the arc based on them.

Example; the game I  currently DM has an overarching plot about the PCs coming into their powers as Titans in order to defeat the Devourer (an eldritch being from the Far Realm). I know that along the way they will either kill, or ally with, many of the gods within the pantheon as well as travel to a few other Planes and ally with other Titans in order to have the powerbase necessary for the endgame. I know, it's not terribly original.
 

Have I planned much more than that? Not really, most of my ideas remain as ideas so I can alter them freely. I know roughly what will happen over the next few sessions (as in, I have bullet pointed plot threads and scenarios that I can fit in almost anywhere), but after that they (my players) will be making a choice that will determine the sessions after that.

Mixed in with the main plot, I've seeded some side stuff they can pick up on if they want to and, if they indicate they prefer that over what I have planned, I have no problems at all working it into the main plot/replace the main plot entirely.

Admittedly GMing isn't for everyone, I know people who flat out refuse to do it, but if you enjoyed doing it, there are things like Story Forge that provide prompts to jog inspiration when you're stuck for a direction to take things in. A lot of it practise, of course, and some people find certain styles of GMing faaaar easier and more natural than others.

I hope I'm coming across as helpful, rather than overbearing.

The one time I tried GM'ing, it was running a homebrew system I made myself, and the game was pretty dumb because I was young. :B But I also count myself in the "bad at thinking on my feet" category, enough that I find I prefer games light on actual roleplaying, even as a player.

I honestly prefer P&P RPGs to be more like socially constructed video games, when you come down to it. D: It's a failing.

This.  So much this.

During college, I spent so many hours writing up stats for character after character, NPC after NPC, only to realize that my players will see next to none of that.  They don't care about how many feats the guard captain has, how many points the villain has in History, or anything beyond the most rudimentary mechanical elements which which they interact directly.

In the end, this gives you a massive space with which to operate illusorily, as so much of your players' experience with a character hinges upon their own character-interactions with that character and less their mechanical-interactions.  No one remembers that Black Nellie had a +22 to Pick Pocket and a +18 to Athletics; everyone remembers how Black Nellie fliched the Gem of True Seeing from Rygar's pocket while they were negotiating a truce and how she led the entire party on a chase across the city rooftops before escaping on a pirate ship.

RPG-writing legend John Wick noted, in his infamous (and brilliant!) book Play Dirty, that as a GM, "There are no rules for you.  Cheat anyway."  Advice to take to heart!

This is great advice!

There are two principles in many of the games that use the Apocalypse engine which I apply to every game I run, both of which benefit from a liberal interpretation of the rules from time to time:

1. Be a fan of the characters - as a GM, you aren't there to obliterate the characters, you're there to build them up, support them, and help them grow from their starting point. By doing this, everyone around the table should have fun and be engaged (it is important to remember, you cannot always keep every player engaged).

2. Make the character's lives interesting - as a GM, it's also your job to challenge the characters, wear them down, remove their supports, make them feel like the world itself is out to get them, keep them on their toes but know when to cut back on the pressure and let them relax before ratcheting up the stakes once more.

Continuing on with my theme of the players not knowing unless you tell them, always bear in mind that your game is your game. If you forget a rule as it applies to something, that's fine. If it makes the experience worse, own your mistake and remember it next time. If it makes things better however, you intended it all along. No-one else will know any different.

As an aside, I think it was Mike Mearls of the D&D team who recommends that your prep time takes no longer than the session length. Obviously, some things will take longer than others to prep, but that does seem to be the sweet spot, in my experience anyway.

Stop checking for for 18 hours and all of this happens. There is alot of GM here. Platinum Warlock didn't know you made some stuff, going to check it out this weekend. I am looking into non-d20 systems to try.

The Best advice I read was, What are the NPC's (non player Charaters, anyone who are not the players) Motive? In this scene what are they trying to do. This help put when the Players throws a wrench into the system (are very convincing, give good logic that you didn't think goes left field or just blows them off). 

I say don't be afraid to try, you will fail at times but how else are you going to learn. One day you will look back and laugh at the though of giving a low level Charater haste(a powerfull ablity) breaking your game but it was fun at the time. You might want to stick to a premade story for the first time. Makes life easier.

Anything else I want to say has been said, except practice improv.

• If you have never GM'd a game, what is the biggest barrier to you trying it out?

                  Fear of failing, but my desire to play out weighed that fast when i started.

• If you have GM'd a game, what were the biggest challenges you faced? What did you find most and least enjoyable?

                 Learning how to go off script. I am the player who would buy a robe of usefull items, use a patch to make a window on some glass, which was use to forshadow the boss (You see them their with an NPC you have to save, blah blah adding tension) and have a suprise attack on the boss. Then I put glue on my self and hug the mind controlled person we are trying to save. . . I had a hard time dealing with players like me.

• If you have played in an RPG, what was the best thing a GM ever did while running a game?

                 Letting my crazy idea (see above) fly. I am ok with them failing but just seeing how far they can go is fun for me. The look on the DM face when I glued myself to Mind Controlled NPC(cleric), who was ment to buff and heal the Boss. . . Priceless. I like resourcefull charaters.

Side note: I also am likeing Fantsy Flight's Star Wars system. Lets us get away with much. More story driven .

I'm reading all of these responses, and as the pure noob to this genre of game, one word keeps cropping up in the back of my mind.

Daunting.

I think all the feedback and information in this thread is really fantastic. But from the perspective of someone with no experience ever with this type of game, I feel like I'm more likely now to pass on the RPG than I was a few days ago.

Maybe I'm missunderstanding things due to my inexperience with the genre, but theres a lot of "be prepared for this, that, and the other" and not a whole lot of "this is what you do to prepare for this, that, and the other". Is it even possible to give more tangable answers to these questions without knowing the extent of the rules system?

@Foote: Well, FWIW, playing in an RPG is not that hugely hard.

But GMing, yeah, it takes a really specific talent set to be any good at it.

Here's the thing.  It seems like a lot.  But in the end, it all comes down to one fundamental question:  Are we having fun?

Mechanics don't matter for this.  You can get the math wrong, you can roll the wrong dice, you can fudge the numbers over and over.  If people are having fun, that's what matters.

Performance doesn't matter for this.  People can laugh at your attempts at voices, run totally off of the rails, or leave the quests behind.  Is everyone having fun?  That's what matters.

This was the biggest hurdle for me, in terms of maturing as a GM and designer.  It's so easy to want to plan out Every Last Step of the adventure…if that's what you want, go write a novel.  You control those characters.  The ones in your game belong to their players; you have to react to what they do just as they react to the situations you present for them.  If you're flexible and are willing to roll with the punches, you can't go wrong.

One of the oft-quoted pieces of advice in GMing is to "Say yes or roll dice."  I might add to that, "Say yes, give them an obstacle, or roll dice."   If you can do that much, you're good in pretty much any situation.

Tangible answers come across as a bit… facetious (I think that's the right word here), at least to my mind. Put simply, the answer is play the game.

Like with any storytelling or improv-based activity, practice is key. I've been running games for about 7 years, and I know I don't have all the answers. What I do have is a wide knowledge and experience base which I can draw upon to make characters believable. Knowing the rules helps, of course, as does knowing the story you want to tell.

So at the moment of writing, my answer would be "Play the game to learn the basic rules, play a few scenes out to find the story you want to tell OR to find out what you want to explore and draw upon every experience you've ever had, book you've ever read and story you've ever consumed."

Only you know what you know and that's what makes every GM different. Open any rpg rulebook and the introduction usually contains some useful information on role-playing, but really, it's just play-acting with rules. Someone is the director and controls the scene changes/setting/chorus, but it's a game of make-believe. It's surprisingly hard to do it wrong, at least, to do it wrong more than once.

Role-playing isn't for everyone. I think that's important to bear in mind. As a community, we can be passionate, but at the end of the day, if you don't enjoy it, that's perfectly alright. It's a game, after all.

I would say, get a few games in as a player before trying to GM. It helps you learn the ropes, common practices and playstyles.

There is some really good commentary and discussion here!

I now want to address Foote (and other people in a similar position; I know there are a bunch of you!). The SC RPG Starter Kit, and the other adventures we are going to release for this game, are exactly what you want to make things less daunting. To explain what I mean, I'm going to talk about my general approach to GMing, in particular for story-driven RPGs like Sentinel Comics. Although this might sound daunting, I'm *then* going to explain how the adventures we are making are going to remove most of the daunting work, and make it easier for you as a GM :D

1) Make sure that all of the players have characters that are fun for them to play, and have reasons to work together.

This relates to the comments above about the "social contract" between players and GM. As the GM, I believe it is my job to craft a story/setting that will be fun for the players, and give them all interesting things to do. I also believe it is my job to make sure that the players all create characters that have motivations and desires that are at least somewhat compatible. To this end, I'll generally have the players create their characters before I solidify the adventure, and I'll give "soft" restrictions during player creating if I think it is necessary, or guide player creation until they come up with something I can work with (often using the "yes, and" techniquie from improv). For example, I might say that all of the players in a Star Wars campaign have to have some reason to be working for the Hutts, or to be Imperial officers; or in a D&D-like setting, I might say that no one can be Evil, or maybe even restrict Chaotic Neutral if I know that'll be a problem.

FooteNote:The Starter Kit solves this for you! We will provide premade characters who all have reasons to work together (they are the Freedom Five!).

2) Craft scenarios where all of the characters have something to do that interests them. 

Let's use the example from above! PlatinumWarlock proposed the following situation:

Jim makes a character designed to follow in Bunker's footsteps; he's interested in dealing a ton of damage, fighting a bunch of bad guys, and stomping on robots in a mecha-suit.  Amy makes a new Virtuoso of the Void; she's more interested in exploring the relationship between the Virtuosos and Akash-X, as well as interacting with other heroes (and even villiains).

There is actually a lot to work with there. The nice thing about a comic book setting is that it is easy to tell players that they have to make characters that think of themselves as heroes, and generally act in a heroic way. In the above setting, I'd likely create a scenario where some kind of villain wants to harvest power from or otherwise damage somewhere important to Akash-X and the Virtuosos; maybe somewhere attuned to void power. I'd likely also make their scheme involve tapping into the power of the Void and/or the past Virtuosos. Then, I'd make sure that they had some sort of violent means by which they wanted to accomplish their ends; maybe Professor Pollution is back with some PollutionBots that are out to kill all of the local fauna, or maybe the antagonist is Citizen Dawn and a bunch of Citizens. Either way, there'd be a situation where both players have lots of hooks for their characters, and will each get turns in the spotlight.

FooteNote: Again, the Starter Kit solves this for you! Since we know that the characters will be the Freedom Five, we put them in a scenario that they'll inherently care about.

3) Know your world.

If I were to run a game in the Dune universe, I could fake it if my PCs didn't know much about the world, but I'd have a hard time. I'd really want to go and read some more dune books and talk with our Inventory Manager for many hours to prep. However, if I'm going to run a game in the Star Wars universe, I just pick a starting portion of the galaxy and run. If the players decide that the place I planned for them to be (say, Hutt Space) is not for them, and decide to run off somewhere else (say, Corellia), I've got a decent idea of what's there, which is enough to bluff my way through the session and describe some stuff that the PCs see when they show up. I can then just pop over to Wookiepedia between sessions and come up with some more detailed settings. Knowing your world is also of course doable if you create the world from scratch, but it is actually a lot harder; not only do you have to craft the world, but you are the only source of world information, so if you haven't prepped something for an area, you don't have a wiki to fall back on.

FooteNote: Here's a quasi-secret - one of the major reasons we started releasing The Letters Page now is for background/worldbuilding for RPG players. If you listen to the podcast, you know more than enough about the world of Sentinel Comics to run an RPG. Relatedly, we recently made the Sentinel Comics wiki officially supported by GTG, and it is a great source of info!

4) Know the game rules

As the GM, you are the arbiter of the rules. It is important that you know them fairly well so that you an answer rules questions from players. It is also important to be confident; if you don't know a rule, it is generally better to guess (and stick with that guess during the session) rather than pause the game for 5+ minutes to look something up.

FooteNote: This is the main thing you'll have to do in order to run the Starter Kit. Fortunately, the rules for the Sentinel Comics RPG are much simpler than many other RPGs. So simple, in fact, that the rules document for the Starter Kit can fit in a short, staple-bound booklet. If you can understand the rules for Spirit Island (to say nothing of Galactic Strike Force), you'll have no problem with the RPG rulebook :)

5) Prep Settings/Scenes, not plots.

In my experience, preping entire plots, movie-style, is way too much work and often a waste of time. In an RPG, Players have agency, and PCs will definitely jump in all sorts of directions you don't expect during a long campaign. Instead of saying "no, you can't do that", you really want to be able to use the old improv trick and say "yes, and then this happens". To accomplish this, I tend to create antagonists who have their own goal and plans, and then put the heroes in a situation where they will want to do things that intersect those plans. I'll then prep specific scenes, but not how I envision the plot proceeding. For example, I might decide that Citizen Dawn is going to invade Megalopolis, hold the City Council hostage, demand gold, and have some Citizens start blowing up infrastructure. I'd prep 2-3 different "citizens are blowing up infrastructure" scenes, a City Council scene where Dawn is making demands, and a scene where the gold is being delivered. I'd then introduce it by saying something like "You're sitting around Freedom Tower when you feel a huge explosion. Looking out of the 34th story window, you see smoke rising from the power transfer station down on 101st street*. What do you do??". The players then have a reason to investigate the explosion, and on the way might see some other suspicious stuff that will let them work out what is going on. I'll then have a rough idea of what I think Dawn and the Citizens will do in any given situation, so I'll just have them react on the fly accordingly, with no specific plan for how the situation will end.

FooteNote: Running a story the way I just described definitely takes practice. However, the Starter Kit is specifically designed as GMing 101, with a story that is fun to play, and is presented to the new GM with sort of "training wheels" for the system. There is a lot of room for player choice, but the plot branches are constrained by the story, and the Starter Kit walks you through letting the players do things in any order they choose.

Final Thoughts

• Play to your strengths. If you are not good at voices or dialogue (I'm not!), don't bother with it! If you are, do it up!
• Don't worry about getting all of the rules right; just worry about making it fun.
• Lean heavily on stuff you already know and work other people already did.

*All of the geography of Megalopolis and Freedom Tower is non-canon stuff I just made up as I was typing. 75% of GMing is making up plausible-sounding BS on the fly.

I will say that my game group started playing the summer after our sophomore year in college, and I wanted to GM then because I had a lot of fun doing improv type things, rolled up a random dungeon from a generator, had all of the players roll up their characters and just played. It was a lot of fun! I made every mistake in the book, but as we were all inexperienced with the genre, we were very much all focused on how we could do the coolest things with all of our individual characters. That random dungeon had a randomly generated title "The Lair of Wez the Mad", that I had disregarded until the players started looking for a quest in a tavern, and they wanted to know why "bad things" were happening "in that cave outside of town" and I floundered for a minute(cried bathroom break to take time to think), and then told them it was an abandoned research laboratory that used to be owned by a wizard known as Wez the Mad. That was enough for them, and they went forward. The rest of the "setting" was mostly generated when the players would ask things about why something would be in this research station(randomly generated was not my friend here), and I made up something that I wanted to be true, wrote it down for future consistency, and it was thus!

After that first summer, I bought a DM guide, looked up on a few forums, and learned all of the things I had done "wrong", and tried to do one recommended thing each new session(about once a month). Mostly player/table engagement things (discover what your players enjoy: exploration/combat/clever-puzzle-solving/etc.; keep sessions focused around one, maybe two major events to maintain focus), the occasional tips about how to keep combat from feeling like a slog(much more pertinent in a rules-heavy system when players just want to punch, not math to show the punch the best), and leaning general rules about how the system I was running worked so I could lean on handy shortcuts for player decisions that I hadn't anticipated(GM screen with charts for Overcomes, etc. would be great). I still ran a prep-light campaign, as I liked when players decided to try to do something new, and only had a sparse outline of Big Bad, Major Faction(s), Map, McGuffins, and "home base" progression. I essentially would glean a few things that the players wanted to do, and weigh how likely that thing they wanted to find/explore/interrogate/imprison/fight/seduce was to actually exist in the world, and then just ran with it.

The few homebrew story sessions I ran of SCRPG after stealing some materials from 2016 Gen Con worked very well with my prep-averse style, as the system(at the time) could do everything the card game did in terms of *Unexpected Minion Surge!*/*Death-Ray Charge-Up Sound!*/*Rocket Launch Exhaust!* can just happen at any time. This really encouraged me to outline A Thing(tm) and then just throw Things Likely Adjacent To A Thing(tm) at players during an encounter. I personally enjoyed gauging the player's excitement for "finishing" an encounter in a particular way (PUNCH MORE/ALL THINGS, find source of enemies/shut gate, collapse building to prevent X, etc.) and having that emerge as an obvious solution if they don't explicitly start trying for it.

@Foote, this was meant to be reassuring about flying by the seat of your pants, but it probably wasn't as helpful as I thought it was going to be when I started writing...

TL;DR:

Tangibles: Find why your players came to the table/system/game, how their characters are equipped to let their players do that thing, and try to have an opportunity for most of the players at the table to do that thing in every/every other session. Players are all different, and we could probably do a little Archetype:How to Engage that Archetype, as the players(to me) are the most important thing to handle well.

EDIT: Ninja'd by Paul with a more concise rundown =]

I feel that was very helpful Paul. Hopefully more folks in my position see that rundown. I think I have a better understanding of what an RPG entails if nothing else.

Hey Paul can you pin your post. 

I would thumbs up it but no option for that on the forums.

Seconded--that's some great advice, brother!

One aspect that can be overwhelming in a thread like this, is that we are all different storytellers, trying to help others learn to tell their stories.

My style?

Build the entire world and the end game that I have yet to ever reach, and come up with stories that I want to tie in.  Then I write each story, and see which characters will be recurring or only in one episode, and then I create a very ino uous seeming first adventure that foreshadows things and leaves the characters a bunch of paths to eliminate as they play (I don't like end of episode choices, I like midgame choices that eliminate possible paths).

Then we work through the places and events I came up with, adding new ones when inspiration strikes, and basically letting it play out in the order they choose.

It is incredibly time consuming and e eryone says I am crazy, but it is honestly what works best for me.

A starter kit is a fantastic way to get your feet in the pond.  After that I draw from scenes i love in stories or movies and create similar moments.

GMing became really fun for me once I was experienced enough to let things go off track without having to stop and dig through books to continue.

And really, even being open ended isn't hard.  Every campaign I run I set up 3 alternate adventures at the start, that i can plug in at any time the players go off script.  Usually something like an escape, a travelling story (for when players just leave the town where the adventure was supposed to be) and a captured story (for when they do something to run afoul of things too tough for them.  If i use one, I just replace that adventure and I still have 3.

The key is to find out how to tell your story your way, while empowering your players to tell their character's story.  That mostly just comes with experience.

Something else for new GMs to note: by virtue of the choices they make when creating characters, your players will tell you something about the kinds of stories they are interested in. For example, I'm making/made conscious choices with Lacuna that say she's got ties to the GMs choice of the literal forces of Hell (a la Apostate) or the Unpronounceables (a la Nightmist), and that I'm interested in stories that explore the consequences of using power too much, because I want her to toy with becoming addicted to the use of her power - and risk burning out because of it.

If you can arrange it, I strongly encourage you to devote a "Session 0" to joint character creation if you aren't going to run the Freedom 5+i. As a part of that, steal something from Everway/Fate games, in which you either give every player/character the opportunity to ask each other character a question and/or appear in each other's back stories.

I want to adress this point, because the "thinking on one's feet" is perhaps one of the hardest and most daunting of the things expected of the GM.

And, like someone mentioned above, it is really hard to give advise on it, because most of us just floundered and practiced until we could do it, but there is one thing mentioned off-handedly that I'd like to expand upon.

This

is perfectly fine and perhaps one of your most powerful tools.

Sometimes, it depends on the players, but I have some groups that absolutely love the times they flabbergasted me and put me in a positon where I had to time-out and think through what was going to happen next.

The most famous (infamous) of these involved the Savage World System and a deck of cards that came with that system that essentially allowed the players to change the story, forcing me to adapt to new events. It started by them falling down a cavern beneath the cavern they were in (a card called "out of the frying pan" to avoid the combat they were losing pretty handily) and ended with one of the players playing the Love Interest card… on a semi-eldritch being with no capacity for love or other emotions as I conceived her.

It… honestly it broke my entire homebrewed world to a degree, she wasn't supposed to be a person, she was supposed to be a thing, hinting at the dark energies at the core of a different set of villains. And suddenly she was madly in love with one of my players… They recorded my reaction, and I had to call the game for that night so I could think through the implications of this and adjust. It was simply too big of a change to adjust for with any speed.

In another example from a group of mine, much less severe, I was rushed in map building for this castle the players were exploring. The adventure was to the right, and the player turned left… where I had forgotten to draw anything or even think of what could be down there. I asked for a few minutes while I quickly made-up what was that way, let everyone take a bathroom break, and the resulting encounter led the player to making a deal with The Nine Hells which had repercussions throughout the entire rest of the game.

The point I am trying to make, is that if you end up thrown for a loop and you can't think of what can possibly happen next. Tell your players you need a few minutes. Taking a break so you can figure out what happens next is perfectly fine, and they may even get a kick out of throwing you for a loop or suggest things that could happen.

Also, if the problem is more that you end up circling but never able to get a good lead up into the final encounter of a series of events. Just have that ending come suddenly, even jarringly or out of place. I think it is more important that something happen and the story moves forward than for you to keep trying to find the perfect way to do it. There is no perfect way, just the way it ends up happening. Trust that the scene is exciting enough on it's own and the players will likely not question why it was finally this door that led them where they wanted to go.

I'm not familiar with Savage World but… couldn't you just say no?  What if a player uses that card on an animal, or an inanimate object?  The GM should default to saying "yes" most of the time (or, more powerfully, "yes, and" or "yes, but"), but saying "no" is often the appropriate response.

The way the cards were designed (and to be clear they are an addition to the game I bought and allowed into the campaign, not something which is in the base system itself) saying "No" violated the agreement and understanding of the cards.

For example, one of them forces the villain to spend a turn giving a villainous monologue. If I said no to this card, then I could say no to that card, and they only get to draw one or two for the entire session.

I've banned the deck for more serious games, my for more light-hearted games where this kind of silliness is more appropriate, everyone seems to love having something in their back pocket to rock the boat.

EDIT: And, I want to make something more clear. While the entire backstory of the world and a lot of my lore had to be altered in light of that event, and it did cause me much gnashing of teeth for a few hours, I think the end result was incredibly cool and satisfying. It worked out and allowed for some pretty great moments for the next few sessions.

In fact, I've rarely had a game where the player actions reduced the fun of the game or ruined the game for myself or someone else. It has happened, but those are horror stories I don't think anyone here has to worry about emulating, because it all had to do with particular personalities that I imagine few other people will end up having to deal with. As long as you are playing with people you know and like, you should never have to worry about that sort of mess.

I mean, the worst thing I've ever come across, on either side, is a player figuring out a puzzle or major plot point well ahead of when they 'should'. You just kind of feel bad for the GM in that case. :C

I recently read something about that and what to do. Can’t remember where. Maybe StackExchange?

I'm currently GMing a game of DnD over on a website called RPOL (Roleplay Online, a forum-based roleplay site) and am playing in a couple more. I'm also a player in a game that my dad is running here at home for myself, my sister, and her boyfriend. All DnD 4th Edition as that is my preferred version. So I can't give too many personal tips for running a tabletop game since I have pretty much no experience of doing so.

However, there is a YouTube series I watch called High Rollers which has been going for just over a year and a half now (they stream every Sunday on the Yogscast Twitch channel and upload to YouTube a few days later) which has a really super amazing DM called Mark "Sherlock" Hulmes. He himself has a YouTube channel called Tabletop Weekly in which he's done a few videos on advice for DMs - some of them are specific to 5th Edition DnD since that's the system they use for High Rollers but he's done plenty of more generic stuff like worldbuilding and how to do NPC voices. I think I've learned a lot from this guy and would consider attempting to run a tabletop game of DnD should the opportunity arise when my dad's game finishes or something. Okay, so the Sentinels RPG isn't DnD, but a lot of GMing stuff can carry over across pretty much every system. There are plenty of other videos on YouTube by experienced GMs giving advice on how to run games and plenty of videos of people actually playing so you can get an idea for it. I just recommended Mark Hulmes because I think he's the best of the ones I've watched but there's another guy called Matt Colville who has a channel (first vid I watched of his was called "The Sandbox versus the Railroad" when someone linked it in a Discord channel and I went on to watch a bunch of his other stuff from there) specifically made for giving advice to GMs and which he tries to make as non-system-specific as possible (though the system he uses to play is, again, DnD 5th Edition). And this guy called Matt Mercer is always getting mentioned, who runs what appears to be the best-known DnD stream, Critical Role - both Hulmes and Colville mention it a bunch of times in their videos and both are RL friends with Matt Mercer (though I don't think they know each other). I've not checked out his stuff, though - I'd really rather only be dedicating a few hours a week to one DnD stream and that's High Rollers :D. Also, Critical Role has been going a lot longer so it's a lot more hours to catch up on - I binge-watched the entirety of High Rollers as much as possible and it took me about 3-4 weeks, and that was when there were "only" 49 episodes plus a couple of extra one-shots and QnA videos in the playlist :D.

Sooo, yeah...plug plug plug but these guys know what they're talking about so I thought I'd direct you to them rather than attempt to give any advice myself...which would have come from them (well, mainly Hulmes) anyway :D.

If we're going to get into online versus face-to-face roleplaying, I don't know if I could ever RP even as a player f2f or voice chat without being way too self-conscious. Much more freeing to RP in text.

Makes it easier to keep track of what else is going on, too, in terms of keeping logs and how I process written text much better than I do anything spoken.

I love when someone figures out their employer is a bad guy setting them up for future ruin early enough that I have time to alter it, because guess what, you may be right today, but not tomorrow.

That also is why I try to avoid last second "aha" moments.  Players usually figure them out.  Sometimes I write a key combat where either our ally turns on us or a threat from outside joins the fight, and if the players expect betrayal, they don't get it.

Be very careful saying no to your players.  While at times you have to, like a player is ruining the game for others, or is going way outside of their character without good reason, because once you start controlling the actions of your players, you are taking control of their story.

As a GM, you are the writer of the story, the players are your story's characters, and any good writer will tell you it is important to let the characters shape the story.  You don't want to remove player agency, because that gets you players that don't care about the story or the character that used to be theirs.

A good trick for a left turn situation is to provide them with a closed door that gives a feeling that they found something they shouldn't have, something that will be big in the future.  Then find a way to work it in later.

I did one where they found a door they couldn't open, trying to analyze the enchantments damaged our caster, and when they touched the door they saw images of blood and heard screaming in their minds.

They got out of there.  Later they took that same path and it was a hallway leading to the kitchen.  No door.  Later they found out that a powerful being was trying to enter the world by creating such doorways, and by touching it they had linked themselves to this being, and were some of the few people that could fight it.

Don't be afraid to throw impromptu foreshadowing out in a crisis of preparation, it just buys you time.

I have trouble not playing a bard.

Wait, this thread is about GMing? Oh, let's see, what can I add ...

Well, first, major props to Russ, who is one of my GMs and does a wonderful job looking after his players in many ways and making ridiculously awesome props and creating all kinds of backstories and NPCs.

Oh, hey, there were motivating questions, let's see what my answers are:

• If you have never GM'd a game, what is the biggest barrier to you trying it out?

I have GM'd a game! Still, for a new game system, the biggest barriers would be learning rules and settings. Too much to learn and it's daunting. Too little to learn and I wonder if I have enough to use.

• If you have GM'd a game, what were the biggest challenges you faced? What did you find most and least enjoyable?

I GM'd a few sessions of an AD&D 2nd edition game for one experienced RPGer and three people who'd never played. I was pretty frustrated when they wouldn't bite at a plot hook I'd inserted. They had every reason not to, mind you. It helps, if you spend a lot of time creating a situation/setting/scene that you love and get attached to, if you keep in mind that if it doesn't get used now, you could probably repurpose it for something else later. I loved that the new players were so new to gaming that very simple things, like being attacked by wolves in the night, felt really dramatic to them, and I loved that my one experienced player was a fount of entertainment -- coming up with lots of interesting things to say and do.

I co-ran a very rules-light, universe-hopping supers game for a few months with my spouse. On the one hand, I loved having a partner to help bounce ideas off of and play NPCs, but she wasn't as helpful during the actual session as I'd hoped. In the end during the GMing itself I found myself constantly wanting to do two things at once: 1) Facilitate the action, checking in with what the players wanted and thinking through how the NPCs/world would react, while 2) Keeping notes on what _actually_ happened so I could keep things consistent.

I found that as a GM what I really wanted to be able to do was craft an interesting, intricate world/situation and let the game run as a simulation, but it was way more work than I enjoyed to build that and keep track of it.

My most successful GMing experience was a one-shot of Super Human High School. The characters were premade and I'd crafted an interesting situation that they got to explore. Every time I've run it, people have seemed to really enjoy it. I knew everything inside and out and got to enjoy watching it unfurl and got to enjoy what the players were doing w/out constantly having to think and plan and keep things in mind.

• If you have played in an RPG, what was the best thing a GM ever did while running a game?

A) See Russ' comments about the work our group does in advance in coming to consensus/understanding about what we want out of a campaign, as well as building characters who have already-present relationships and at least somewhat overlapping goals. I appreciate lots and lots of things that Russ does as a GM. One of them is how committed he is to making sure the players understand the situation. If all the props and descriptions he provides still leave a player making a decision based on faulty assumptions, he's perfectly happy to roll back. Mind you, we, as players, take responsibility for not abusing this. We're mostly roleplayers and storytellers, so this comes naturally for us. 

And by roleplayers and storytellers I'm referring to two of the seven types of gamers outlined in Robin's Laws of Good Game Mastering (http://www.sjgames.com/robinslaws/) (http://www.critical-hits.com/blog/2008/01/23/robins-laws-revisited-part-2-player-types-and-traits/)

B) It's valuable as a player to understand what your GM wants out of GMing and to set one's own internal expectations. My other primary GM has few qualms about killing characters. We play Cthulhu and Runequest and the characters are often quite underpowered. You've got to know when to run away! She is fantastic at providing atmosphere and rolling with whatever the players do. Sure, the players might do something she thinks is tactically stupid and end up losing an arm or going insane, but it will be amusing and awesome the way it happens.

C) Along with being a roleplayer, I am a power gamer. I LOVE having power! Another GM provided an ending to a campaign where my character was chosen to become the guardian of something and was granted an immense amount of power. Never played that character after this point, but I still love thinking about him. Another GM gave my character the ability to literally know anything. As long as I was honestly curious about something, she would simply tell me whatever it is I wanted to know. It was an amazing opportunity for both powergaming and roleplaying -- I could know anything, but I also got to constantly think about what my character would really want to know. I suppose this boils down to a lot of the advice others have given: Know your players and what they want and try to give it to them.

Oy, that's more than enough.

These two statements somehow do not go together.

You’d be surprised…

:3 Granted, usually when anyone in my group played a bard, we were deliberately inspired by Elan from Order of the Stick. (And our characters were generally pretty loony in general, though we mixed that with then playing them quite realistically.)

Bardic knowledge traits and skills are incredible.  Bards are epic out of combat.  You can win adventures before the combat starts.  My bards drove our GM crazy because I played them as tacticians and detectives.

I really need to learn to make my (self-depreciating) jokes more obvious.

Though honestly some of the responses here remind me why I don't know if I'd fit in anywhere but my old RP group; you folks are so serious. :X

Note that Elan is a puppet master …

Heh.

Basically my group was not power gamers at all; we were pretty much what you get when you cross a Loonie with a Real Roleplayer; come up with a goofy and misfit idea but then play that idea completely in-character and realistically. Think Mystery Men for what our superhero attitude would play out as.

I've played among other ideas, a rogue with a bag that produced random items that he believed was possessed by the spirit of his grandfather who was helping him with the items, a field secretary for an adventuring agency, a hippie IT tech who worshipped machines and thought they could talk, and a ladette personality fighter with a healing factor who was cursed by a wizard to be a literal drawing aggro tank for his army (like arrows in her vicinity would change course to hit her sort of thing) and had a giant sledgehammer as a signature weapon, and I was still generally playing the most mundane/normal characters in the group.

Edit: Actually, the random item bag was kind of fun as it was a trade-off with the GM. Since I would make up a reason to return an existing item to the bag to pull a new item out of it, the GM would tell me what I got, and I'd have to think up what my character would say his grandfather was trying to tell him with the item. While, you know, the GM was feeding me things like pulling a sombrero and a lamppost out of the bag.

 I fell like BB "Consider the Price of Victory" as BB monologuing. Along with Apostate "Remorseless Provocation" and Fallen Angel". ""Rook City is Mine!"" Is literally in quotes. Don't dismiss a thing and Axium and Problem are Scholar giving advice to the group. You might have to look for it but the Card game does have people giving speeches and Monologuing.

[quote="Jeysie"]

. . .Though honestly some of the responses here remind me why I don't know if I'd fit in anywhere but my old RP group; you folks are so serious. :X

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I play with a person who min/maxes, takes everything too seriously and personally so I know how you fell Jeysie. But You should give people a chance. For instance;

I am playing a gnome who shapeshift himself to be a squirrel so he can be with his true love, his flying squirrel familiar.  Every night does a ritual suicide so he can reincarnate as another base form ( after all physical forms are only temporary). Currently, believes himself to be THE Squirrel of the World Tree because that is the lie he been telling everyone. My goal in life is to upset my super serious friend , cause havoc and have fun. I have many time listen to the bad Ideas that the GM proposed because I want to see what happens. 

More the other way around: I feel like people would be frustrated/annoyed with me.

Which is kind of an odd feeling, admittedly; I'm more used to being the Straight Woman/Comically Serious person in a group. (My sense of humor is best described as morbid, satirical, and extremely dry/deadpan.)

Though I'm reminded of how I wish there was two different words for serious-as-in-tone and serious-as-in-really-trying-to-do-something. My group was totally serious about roleplaying; it's just that we generally roleplayed with a rather weird and quirky tone. (Like anyone who was actually Chaotic Stupid and did random OOC or otherwise disruptive things would annoy us as well.)

I love the advice of 'figure out what your players want to do with their characters and use that'. Kind of wish my DMs did that. :/

Highly recommend taking as many plot threads from PC backstories as possible. Making it personal and something the player (effectively) started makes it much more interesting and engaging.

This. It already worked on me, and as soon as I read it, I responded "Sure thing, chief.", without thinking about it at all.  This makes such a difference that I, without ever having done an RPG, want to be a part of at least 5 RPGs like this, and give this kind of experience to any others I GM for.

This is very, very true. Watch out for GMs who take innocuous mentions of former colleagues and term them into master double-agents.

Based on some reactions in other convos here as of later, I think I'm going to stick by my feeling that anyone who likes whimsical or quirky or corny ideas sometimes isn't very welcome or is going to just get dead seriousness in response, so my roleplaying thoughts probably aren't terribly relevant.

I dunno, it depends on the game - some systems just aren't meant to be serious, like the Red Dwarf RPG for example - I remember reading one negative thing that can affect a character is that they become basically all "emo" and the only way to get out of it is for the player to write a suitably miserable-sounding emo poem that pleases the GM enough for them to decide that your character can cheer up now :D. There are also character traits and flaws and stuff that you can pick at character creation and involve standard-sounding things that you get in other systems that use that kind of mechanic, but also things like "Smeghead", which isn't as bad as "Goit" and certainly not as bad as "Gimboid", as far as I can remember :D. I'm also pretty sure that you can also play as a Talkie Toaster or a scutter or whatever if you want to...

I like this idea, but it's not a universal like amongst players.  There's a whole thread on rpg.net that's got peopel arguing both sides.

There's nothing wrong or bad with running a 'corny' or 'camp' game; you just have to have everyone on the same page when you sit down to play it.  

Playing a supers game based in The Tick universe isn't going to really go well for the player who wants to play as Daredevil and run through a legal drama with masks.  Similarly, someone who brings American Maid or Sewer Urchin to a game based in street-level grit and organized crime is going to be disappointed.

It's a matter of measuring GM and player expectations and providing something everyone can enjoy or, barring that, finding a game that better fits what you want.

This just makes me so happy that I'm finally playing in a light-hearted supers game, and therefore can pretty much play as my version of the Tick.

I dunno if that's quite the notion. Like the time I played the hippie techie who thought machines talked was still a campaign with an AI trying to kill everyone on the space station because plot twist she was trying to protect a group of elves who had emerged as a resurgance of magic but were being experimented on by the scientists on the station.

So it was still taking a quirky character and RPing them how they'd realistically react to this entire situation. (You haven't lived until you're having your character from her POV heroically trying to stop a bunch of murderously possessed baggage carts without destroying them because the bad meanie AI brainwashed a bunch of poor innocent machines who are therefore not at fault for attacking the team, while heroic speeching at the AI the entire time how she should feel bad for turning on her own.)

But… like, the other day an online friend was talking about how they came up with this character who had this crazy AC and could do this crazy dual wielding damage with a lot of math and I asked well about their character's story and backstory and they were like "Oh well I guess I'll just have it where they were a local hero for stepping in between a villager and a goblin and something about him using his shell to deflect the blow" and how they're totally a badass adventurer and it's like, OK, I guess that's not my usual ratio of focus.

Or in the "Who are you playing in the Sentinels RPG" thread where everyone else is coming up with all these badass, off the wall hero ideas, and my ideas basically amount to more like "I want to play a more normal person who became a hero for more normal tragedy and motivation reasons because I think the idea of normal people getting powers and coping with it via normal person flaws and reasons is an interesting mindspace."

There's nothing 'wrong' with playing that Everyman archetype, if that's the concept you're going for.  In fact, being the "straight-man" can often provide a really unique experience, especially if your party is made up of those "special snowflakes".  A lot of times, in writing, that character becomes a critical audience-insert character; within gaming, it often gets overlooked because of the nature of the audience as participant within the span of the story.  But, providing a grounded, 'normal'-type character provides its own interesting opportunities...

That's how I usually approach character creation. I sit down with a system, read the rulebooks, latch onto a couple of cool things, and then go, okay, here's a set of cool powers I want to have. I will design a character around them, like the Cleric of Pelor who was basically born to be healing in a can. I just want to be someone with cool powers who can use those powers to beat up guys and get XP so they can get even cooler powers, y'know? And I recognize that's not the "right" way to roleplay, and I'm okay with that.

Then there's the time I played a 'crazy' Gnome wizard who died when the moss he decided to chew on turned out to be a Green Warder. Good times. XD

@PlatinumWarlock: Yeah, I think "Everyman" is a good way of putting it. We generally played pretty "ordinary" people who did often have eccentricities but they were ones you could imagine people really having, busy dealing with whatever odd things life (in the form of the GM) was throwing their way, having the sorts of reactions you'd expect those more ordinary and eccentric people to have.

Much more Mystery Men than The Tick, on the whole. (Sure the Mystery Men had oddball powers and personalities, but in the end they still acted heroic and dealt with a pretty serious superhero plot like actual superheroes would if they had those oddball powers and personalities.)

@TakeWalker: I'm mostly the opposite: I come up with the type of personality I want the character to have, and then think of what powers would go with that.

Or if I do think of a somewhat role or power-based foundation (The group needs an [x] to round things out; I really want to play a bard this time), then I think up what sort of personality feels like it would go most interestingly with that particular role or power.

If you mix serious and silly characters, you could end up with something horrible, like a gun toting mercenary dating a happy go lucky guy whose luck changes constantly in humorous ways.

Nah, there's plenty of silly around here. It's just that sometimes (as I mentioned elsewhere  ) text sucks as a method of communications. 

We had a game in which one player's character was a super-intelligent dog. Her lesser power was the ability to create "water" on demand…   (Insert ridiculous events here.)

I like this idea, but it's not a universal like amongst players.  There's a whole thread on rpg.net that's got peopel arguing both sides.
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Oh, I totally agree! We have some players I don't do this with and others I do. Again, we have to know our players and their interests. I literally ask each player their thoughts on this based on their character, unless I know that player well enough to know what they enjoy/don't enjoy. 

If you mix serious and silly characters, you could end up with something horrible, like a gun toting mercenary dating a happy go lucky guy whose luck changes constantly in humorous ways.
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Yeah, it really reminds me of some of our games, as we have some players that are very serious and some players that are… not.   With the right situation, party, and campaign setting, these situations can be made quite entertaining! 

Heh! Yeah, Setback is definitely the sort of superhero my group would come up with. ("Oh, hello there! Have you considered, say, not hitting me?" is absolutely a line I could imagine one of us coming up with.)

Unity I think is the sort of character I'd come up with specifically, leaning the most towards being a serious idea but still with a toe dipped in "goofy".

(As opposed to Guise who would actually likely be way too goofy for our tastes.)

For me, it's a knee jerk reaction.

I've had players (both as a DM and playing alongside me) who are "whimsical" in that [actual play example] they decide they are bored at the party of the most powerful wizard in the world, where we are acting as representatives of a respected merchant company, and then dump a plate of spaghetti on their head and wear it like a wig. All so they would be the center of attention.

Or, people who are "quirky" in that they murder civilians for being too ugly and steal their stuff, or threaten people with "humorous" tortures to make sure they aren't lying to the party about the fact that they are a merchant and don't know anything about the mysterious dungeon that just appeared outside of town.

Yeah, I've played with some people who are warped in some… interesting… ways. Not that most of them are that bad, not even a quarter most likely, but it's just a background noise for all of my games that I struggle with.

Now, your character you mention that loved machines and wanted to save the machines from the AI without damaging them is really cool, I love that sort of thing. But, I still yearn for a game where I can say the players aren't despicable people and they actually care about human lives and suffering, because I don't think I've had a group where every player was on that same page.

So, I want a "serious game" not in that I want grim and gritty, but a game where the players are the good guys, they are occasionally placed in situations where their morals and preconceptions can be challenged, and they struggle to remain good people who try to do the right thing, instead of deciding to cause massive destruction for little to no reason.

Also, I have a very dry sense of humor, and I tend towards being more serious. I couldn't play a character like your machine talking character, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to have fun interacting with you or that I won't have my own moments.

See, I wouldn't want to play with characters like the ones you mentioned either, because they're just being Chaotic Stupid and OOC. That's bad roleplaying to me!

That's why it's so hard describing this stuff; people always jump to that sort of thing when it's like no, I agree that's just plain annoying. The idea isn't to derail a plot or be randomly stupid, it's to come up with characters with lots of interesting personality roleplaying hooks to build from and then seriously roleplay them.

I've played a variety of different characters depending on the campaign; some were more typically wholly good. (Though my techie wasn't anti-social, per se, she just liked machines better.) Another fave was a gnome inventor with a sunny and curious-about-everything personality who invented a sort of medieval MRE that we were delivering to a disaster-wrought town.

Like I said, think Setback or Unity for the types of characters that would show up in our games.

Oddly I'm also very serious and have a dry sense of humor, but--I guess this is more personal psychology than RPing--because I tend to be very logical and straightforward I tend to be drawn to/intrigued by things that are weird, creepy, whimsical, quirky, and/or creative. Things that challenge my perceptions, or challenge me to think and react in ways I normally wouldn't.

(I think that's why I like listening to and performing music so much as well; as Christopher said in the podcast, music is a strange mix of both art and logic/science.)

It was fun trying to think how my techie would react to that situation because she had an obviously unusual POV. With my gnome it was fun trying to think of how someone optimistic and bouncy would react to things when I'm usually pessimistic and restrained. I once played a fighter who was very much a combo of Blood Knight and The Ladette when I'm totally not either of those things.

It's more the difference between Legacy and Setback as characters. They're both very nice and good-aligned characters, but quite different in actual implementation.

There is something to be said for suddenly realizing that you are exerting power over a setting in which your actions have more or less no consequences, and going mad with that power. I mean, isn't roleplaying meant to give you a way to get inside the head of someone you're not? Someone who isn't the good guy, who would do things you would never do? That's what went through my head as I read Chaosmancer's post.

See, this is a massive pet-peeve of mine as a GM: the player who decides to be wacky "in-character", because they themselves want amusement, or view themselves as the center of the attention because–due to the nature of the medium–they're among the primary protagonists.  Worse so, if they're masking this desire under "I'm only doing what my character would!"  In doing so, they're actively conveying the message that their fun is more important than the fun of anyone (perhaps everyone) else at the table; it's selfish, it's self-centered, and it's arrogant.

I'm a big believer in consequence in my games.  You do something dumb, the in-game hammer's going to come down.  If you want to wear a bowl of spaghetti at the grand duchess's ball, you're going to be 1) shunned by pretty much every noble there, 2) escorted out of the ball by force, and 3) pretty well ignored by me for the remainder of the session.  As a GM, I'm not going to incentivize that sort of behavior by giving that player a "solo adventure" because they didn't feel like acting in a setting-appropriate manner.

For the character that's goes on a killing spree or actively threatening people, the same thing applies.  Killing a sentient being–even in a generic fantasy setting like D&D, where killing orcs and goblins is a given–is a big deal.  If there are witnesses, you can bet your bottom dollar that the police/town-guard/etc. will be knocking on their door.  Assets will be seized, trials will be held, and prison time is a reality.  Again, as GM, you shouldn't incentivize the behavior or sentiment that "I was bored, so I made my own amusement by wrecking your setting."

Now, for me, the way you convey this has to be directly.  If someone wants to take a questionable action, the GM has to hold the authority to say, "If you do that, XXXX is going to happen.  If that's what you want, that's fine; just don't be surprised by the consequences."  I'd say that, in my experience, 90+% of the time, that gets a player to reconsider.  For the ~10% of the times it doesn't, the player's been explicitly warned and you're in the clear to bring down the headsman's axe.

Yeah, I was going to say to TakeWalker: The problem with Chaosmancer's post is more that the players in question were using their roleplaying power to be disruptive and annoying to the other players and their PC.

I have both played in games where chaotic and random things happening was a central plot/RPing point, and games where the PCs all had dodgy morals, but it was situations where we all agreed ahead of time that we were going to do these things and that we'd react realistically to any disruptions that occurred and the GM was OK with it and it fit the rules of the GM's story and so on and so on.

But if you instead have it where there's a character who goes off and does chaotically disruptive things when the other players are trying to seriously solve a plot, or a character doing dodgy or downright evil things in a group of otherwise good characters who are supposed to be doing good things, it's just plain old bad and annoying.

With great roleplaying power comes great responsibility.

Forgot to add that the reason I liked your Virtuoso plot idea you mentioned in another thread was because of the interesting juxtapositions between an as-yet-unaddressed consequence of the canon plot, someone who has every right to be angry, and them being angry at someone who had zero intention to do what they did and almost certainly wouldn't have had they known what would happen.  It's an interesting tangle that's not at all straightforward.

And therein lies the roleplaying opportunity for me.  In a perfect world, Xu's spirit would be helping Anthony teach the future Virtuosos in the ways of music and the Void.  But, because he made a stupid decision–ignorant might be a better word than stupid here; he wasn't aware that destroying the Bell would have the consequences it would, even though doing so is inherently selfish and destructive–Xu has a right to feel angry, particularly given her fate (at least, in my mind, as a villain).  Argent Adept can be as sorry as he likes, but it's not going to bring the bell back, and it's not going to bring Xu's spirit back.  And, if you're his student, it's a legacy that you'll have to deal with…

Which kind of ties into why I like roleplaying more "ordinary" or quirky characters. Argent is definitely in the "normal guy who gets saddled with powers and reacts to them in normal person ways" category of things and does a lot of "well, it seemed like a good idea at the time..." sort of things as a result that lead to interesting consequences when they're not actually good ideas.

Contrast, say, Legacy, who was literally born to do this stuff. He's more of the Standard Heroic Character people seem to usually play; he always knows what's the right thing to do and what isn't, he's always on top of things, he doesn't have many notable personality flaws. And thus not the sort of character I really know what to do with even though that's the sort of character most RPG folks seem to like to play.

Prep time is always an interesting topic.   (Yes, I've been wanting to respond to this for more than a week. Sad, right?  )

We have a friend who preps very little, as she is amAZing at improv. I, on the other hand, need to "talk to" NPCs in my head for a long time before I get their voice set well enough I feel like I can actually roleplay them in a session. That means I have to spend a lot more time on prep than many GMs. I also tend to do things that are a little more complex in nature. I'm also generally not willing to run published adventures as-is (that's a longer post than I have time for tonight), so I spend a great deal of time not just getting to know the material, but also customizing it for my own use. 

These are not normal things. They are things I've learned over the years. Most GMs will do just fine (and are probably better off!) using published materials for their first few games. That gives them an easy starting point and a basis upon which they can learn the craft. Once they get comfortable with GMing, they can branch out, experiment, etc.

Using what GtG is providing in the Sentinels RPG Starter Kit will be great for starting GMs! Read it, get to know it, get the "voice"/personality for the NPCs (especially the villains) in your head, make sure the players are playing one of the characters that fits their personal play style, and you'll do great. 

Not sad at all! Gods know I take my time replying to things sometimes.

I must admit, a lot of my prep time is just looking over notes to refresh myself on character names, place names and the like (the joys of homebrew). I usually figure out what story beats I'd like to happen during the week and then figure out how to make them as applicable as possible depending on what the players decide to do. Obviously there is some guiding happening during the game, but I like to improv that so its more fluid and reactive to the player's wishes.

But for new GMs, don't expect to be good at improv right of the bat. This is something I've taught myself to do and it really works FOR ME. I've found that if I over prepare; 1) most of it goes unused/recycled and 2) my anxiety kicks in about making sure everything fits perfectly together.