In the last few weeks, I’ve been discussing with Johnn Four of Roleplayingtips.com (you should subscribe!) about setting up some sort of monthly guest feature on his very popular GMing newsletter for me to share GMing tips (Notice the use of the more generic GM).
Earlier today, my first column was posted here.
I’m reprinting it here to allow comments, questions and feedback on it. I’m rather proud of it and I hope you’ll enjoy it!
A seldom talked about challenge of GMing is when you find yourself surrounded with other, possibly more experienced GMs as players.
This might not be an issue for gaming groups with alternating GMs, however, I’ve often seen players who would love to take a stab at GMing in an established group but back out at the somewhat scary prospect of having one (or many) more experienced GM(s) with a character sheet sit across from them.
Here are a few tips to make your first stints as a GM of GMs less daunting.
1) Establish The Ground Rules Of The Game
Chances are, all players around your table will know you have limited experience. You need to openly acknowledge that and not be insecure about the others stealing your game.
Expect a transition period where any former GMs adjust to the new role of player (i.e. relinquish control and let someone else do it).
If you feel the transition doesn’t go well and the game tends to get stormy more often than not, take the time to discuss it one on one with your fellow player/GMs to try to work it out.
In such cases, don’t wear your heart on your sleeve; be ready for some critical (and hopefully constructive) feedback on your game, and don’t let that force you out of GMing.
However, don’t hesitate to establish your space as GM. The others need to acknowledge that they don’t get to both play and run the show. Concessions must be made to your personal style and allow you to grow into your new role.
One thing that I’ve seen work to ease up these transitions is to ask another GM (preferably the one who GMed the last campaign) to act as a reference for rules and maybe help out at running the administrative aspects of the game.
In such a partnership, make it clear what you expect of that person and explain what parts of your game you want to be solely responsible for. Work out in advance how to handle GMing calls when the old GM doesn’t agree with a call you make.
In fact, you should do this even if you don’t plan to ask one of the former GM to help. The reflex of making (and challenging) GMing calls can become deeply ingrained in GMs. You therefore need a clear politic on rules discussions that you are comfortable with. It’s one thing to have a rule book say you have the final call and another realizing that respect for a GM’s authority is earned, not inherited.
2) GMs Are Players Too
This tip might feel obvious, but GMs have the same preferences and motivations seen in other role players when they grab a character sheet. Some are Butt Kicker, looking for heroic mayhem. Some are Power Gamers who love to accumulate new powers. Others are Story-tellers, seeking to be swept in an epic tale which, for once, they don’t have to plan for.
Much like I would tell any GM, take the time to learn what motivates each of your players by asking them what would be the perfect game session (and then the perfect multi session adventure for them). Take a few notes per player, and try to insert at least one elements of each player’s list in each gaming sessions.
3) Disorient Your GMs
Use a different rules set for your game, or at the least, a completely different setting for your game. This will disorient your GMs a bit, giving you some slack while you settle in your new role.
If you decide to play with a rules set the GMs-turned-players are more familiar with than you are, make sure you shake things up: play in a unique game world you designed, or set it up in a place never visited by the group.
It might be worth exploring a sourcebook/adventure the others are unfamiliar with, and base your game on its material.
4) Start Simple
Your goal as a GM of GMs is not to blow away your players with a legendary campaign (such campaigns often grow from simpler, more modest beginnings). If you are new to the role of GMing, chances are your enthusiasm and breadth of vision for your game will greatly exceed your actual abilities to pull off all the things you think would make for a cool game.
Start simple; create an adventuring environment whose scope is limited and where the players (especially the former GMs) can adjust to you as the GM, and you can settle in the rules, setting, existing social dynamics, and your new responsibilities.
5) Build Up To Bigger Things With The Help Of The Other GMs
Unless they GMed by default (because no one else wanted to do it before you stepped up to the plate), your fellow players became GMs for a reason. Regardless of how well they adapt to their new roles as players, chances are they will miss some aspects of their old job.
This opens the door to possibly the coolest thing about GMing for GMs. You can harness this to help them build up your campaign up to something far greater than you could pull off alone!
Some GMs love to build worlds. While in your game, have them design aspects of your campaign for which you don’t have time but feel it would add to the fun of all to have there.
For example, in your fantasy game, an ex-GM is now a rogue who’s a member of your city’s Thieves’ Guild? Have him/her propose names for guild leaders, draw maps for the guild’s headquarters, and propose a few adventure hooks that could involve the freshly fleshed out guild.
Other GMs prefer to tinker with the rules. Discuss with them, outside of the game, how you’d like some sub-system to better address your needs for a specific scenario you are cooking up. Chances are you’ll find a receptive ear and many helpful suggestions.
In the end, you’ll have stronger buy-in into your game as it becomes a group effort while allowing you to create the stories you want and grow into the joys of GMing.
jason says
I don’t play in any games like this currently, but I could see where it can be intimidating. I’m playing in a game with 9 people including GM. 4 of those 9 have spent a considerable amount of time GMing and are either GMing other games currently, or have finished one recently. Quite a bit of knowledge and experience between the 4 of us.
These are definitely good tips. I just realized they can even apply to an experienced GM too. Suppose you picked up a new player who was an experienced GM like yourself. There’s always a bit of a power struggle between the current players and the new one.
LokyCat says
This are great tips!!!
My former Group was 5 people and we were all experienced players and GMs. The way we worked it out is for us all to run different games, wale one was running D&D someone els was running Mutants & Masterminds and after that someone els might run a game of Shadowrun, ext.
We fed from each others expiriance and aided each other with our respected campaigns but it had a lot to do with the chemistry of the group it self, we had great chemistry together and ended up gaming for 4 years every weekend religiously only taking holidays off. I can see how it might be hard for some other groups that don’t have that chemistry that I shared with my last group.
Michael Phillips says
I never considered that someone might consider running a game for other GMs intimidating. Of the 11 core members of my HS gaming group, Matt, Dan, John, Michael (me!), Kevin, Brad, and Brent ran at least occasional games, and four of us ran regular games. It was just something you got used to or you didn’t run games.
I use as many players as possible as rules references at the game table. We had a couple of folks who didn’t want the players to have any rulebook at the table except the PHB, but I always encouraged people to bring their books (and when I had them, passed around my spares. I find that, since we all respect the “GM’s decision is final until after the session” rule, it speeds up those times that I really really want to have an official ruling if a bunch of players know the rules very well. Heh, especially during Character Creation. New players will go off with experienced players and build their characters and all I have to do is answer the occasional question and vet sheets. It lets me answer everyone’s questions without having to stop and spend a lot of time working with single newbies. (Same thing with in game rules. It is nice having at least half of the party consisting of experienced players so I can have them alternate with the newbies and help keep things running smoothly.)
Michael Phillipss last blog post..Last little brother post for a bit.
GAZZA says
I’m with Michael. There seems to be a sort of subtle undercurrent there, Chatty, that experienced GMs are ruleslawyers ought to get revenge for the players wrecking THEIR campaigns. 🙂 Having played almost exclusively in a group of other GMs for at least a decade, and often before that as well, I personally would have to say that running a game for people that also run games, even if you’re inexperienced, is by far preferable to running a game for experienced PLAYERS who never GM. (As an aside, if you only ever play and never GM, or vice versa, then it’s like playing just the Protoss or just the Zerg in Starcraft: you’re missing out on the whole experience).
I’ve been in the situation where I was essentially an “imported GM” once; a friend of a friend mentioned that their usual GM had recently left (I forget the details), and would I mind running a game or two for them? The catch was that they were big fans of the Forgotten Realms. I personally don’t care for any established settings – most of the fun from being GM comes from making things up for me – but the FR to me is just the most bland generic boring setting imaginable, and reads more or less like a guy who’s built a world specifically for the purposes of showcasing his own favourite PCs.
Anyway, I should definitely have used a variation of 3 and “Disoriented My Players”. To this day I’m not going to say that they’re a bad bunch of guys – more that they were very used to doing things the way their old GM did them, and didn’t care at all for my “scribble a couple of notes, have a bunch of pregenerated monsters handy, and then fly by the seat of my pants” style. It didn’t work out at all well – everyone would have been better off if one of them had stepped up to the plate, but apparently none of them had any desire to do so.
By contrast I ran my first game of HeroQuest and Amber with a bunch of people that had ran and played in games for ages. That went off without a hitch – the rest of the guys understood exactly what the problems were when I floundered, and were much more accommodating for that reason.
So yeah – I’ll take a bunch of experienced GMs over experienced players any day. YMMV, though – it’s not exactly a 1-1 comparison. It’s been a very long time since I counted as an “inexperienced GM”, and maybe I’ve just gotten used to dealing with it.
ChattyDM says
@Jason, Micheal and Gazza: I get a sense that a significant part of my readership, which you represent, are experienced GMs/Players playing with other experienced people.
From that standpoint my tips fall short because you don’t really need them, however, for the newbie GM’s perspective, the prospect of stepping up to the plate with old timers around the table is not as easy.
(The article was written based on a request Johnn got from a reader)
I really don’t think that GMs-turned-players are out to get newbies but I know from personal experience that it can be a bit hard cutting the new one enough slack to allow him/her to grow into the new role in a comfortable manner.
GMs are hard to come by and I strongly believe we could achieve more for the Hobby as a whole by fostering more players to try their hand at GMing .
Last but not least, while I do have 25 years of GMing under my belt, I have rather little playing experience. I’m not naturally prone to want to be a player, I like GMing too much. For me a transition is needed to go from one role to the other. That’s a bias I don’t and can’t hide from.
That being said, I too have GMs around the table, and the players help me get to rules faster in books all the time. That’s highly appreciated.
@Loky: Thanks! I agree that having a good RPG group is a treasure… I consider myself honored to be part of such a great one as ours.
Ripper X says
This article is excellent, Chatty, and well worth the wait.
Personally, I feel that wanting to DM is a natural thing to want to do after playing for so long. I prefer DMing to other DM’s who know and understand what I go through to make the game work, and can respect that.
You can have a player quietly run a good NPC during combat, you can also rely on them to have richer and more fleshy characters who aren’t afraid to really get into the story and get their hands dirty.
As a player, which I do love playing a character, I just love DMing more, I make it a point to make the DM’s job as easy as I can, and I noticing that my players do the same for me. Everybody knows what they are responsible for, and everybody knows their role that night and we get a smoother running game out of it, which makes all of us happy!
RIP
Graham|ve4grm says
I GM. I love to play, but it’s difficult to get back into the right frame of mind. Specifically, I need to tone down my tendency to take control of situations, and let the GM do it themselves. Because I play largely with inexperienced players, I frequently need to take control of a situation, since I’m one of the few who knows how to handle the rules well.
I like playing with experienced people, players of GMs, who know the rules well enough to not require rules lookups. I know the rules quite well, myself, so rules lookups are rare, but it still helps.
I’ve noticed, however, that when I GM a group with a GM in the group, they frequently have the same problem I do. Usually not to the extent it affects me, but it tends to be there nonetheless.
It’s a skill to be able to play a game you GM without subconsciously trying to back-seat-GM it.
I need more ranks in “Keep-my-damn-mouth-shut”.
Michael Phillips says
-Chatty-
I admit that even when I run a game full of newbies, I try to salt the batch with at least one person who has been playing for a long time.
From that standpoint my tips fall short because you don’t really need them, however, for the newbie GMs perspective, the prospect of stepping up to the plate with old timers around the table is not as easy.
Hum, amusingly, I’ve been DMing since 1990, and in a lot of ways I still thik of myself as new to the task. (A big part of why I started looking for DM and Game Theory blogs in the first place.)
I’m not sure your tips fall short, at least in my case, as much as sometimes they speak to a very different gaming experience than my own (My high school experience was, well, idiosyncratic. The D&D players comprised the single largest steady social group in the school.) In my home group’s case, at least 50% of the members ran a game within the first two years of us gaming, and by 1994, we usually had 2 different games each weekend with a 4-6 game cycle, so not only did we gain experience as GM’s, essentially all of us who ran a game ran a game with a lot of GMs playing in it.
We were a lot nicer to the new GMs than we were to each other though. Only two of our group members were actively disruptive in other people’s games, and one of those just never wanted to not be the DM. (He was pissed that he didn’t get to run every weekend, and usually didn’t show up when it wasn’t time for his game.) If you were an experienced GM, your sessions were fair game. (We were mostly nice about that, though I do vaguely remember a 4 hour laugh fest that was supposed to be a grim and gritty dark fantasy game. Something about snorting Djin from their bottles. And Lime Jello.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..Last little brother post for a bit.
Tommi says
When there are game masters as players, remember to ask for feedback. Running a game for other game masters is a golden opportunity to get actual, useful and concrete feedback from someone who is not a random internet person. One should not ignore it.
Generally speaking, people who both play and run games are better at both. Synergy bonus and all that.
Tommis last blog post..Summer
Lanir says
I play more often than I run things, largely I think due to my main source of players being people who like to GM themselves. This does present some problems. I have #’s 3 and 4 down no problem but #1 keeps biting me. I think I’ve managed to handle #2 alright but that’s always going to be an area I think could use improvement. By default I think we all spin stories and run games the way we’d like to have them told or run for us. To do #2 right we have to not just passively allow but actively support styles that are sometimes a bit foreign to us and that’s always going to take a bit of extra thought and talent. But I think my main problem personally is more #1.
I’m in the process of starting a new game. I had an idea for one earlier, a mini campaign to just test run a new system but by request I’m redoing that work in a different setting more conducive to a longer run in case things go well. I’ll be keeping this in mind while I whip it up.
Oh and Chatty… You’re to blame for some of it. So far the setting has three main factions. A magical faerie tale realm where everyone is inherently magical and most creatures have human average intelligence and can talk. A heavily industrial fascist steampunk state full of Victorian style window dressing. And the more rural, typically pseudo-medieval independent cities and towns where halfbreeds and mixed blood is very common. The major conflict in the realm will be a war of steampunk vs. the inherently magical creatures and their realm with the battleground mostly being the neutral rural areas which had been dealing with both. An early visual might be a zeppelin and ornithopter armada closing in on a fantastical city with crystal spires while griffon mounted knights try to stop them.
ChattyDM says
Arghhh I had a response done, I was distracted and I closed the darn window!
All right Prise Deux:
@Rip (and indirectly others): My gut feeling is that the presence of experienced Players with DM experience is not so much the important thing in what makes your various groups tick so well but the trust that you’ve archived as a group.
However, I’m willing to bet that having players with DM experience helps a group achieve trust faster (and/or stronger) because of the empathy of people having seen it from both sides.
@Graham: I’m exactly the same as you on this. Keeping my mouth shut is hard (Extroverted loudmouth here!) and I’m a rather impatient man.
@Michael: Lol, 1990 was 18 years ago man! A new DM you ain’t! As I mentionned above, your group has a high level of trust in it. Oh and don’t laugh at Lime Jello, it will end up eating the Universe you know… just wait for Cern’s LHC to start!
@Tommi: Agreed 100% Nothing ever beats getting feedback. Having a strong enough ego to take that feedback without being hurt is another manner… I haven’t touched that subject directly yet but a lot of GMs are very very prone to beat themselves up… I know I still do!
@Lanir: I’m exceedingly glad to take the blame… One word of advice Lanir, keep tip #4 close by with that Campaign of yours. PCs don’t fight wars on 3 fronts usually. But this sounds Hellacool!
John Arcadian says
I like having DMs (used because they run DND) playing in my current eberron game. I’m not as experienced with 3.5 D&D, and I’m just getting back into the DND loop, so they are my goto guys for rules issues or balance concerns. It helps, especially because one of my other players keeps encouraging me to hack in 3.0 besm d20 stuff and I tend to undervalue gold prices in the conversion. Having a person to ask questions of, or get a second opinion from, is a great boost.
jason says
I don’t think it’s necessarily that GMs-as-players take over the game. Sometimes it can happen, but GMs are there to play and they know that. I think it’s mostly about intimidation. Imagine being a big fan of A-Rod. You have watched every game of his career. Then you actually get the chance to pitch to him. Wouldn’t you be intimidated too? The best way to remove that intimidation factor as a player-GM is offer your services to the new GM. Ask him if he needs any help with anything. He’ll learn not only that you’re not there to take over, but you also have a wealth of experience to impart.
ChattyDM says
@ Jason: Actually I believe that a DM-turned-player should never try or be allowed to take over a part of the game. What I’m saying though is that the new DM may ask for help and must define where it starts and when it ends.
From what I’ve seen of comments so far, most groups our commenters are part of have no problem sharing administrative duties and are rather light on backseat GMing.
But, if you have a look at WotC’s community forum , especially the ‘What’s a DM to do”
http://forums.gleemax.com/forumdisplay.php?f=24
and ‘What’s a player to do”,
http://forums.gleemax.com/forumdisplay.php?f=48
believe me there are a tons of issues for new GMs dealing with more experienced players/DMs.
Dave T. Game says
Thankfully, I’ve played with plenty of DMs, and it hasn’t been a problem. In fact, I tend to really enjoy their contributions.
(Now, on the other side, when I’m a player? Maybe they don’t have the same impression of me as I do of them. I can be pretty critical.)
We’ll find out soon as I go back to being a player after a long hiatus. Have any opinions on co-DMs?
ChattyDM says
@ Dave: I wrote the article based on how certain DMs (like Graham, you and myself apparently) tend to react when WE become players with a greener DM.
I think that the dread the greenies feel come from potentially facing criticism from the veterans…
As for Co-DMing, we should get the Stupid Ranger crew to chime in as Dante has been doing it for some time. I’d love to try it with my buddy Yan since we seem to be perfectly complimentary in our skills. But my experiences with it are rather limited.
Dave T. Game says
Ah, see, I tend to assume most articles are written FOR me, not AT me. 🙂
Dave T. Games last blog post..Dungeons & Dragons: The Pen and Paper Video Game
Yan says
Eventually we’ll do it.
Probably not this year though with 4e coming out…