I don't personally need to know the answers because I already know everything there is to know about GM'ing because I'm the perfect GM.

But for all the rest of you noobs, I figure you could use a lesson or two, therefore this thread is for all of you to sort it out amongst yourselves.

Begin lesson one!

I was going to participate, and then I read your post.  I guess I just don't get your style, but "dance monkey dance" isn't to encouraging.

Yeah, well, for anyone else, herewith my top GM rules ... (reposted from somewhere else, as is apparent)

1) We should all be in this to have fun. If people aren’t, something’s wrong. Change it. If I’m not having fun, something’s wrong; change that. If I need to take a break, then I should; it beats burnout.

2) Be true to (and aware of) yourself. I run the game that I run, not the game someone else wants me to run. I’m ten times better off seeking players who enjoy my style than to compromise my style to please specific players. Beyond that, I should know what I can handle: how many players I can comfortably run, how frequently I have time to play, how long sessions should go, how much digression and socializing I want. Not knowing your own limitations ends in trouble. By the way? Articulate this to your players. I've been hugely wrongfooted twice; once, when I brought a serious, gritty assassin into a Top Secret game that turned out to be patterned after Get Smart!, and a Howard character into a game billed as based on Heinlein's Future History that turned out to be Monty Python meets Number of the Beast. In both cases I scarcely lasted out the first session. Like most players, there are styles I do and those I don't do, and you're a lot better off alerting me in advance.

3) Be prepared. I not only run a sandbox, the PCs can choose to travel to any other city in the kingdom and there’s a book detailing the top ten people in local politics, how many temporal wizards there are, a paragraph or three of a hundred or more shops, what the major temples are, what the minor temples are ... It’s an appalling amount of work, but I can save my brain power to invent details my volumes of notes don’t cover, as well as not get caught short in contradictions ... hey, wasn’t the elderly priestess at St. Viria’s named Fidessa when we came through Seasteadholm in the spring? I thought you said the Sufontis Market was in the Zhantil District? And so on. However ...

3a) ... don't overprepare. The detail I want, as a player, is the detail I'm not only likely to encounter on my own, but detail which I reasonably think might pertain to the job at hand. I don't need to have an hour of session taken up by the GM droning on, a paragraph apiece, about every crew member heading up to the space station, from the black gang on up. How about spending that time working out the possible responses to what we do in reaction to your plot? I assure you I'd rather you had a handle on that than the hometowns, marital statuses and off-duty fashion details of all three lab assistants.

4) Don’t ever, ever railroad. It is not my job to tell the players what they’re doing. It’s their job to tell me what they’re doing. If they’re not interested in my plot, they’re not. If they make all the right guesses, then they have a walkover and I need to give them something else to do. Hey, how about a shopping expedition and a night on the town while I resign myself to more prep work for next time? In the meantime, what is my job is to have as many of the bases covered as is feasible. A clever party should be able to come up with a dozen ways to get past any problem. A clever GM should be able to foresee that they will and have a notion as to how to handle each choice.

5) Know your party. The OP talked about having the rug ripped out from under him by players reminding him that they had certain abilities he forgot to take into consideration. A prepared GM doesn’t forget these things. I keep copies of all character sheets, and I have a cheat sheet on a clipboard detailing Advantages, Disadvantages, stats, weapons of choice, defense rolls, reaction mods, Perception and Will checks and the like, for each character.

6) Don’t get bogged down. If I can’t calculate the modifiers in the haggling session between Lady Sula and the goldsmith (the smith doesn’t give a damn for the aristocracy, Sula’s a babe, they’re finding each other’s accents a bit tough to follow) in an instant, then I should fudge it without hesitation, and if I can’t do that, I’m in the wrong business; there’s nothing more boring than watching the GM flipping through a stack of rulebooks. That aside, scenes should only take so long. NPC soliloquys should only take so long. Players should only get so long to meander or do their solo stuff. Adventurers and plot arcs should only take so long. Even an epic tale has its sell-by date. Brevity is the soul of wit. Keep the pace moving at all costs. (In combat, too. Combat rounds in the game I play are two seconds long. If the player - who’s been cooling his heels for a couple of minutes anyway - can’t decide what to do within ten seconds after I call on him, I skip him. You should too.)

7) Be a good actor and storyteller. You play everyone else in the world. You set all the scenes. You handle much of the dialogue. If you can’t act and refuse to learn, you should be refereeing miniatures wargaming instead. Practice this. Use body language, posture, different voices and accents. If you don’t know how, learn.

This is a cooperative exercise. Something you need to hammer into the players, if need be; however illogical, this is a consensus-driven game which needs to be handled consensually. A player who designs a character wildly at odds with the others, a player who wants to freelance all the time, a player who doesn’t want to get on board with the milieu or the setting, these are people who need to be told No. There are RPGs out there for rugged individualists who don’t want to act in lockstep with others; they call them MMORPGs and LARPs. There's also a role for GMs who can't bring themselves to say "No:" it's called "player."

9) Use no complexity in the game system you can’t readily handle, and avoid anything you don’t really need. There are few things, short of drunk and disorderly players vomiting on the battlemat, more disruptive to the flow of a game than a lengthy rules debate. A lot of RPGs out there have “light” versions or a spate of optional rules that honest to God are “optional.” Don’t let this happy truth slip past you.

10) Know Your Shit, or Don't Run Campaigns That Require You Do: I'm an elitist. I think it's incumbent on GMs to learn as much as they can about their milieus, and play them as accurately and realistically as practical. I really don't want to see howling anachronisms, except in genres where it doesn't matter (30s pulp, for instance), or where the GM has an explanation in hand.

11) Believe in the Rule of Cool. If a player does something outrageously cool in combat, let her pull it off. If a player comes up with a really cool idea, reward him. This will almost never go wrong.

Quote from: mcbobbo;681209I was going to participate, and then I read your post.  I guess I just don't get your style, but "dance monkey dance" isn't to encouraging.

Did it take a long time to kill your sense of humour or were you just born as a grumpy old man?

Quote from: Ravenswing;6812103) Be prepared. I not only run a sandbox, the PCs can choose to travel to any other city in the kingdom and there's a book detailing the top ten people in local politics, how many temporal wizards there are, a paragraph or three of a hundred or more shops, what the major temples are, what the minor temples are ... It's an appalling amount of work, but I can save my brain power to invent details my volumes of notes don't cover, as well as not get caught short in contradictions ... hey, wasn't the elderly priestess at St. Viria's named Fidessa when we came through Seasteadholm in the spring? I thought you said the Sufontis Market was in the Zhantil District? And so on.

I agree with this one a lot, having and more importantly being able to quickly find the information you need (even better knowing it without needing to reference it) is a key GM skill. I'd leaven that with the ability to be flexible and throw out bits where needed. The primary skill of a GM to me is being able to adapt to what the group are doing within the context of the sandbox.

Quote from: Ravenswing;6812107) Be a good actor and storyteller. You play everyone else in the world. You set all the scenes. You handle much of the dialogue. If you can't act and refuse to learn, you should be refereeing miniatures wargaming instead. Practice this. Use body language, posture, different voices and accents. If you don't know how, learn.

This is something that gets almost no attention in the hobby, and is really crucial to running a good game. Being able to deliver descriptions and act out roles really helps immersion much more than any amount of trying to wrangle rulesets down to minimalist skeletons. Join toastmasters, take acting lessons.

Quote from: Ravenswing;6812104) Don't ever, ever railroad.

Some groups of players WANT a railroad. They like the feeling of being major characters in a novel.

Quote7) Be a good actor and storyteller.

I've never been in a group (as a player or as a GM) in over 40 years that gave a damn about the "acting ability" of players or of the GM. And as I've said many times in the past: my campaigns don't do story. That is, as GM I have no story to tell, stories are what players (or their characters) tell after the fact about whatever game events happen -- just like in real life

Quote This is a cooperative exercise. Something you need to hammer into the players, if need be; however illogical, this is a consensus-driven game which needs to be handled consensually.

Except that some groups thrive in campaigns that are competitive and definitely not consensus-driven.

Quote11) Believe in the Rule of Cool.

Some groups don't want this. They want a "rule of realism" or the like instead. They don't enjoy the type of cinematic/action hero type of game that often results from following the "Rule of Cool"

This is the problem with defining a "good GM" or listing rules a "good GM" should follow: what groups of players want out of their game and out of their GM can be very different from each other. For example, my current group of 9 old school players all consider me a pretty good GM. However, if they were all replaced with char-op players, or tactical combat players or storygamers, they would likely consider me one of the worst GMs they had ever had as I have no interest in or desire/ability to cater to any of those styles of play.

My sniping in the other thread aside, whilst I don't find doing full-blown different voices important (or even desirable, laughing at comedy accents tends to derail moments when a more sober atmosphere is desired), I've found being able to change my tone of voice actually really helps, and have observed this in other DMs too. Keeping in mind the general mannerisms, word choice, mode of speech, level of formality and so on of different NPCs gives much better results than simply wheeling out a different voice for each one.

Quote from: The Traveller;681213This is something that gets almost no attention in the hobby, and is really crucial to running a good game. Being able to deliver descriptions and act out roles really helps immersion much more than any amount of trying to wrangle rulesets down to minimalist skeletons. Join toastmasters, take acting lessons.

I admit I wouldn't be so hardline as to suggest GMs take acting lessons -- though I've done a lot of stage work -- but there are simpler steps.

For instance, we've most of us met hundreds of people in our lives.  Something I often do when considering how a NPC will act is to pattern him or her after someone I know.

One current NPC of mine, for instance, is patterned after a lady with whom I sang for several years.  She's a hugger.  She's one of those speak-with-her-hands types.  She has a low alto voice (and she's a terrific singer), and she doesn't speak loudly.  She's very vivacious and always moving.  She's not a raving beauty, but when she smiles or when she sings, she's got a palpable presence.  These are things with which I can work, and it doesn't take any more than me writing "Sarah B. clone" next to the NPC notation.

Quote from: RandallS;681215Some groups don't want this. They want a "rule of realism" or the like instead. They don't enjoy the type of cinematic/action hero type of game that often results from following the "Rule of Cool"

These aren't mutually exclusive - you can have rule of cool actions in realistic games too, reality is quite capable of being awesome.

Quote from: RandallS;681215This is the problem with defining a "good GM" or listing rules a "good GM" should follow: what groups of players want out of their game and out of their GM can be very different from each other.

Doesn't mean there aren't some decent basic guidelines which can be followed.

Quote from: Ravenswing;681219I admit I wouldn't be so hardline as to suggest GMs take acting lessons -- though I've done a lot of stage work -- but there are simpler steps.

Well it is just a suggestion, acting lessons would do no harm and benefit a person in other ways besides GMing, but it's not a basic essential. Good delivery is or should be I feel.

Quote from: Ravenswing;681210Yeah, well, for anyone else, herewith my top GM rules ... (reposted from somewhere else, as is apparent)

1) We should all be in this to have fun. If people aren't, something's wrong. Change it. If I'm not having fun, something's wrong; change that. If I need to take a break, then I should; it beats burnout.

Agreed. Without fun the exercise is pointless.

Quote from: Ravenswing;6812102) Be true to (and aware of) yourself. I run the game that I run, not the game someone else wants me to run. I'm ten times better off seeking players who enjoy my style than to compromise my style to please specific players. Beyond that, I should know what I can handle: how many players I can comfortably run, how frequently I have time to play, how long sessions should go, how much digression and socializing I want. Not knowing your own limitations ends in trouble. By the way? Articulate this to your players. I've been hugely wrongfooted twice; once, when I brought a serious, gritty assassin into a Top Secret game that turned out to be patterned after Get Smart!, and a Howard character into a game billed as based on Heinlein's Future History that turned out to be Monty Python meets Number of the Beast. In both cases I scarcely lasted out the first session. Like most players, there are styles I do and those I don't do, and you're a lot better off alerting me in advance.

Yes. No one should participate in gaming they will not enjoy.

Quote from: Ravenswing;6812103) Be prepared. I not only run a sandbox, the PCs can choose to travel to any other city in the kingdom and there's a book detailing the top ten people in local politics, how many temporal wizards there are, a paragraph or three of a hundred or more shops, what the major temples are, what the minor temples are ... It's an appalling amount of work, but I can save my brain power to invent details my volumes of notes don't cover, as well as not get caught short in contradictions ... hey, wasn't the elderly priestess at St. Viria's named Fidessa when we came through Seasteadholm in the spring? I thought you said the Sufontis Market was in the Zhantil District? And so on. However ...

I can get by with a bit less prep but not bad overall.

Quote from: Ravenswing;6812103a) ... don't overprepare. The detail I want, as a player, is the detail I'm not only likely to encounter on my own, but detail which I reasonably think might pertain to the job at hand. I don't need to have an hour of session taken up by the GM droning on, a paragraph apiece, about every crew member heading up to the space station, from the black gang on up. How about spending that time working out the possible responses to what we do in reaction to your plot? I assure you I'd rather you had a handle on that than the hometowns, marital statuses and off-duty fashion details of all three lab assistants.

Who's plot? If the GM has a plot that doesn't belong to some entity in the campaign then I won't be interested anyway.

Quote from: Ravenswing;6812104) Don't ever, ever railroad. It is not my job to tell the players what they're doing. It's their job to tell me what they're doing. If they're not interested in my plot, they're not. If they make all the right guesses, then they have a walkover and I need to give them something else to do. Hey, how about a shopping expedition and a night on the town while I resign myself to more prep work for next time? In the meantime, what is my job is to have as many of the bases covered as is feasible. A clever party should be able to come up with a dozen ways to get past any problem. A clever GM should be able to foresee that they will and have a notion as to how to handle each choice.

Avoiding the railroad becomes much easier when you don't waste time on plots in the first place. At least not ones that exist in a meta sense.
 

Quote from: Ravenswing;6812105) Know your party. The OP talked about having the rug ripped out from under him by players reminding him that they had certain abilities he forgot to take into consideration. A prepared GM doesn't forget these things. I keep copies of all character sheets, and I have a cheat sheet on a clipboard detailing Advantages, Disadvantages, stats, weapons of choice, defense rolls, reaction mods, Perception and Will checks and the like, for each character.

Bah. Bantha fodder. Know your players and what types of adventures they enjoy most. Worrying about specific things characters can do leads to the preparation of "fuck the PC" scenarios and begins pointless arms races.
Besides that, if your players each have several characters and you don't know the exact composition of the party until they decide who is going, this is next to impossible anyway.

Quote from: Ravenswing;6812106) Don't get bogged down. If I can't calculate the modifiers in the haggling session between Lady Sula and the goldsmith (the smith doesn't give a damn for the aristocracy, Sula's a babe, they're finding each other's accents a bit tough to follow) in an instant, then I should fudge it without hesitation, and if I can't do that, I'm in the wrong business; there's nothing more boring than watching the GM flipping through a stack of rulebooks. That aside, scenes should only take so long. NPC soliloquys should only take so long. Players should only get so long to meander or do their solo stuff. Adventurers and plot arcs should only take so long. Even an epic tale has its sell-by date. Brevity is the soul of wit. Keep the pace moving at all costs. (In combat, too. Combat rounds in the game I play are two seconds long. If the player - who's been cooling his heels for a couple of minutes anyway - can't decide what to do within ten seconds after I call on him, I skip him. You should too.)

Bogging down in mundane shit sucks. Epic tales created in actual play take as long as they take though.
 

Quote from: Ravenswing;6812107) Be a good actor and storyteller. You play everyone else in the world. You set all the scenes. You handle much of the dialogue. If you can't act and refuse to learn, you should be refereeing miniatures wargaming instead. Practice this. Use body language, posture, different voices and accents. If you don't know how, learn.

I'm not there to act and far as storytelling goes, see your own advice regarding getting bogged down in useless shit. I do enjoy doing voices to make some npcs more memorable but a requirement? -it isn't.

Quote from: Ravenswing;681210 This is a cooperative exercise. Something you need to hammer into the players, if need be; however illogical, this is a consensus-driven game which needs to be handled consensually. A player who designs a character wildly at odds with the others, a player who wants to freelance all the time, a player who doesn't want to get on board with the milieu or the setting, these are people who need to be told No. There are RPGs out there for rugged individualists who don't want to act in lockstep with others; they call them MMORPGs and LARPs. There's also a role for GMs who can't bring themselves to say "No:" it's called "player."

A wordy version of Wheaton's Law.

Quote from: Ravenswing;6812109) Use no complexity in the game system you can't readily handle, and avoid anything you don't really need. There are few things, short of drunk and disorderly players vomiting on the battlemat, more disruptive to the flow of a game than a lengthy rules debate. A lot of RPGs out there have "light" versions or a spate of optional rules that honest to God are "optional." Don't let this happy truth slip past you.

Yes. Just because a designer created something for a game doesn't mean you have to use it.
 

Quote from: Ravenswing;68121010) Know Your Shit, or Don't Run Campaigns That Require You Do: I'm an elitist. I think it's incumbent on GMs to learn as much as they can about their milieus, and play them as accurately and realistically as practical. I really don't want to see howling anachronisms, except in genres where it doesn't matter (30s pulp, for instance), or where the GM has an explanation in hand.

Consistency is far more important than realism. I'm not going to bother with "knowing my shit" as it applies to the land of make believe. The very idea of HARD DATA about making up some shit you think will be fun is laughable.

Quote from: Ravenswing;68121011) Believe in the Rule of Cool. If a player does something outrageously cool in combat, let her pull it off. If a player comes up with a really cool idea, reward him. This will almost never go wrong.[/COLOR]

This is HIGHLY game/genre dependent. In a TOON game thats precisely how I would roll. In a gritty fantasy Vietnam dungeoncrawl that might actually piss off the players. Remember #5?

A good GM enjoys GM'ing - bottom line.  They enjoy the prep work for a story or enjoy spontaneous creativity as they make it all up as the players go.

I have played in handful of campaigns where I had to ask myself, "Why is this person GM'ing anything?" - And I have found that this is a good question for all gm's to ask themselves.  Why am I GM'ing this game...  If you have no answer, well... then you have your answer.

As others have said, and as I started off by saying - Knowing what your players want is paramount.  I have played with the same three guys for almost 15 years now, and the characters we tell stories about to other gamers were long-term characters that were played over years and years. Knowing this, as the main GM among us now, I only run long term campaigns.  They want to see their characters grow and develop, as the GM it is on me to give them that.

Prep-work is necessary to an extent.  There is such a thing as preparing too much though.  The balance is found through experience mostly, and not necessarily the same for every group.  Knowing what kind of campaign you are going to run and being upfront about it with the players from the start aids in this greatly.  And if the players derail the story campaign or aren't really into your free for all campaign, then do what you have to as the GM.  

I've killed story campaigns an adventure or two in because the group wasn't feeling it.  I've turned story campaigns into free for all's based on the vibe I was getting from the group, and after a bit of free-for-alling it, they got back on to the story by their own choice.

I suck at accents and the like, but my group appreciates my attempts and the humor of it.  It has become a bit of an inside joke among us.  And in our current campaign, the players were tracking down bits of a manuscript written by an alien species which perceives and exists in all temporal states at once.  So when I sat down to actually write the manuscript it occurred to me that sticking to correct grammer would actually be out of character for the npc.  I had to change up my entire writing style so as to reflect that he perceives time differently than the main characters.

When the group began reading the manuscript (without the knowledge of the writer and how he perceives time), they were at first confused by how it read.  And they began discussing it and formulated many theories about the writer.  A process which was a bit of a tangent for a spy/martial arts campaign, but one the players thoroughly enjoyed.

I'd say I'm a decent GM. I have my moments of awesomeocity, and my moments of epic fail.  But I know my group, and know that intermingled with intense sci-fi-spy-martial artsy-magical-psionic awesomeness, the occasional intellectual challenge of sorts will really engage them.

In a recent player experience of mine, the campaign and group was so boring I'd pre-roll everything in the first few minutes of showing up to the game and sit there fiddling the rest of the time.  All because the GM spent most of his time looking through books, discussing inane details of unimportant minutia.  The group couldn't decide on anything, and so no one ever actually took an action.  If someone did decide to act folks would retroactively argue about and against the action, all while the GM seemed to feel this was "good".  Oddly enough that group still plays, but without me.  I'm not sure if that makes him a good GM in their eyes or not, but they enjoyed it which is all that matters in the end.

Quote from: Ravenswing;681210I run the game that I run, not the game someone else wants me to run. I'm ten times better off seeking players who enjoy my style than to compromise my style to please specific players. Beyond that, I should know what I can handle: how many players I can comfortably run, how frequently I have time to play, how long sessions should go, how much digression and socializing I want. Not knowing your own limitations ends in trouble. By the way? Articulate this to your players.

That's very good advice.

Quote from: RandallS;681215Some groups of players WANT a railroad. They like the feeling of being major characters in a novel.

Some people do want a railroad, but you can be "major characters in a novel" without a railroad.

If you plan for your players to choose between A and B, they will inevitably pick Q.

JG

Quote from: James Gillen;681527If you plan for your players to choose between A and B, they will inevitably pick Q.

JG

Yeah, this is why I've given up planning ahead. I generally go to a session with some minimal ideas on what could happen but the players inevitably surprise me and the adventure goes off in a completely different direction.