Give Feedback to your GM… and live! Part 2.

In part 1, I discussed about players giving feedback (both good and bad) to DMs in such a way to make it more useful and to limit the damage of criticism.

Today I want to talk directly to the GMs who, while craving feedback, aren’t always that ready to get it.

Having to prep, run and referee the game is a huge responsibility and necessitates a lot from a person.  Often, the amount of work poured into a game makes the GM emotionally involved with the game to a point where honest feedback on the game, both good and bad, is taken as feedback on the person.

Dear GM, if you are truly interested in getting relevant feedback from your players, you need to accept, at the deepest level a few very important facts:

1) You are not your game!

Good or bad feedback is not automatically related to your running of the game or a statement on you as a person.  You need to detach yourself from your game in order to be better prepared to receive feedback.

Of course, if all players had a great time, I won’t prevent you from feeling like you are on top of the world.  A great game session is one of the things that make GMing so incredibly rewarding.

Just remember that you are not the only reason why the game went so well.  The GM is a facilitator of fun, not the sole provider of it.

For the same reasons, if a session went less than admirably, you are not entirely at fault.  While you may get feedback about decisions you made or how an encounter you wrote turned out, view this not as an affront on you as a GM but as something to explore when trying to become a better GM.

You are just a part of your game, not all of it.

2) You are not as good as you think

Like so many drivers, some people tend to overestimate their skills in a discipline.  After having GMed for a couple of years, they think they’ve reached a peak and are at the top of their figurative game.

About 5 years ago, I saw myself as such.  Having been a Gamemaster for about 20 years, I deluded myself in thinking I knew everything there was to know behind the screen.  While several of our games were fun and exciting, I still had about one game in 3-4 go wrong enough as to leave me feeling like the evening was somewhat wasted.

I started to realize that maybe there were a few things I could improve.  I was not the only one responsible, but I had my part to play in these less than stellar games.

Now I’m a much better GM than I was then, thanks to this blog and my game reports, still I manage to learn new things I could do better at every game!

As a confident GM you still need to accept that you can get better before asking for honest feedback, otherwise, you’re just looking for validation.

So take it down a notch and listen to what your players are really saying.

3) You are not as bad as you think

The opposite of the last one.  Some GMs are just so damn ready to beat themselves up whenever something goes awry.

There is no way you can write the perfect game, plan for all contingencies, or hit all players motivations all the time.  You are not a robot, you have issues and level of tiredness too.  You also have limited influence on what your players will do.

With time, it will become easier. Getting better is a slow process.  You need to trust that you will.  You also must stop yourself from trying to meet unrealistic expectations or worse, spiral into self-doubt at the drop of a bad encounter.

In that sense, you have to grab positive feedback at face value. It’s not something your players will give you just to make you happy.  Take the time to note what it is you do well and reflect on that.  Similarly, any criticism is not a confirmation of your suckiness, the player giving it, if not a total jerk, probably wants the game to be better too!

If you make player enjoyment your main mission around the table, you are bound to get better faster.

So stop whipping yourself, if you were such a bad GM, no one would show up for your game or ask you to do it in the first place.

The Unspoken word

I’ve said it in past posts, but you can get a ton of non-verbal feedback from your players. Once or twice during a game session, pause the game for a few moments, empty your mind of whatever GMing detail you were focusing on and look at each player’s body language.

Are they leaning forward, talking excitedly? If so, note what kind of scene you are playing.  If a player sits back, doodling, note that too.  Keep this in mind for future discussions with them.

You’ll need to work for that feedback

How many times have you packed your dice and rulebook after a game, asking innocently enough ‘So, how was it?” only to get grunts and shrugs with a few ‘was okay’?

Unless the player you ask is a chatty extrovert, chances are that putting people on the spot with no preparation will result in limited, non-committal feedback.

In part one, I’ve been preaching that players need to recover from whatever emotion they carried in the game and must identify some concrete element of the game to give useful feedback on.  It stands to reason that as a GM that read both articles, you have to give your players time to prepare.

So after a session, or before a campaign, you may tell your players that after the game, you’ll go around, through email, text messaging or face to face discussions asking for feedback on what they specifically liked about the game and what they didn’t.

You should not necessarily do it with each player for each session, but going around the whole group over a period of a few games is a good plan.

Roll that listen Check!

When you discuss the game with players, do what management courses call active listening.

Stick to asking questions almost exclusively. Use answers received to formulate new questions. Don’t argue or explain your decisions (unless asked to), focus on the player.  People liked to be listened to and eventually come out of their shell when they feel you are genuinely interested in what they are saying.

Ask open questions, those that can’t be answered by a simple yes/no:

“How did you feel when that dragon cut short on your diplomacy attempt and attacked?”

“Why do you think Jack decide to kick down the door that brought all these demons in the fight?”

If they can’t find anything to say, try to recall how what kind of body language they had and bring it up as a question:

“During the fight vs the dragon, you didn’t seem to be all that excited, what was going through your mind then?”

Active listening is one of the best, most useful social skills that a GM can learn.  Look it up and practice it… it’s well worth it!

Open Questions, they talk, you keep a lid on your defensiveness, you move the conversation with more question and you will get the feedback you want!

Post Scriptum: The limits of feedback

Some players and GMs have limited communication skills or don’t actually care about others all that much.  This can make any form of feedback nearly nonexistent at best or downright rude and hurtful at worse.

While I leave conflict management for a future post (or see Tony’s excellent take on the subject here), you must try to differentiate lack of social grace with uncompromising selfishness.  If a player refuses to give feedback or says something that comes out wrong, don’t automatically assume the worst.  Settle on non-verbal feedback gathering until better trust is established and the group works out how to interact better.

However if over a prolonged period of time, a player’s feedback is solely focused on getting more at the expense of you or the others, you likely are dealing with a problem player.

Oh and it bears mentioning that an uncompromising, selfish GM is among the most toxic things you can find around a gaming table, flee those like the plague!

Thanks for reading, feel free to add more things I didn’t cover.  This is a large subject and I already wrote 3000 words on it!

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