Way back when, I started a series of posts where I would review and comment on Robin D. Laws excellent GMing book called Robin’s Laws of Good Mastering.
My main goal is to compare his thoughts on GM to mine and see how the 7 year old book stayed relevant today. My objective isn’t to steal Robin’s content but to revisit it.
Anyway, last time I checked, he was cool with that.
So you’ve learned the Rule Zero of GMing, you’ve got to know what your players liked, you picked a game to play, you designed your campaign, you made your adventure and you’ve taken additional notes to be ready if you needed to wing a name or a place should a player ask for it.
Now comes the time to actually run your game. For many new GMs, the level of stress shoots up and they end up feeling they’re doing a terrible job!
Robin laws presents 3 aspects that affect how a RPG session will go: Confidence, Mood and Focus. Let’s explore that then.
Confidence.
In the book, Laws mentions the number 1 rule of running a game: You’re doing a better job than you think.
True words those are. I think it’s an inherent flaw of many good Game Masters of being overly critical of their skills or how they GMed their last game. Yes, there are experienced, confident GMs out there, but I’m willing to bet that the majority have adequacy issues.
(And let’s not discuss atrocious GMs that THINK they’re good…)
While you do have the responsibility to try to ensure that everyone has fun at the gaming table, a healthy gaming group will readily compromise so that everyone, GM included, as fun most of the time.
Anyway, Laws says that no matter how much you read on the subject, nothing will make you a better GM like tabletop experience and the willingness to get better.
He does mention that many gamers are hard to read and may not let you know that they’re having fun, making it hard for you to validate if you’re doing a good job. That’s also very true and it’s one of the reasons I wrote 2 posts about giving and getting feedback in your games.
(Which incidentally, are included in the soon to be released Open Game Table RPG Blog Anthology… Just though I’d plug it here.)
Reading the Room
Laws’ second topic is about developing the soft skill of reading the mood of your players. This means being able to gauge, at every moment in your game session, the level of energy/interest that players have in regards to the game.
Like the author, I’m often surprised at how self evident this seems to me. That’s until I remember just how many GMs don’t know how to read people or haven’t realize how relevant it is
(I’m beginning to suspect that a significant portion of RPG gamers have autistic traits, explaining many of the social mishaps we’re known for. That’s a whole discussion better left for a future post).
Even if you’re a DM with a stratospheric emotional IQ, it’s possible to often get lost in the details of the story, some intricacies of rules or get to hypnotized by the sound of your own voice (I’m guilty of at least two of those). If this happens, you might lose all connection you have with the group’s mood and miss opportunities to bring it back in the ‘fun zone’ and save your game night.
Fortunately, reading people is a skill that can be learned (just ask successful Poker players). The trick is to stop whatever you’re doing, no matter how engrossing it is, on a periodic basis (say 15-20 minutes) and observe your players.
If they’re animated, laughing, sitting forward and such, everything’s fine, go back to whatever it is that you were doing. However, if they’re slumped, grumbling/arguing, doodling, flipping through books, playing with an iPod or a portable video game, something might not be right.
(And for heaven’s sake, if you notice this, don’t kill your game by stopping it and ask everyone what’s wrong. Everyone’s defenses will go to Def Con 2 and you’ll get no useful feedback. Remember it’s not about YOU, it’s about the GAME).
When you see that the mood is slipping or has gone sour, you need to make something happen in game to bring your players back.
At this point, Laws’ suggests that you review your players’ preferences (Storytelling, Power Gaming, Butt kicking, etc) and drop a healthy dose of what they like urgently… to hell if it isn’t planned or makes no sense. Your priority is to turn the mood around and bring back the players to the game, you can work out how to fit your intervention in the story later on.
Now’s the time to have the proverbial Ninjas crash through the metaphoric windows of your game and attack! Stage a random encounter, drop an unplanned objective on the party, force a hard choice or bring in a NPC for some roleplay sparring… whatever rocks your group the most, you have to do something.
Hell, if you need to intervene with the players, you can always ask “What should happen next guys?” Chances are, you’ll get an honest,spontaneous answer if players are ready for a change of pace.
However, it’s possible that the mood goes bad because of reasons that are totally outside the game. Maybe the players are burnt out from work, maybe a real-world conflict between players surfaces at the table, etc. In such cases, you might want to wrap things up earlier and do something else or call it a night.
Focus
The third topic Laws covers in this chapter is the dynamic of Focus, or if you prefer, who’s talking!
Regardless of your group’s dynamic or the level of authority it grants you as GM, part of your job is to control the game’s focus. This control is a great tool to help prevent boredom or deteriorating mood.
In fact, Laws drops another of his pearls of wisdom:
When the mood of the room goes sour, it’s almost always because the focus is on something the majority of the group finds inconsequential, uninteresting, or actively annoying.
Laws provides a list of game elements on which focus can rest and puts Descending order of importance. This bears reproducing because we can see how relevant they still are.
- Dialogue between PCs
- Dialogue between NPCs and PCs
- Resolution of Events/die rolling
- GM’s description
- Dialogue between NPCs
- Book keeping/Character Progression
- Rules argument
- Debates over GM decisions
- Out of Character/Off Topic digressions (Ex: Talking ad vitam aeternam about all the blue penises you say in the last 2 weeks)
- Dead Air (ex: Stopping the game to prep something)
He mentions that the GM should arrange to maintain focus on the top four categories. I tend to agree. While sometimes you can’t help to flip pages or level up the PCs during the evening, herding the group’s focus on the top four of the list are more likely to keep my group happy than all others.
Hell, one of the greatest moments you can have as a GM is when the players are talking, in character, to each other for more than a few seconds. I recall a few times where I just sat back, arms crossed behind my head, enjoying the show.
How can you change the focus of the game… it’s quite simple. You need to (gently) interrupt whatever’s going on and change direction by asking questions. So if Bob’s been describing for the last 5 minutes how cool his new sword is, you can move in when he draws his next breath and say “While Bob is signing the praises of his new Widowmaker, what do Mark the Rogue and Jim Darkmagic do?”
Don’t forget that some people don’t get non-verbal cues to stop talking, it’s your job to move in and stop it when someone has had focus for too long.
At this point, Laws goes into detail of each type of focus and gives tips and example about how to deal when too much time has been spent on a specific category. If you want to know more, I heartily invite you to buy the PDF and have a look, it’s well worth it.
Up next: Improvising!
Wow. When I started reading your post today Phil I was not prepared for this! It was interresting and I read it all, this post the post on Bad, Killer, Evil DM. The 4 part story of the girl encountering the worst DM ever. Very interresting.
I think what I find the hardest to do is reading the room. Especially with the current game I’m running. My current players are not the kind who speak up if something botters them. They have the FLAW of all being poker players and seems to put on their poker face anytime we play anything!
I did commit the crime once or twice of stopping the game to ask them if they were having fun. I ended up not knowing what they think and making them feel they were doing something wrong themselves. 2 or 3 games latter (I forgot to mention this happened when we started the game last year), I understood. What seemed like serious, silent and bored players were in fact VERY concentrated players worried of not playing their character correctly. I helped them feel more confident themselves after that. Sometime you just need to give it a chance. Time help adjusting.
And I could not end this comment without grading myself so here it is!
DM report.
Bad DMing: 1% (I wish I could say 0% but I think there’s always a moment in a DM’s life where he just get absorbed by his story and forget the fun of his players.)
Killer DMing: 50% (I’m sure you’re surprised I did not grade myself a 100%! It’s because to me the important part is to make sure my players see me has a killer DM. The fear… If there’s no fear, it’s like playing poker with fake money. If there’s no money involved you gonna do stupid moves that can ruin the game.)
Evil DMing: 100% (I’m guilty. My most memorable game on the evil side is one where a PC watched in horror a fellow PC getting pregnant, giving birth and dying by aging. The whole thing at super speed. We were playing a game of Stormbringer. For those who doesnt know the world of Michael Moorcock, it’s a very bleak and dark world. The only thing she could do to save her friends character was to kill the baby crying on the floor. There was yelling, several smashing fists on the table, tears, it was awesome. The mother of my friend got worried and got in the room just in time to see her crying girl raise on her feets to yell “I STAB THE BABY! I STAB THE BABY!” LOL It was awesome! They loved it by the way. I wish I could go back in time to take a picture of her mother face.)
@D_Luck: Sorry for having dropped a metric ton of reading on you man! I’m glad you enjoyed it. I’m glad you figured out how out how to read your players.
I’m not suprised that you rate yourself as a 50% Killer 100% Evil DM. I’ve read your stance on DMing and you are definitively of the tough love school of DMing. I’m pretty sure that your players try real hard to stay a few steps ahead of you.
As for your Stormbringer game… gah, if my mother had heard us say that she’d kicked us all out of my basement at lightspeed! But yeah, I’m sure it was a once in a lifetime intense moment.
Thanks for reading man!
Sweet stuff, as always, man 🙂
This eBook’s going on my “to-read” list for sure…
Eric Maziades last blog post..Kobold Keep Remix Finale – Showdown
Sounds like a book I can use. Does it say anything about 10-year olds meta-gaming to be the group leader?
Vulcan Stevs last blog post..A Hearty Thank You and Welcome to the Network’s Readers
@Eric: The book is a must have for all GMs for sure, along with the 4e DMG and the 3.5 DMG II.
Those 3 books should form the core of any GM libraries.
@Vulcan Stev: Sadly no, he talks about metagaming knowledge but I think it’s mostly about the gaming group deciding how much is tolerated and such.
Plus, if you want my opinion, the concept of group leader is usually just an occasion to create player friction. Consensus politics is the way to go… especially oif siblings are playing.
I enjoyed this article quite a bit, thank you for sharing.
I also forwarded a link to my friend who is about to run his first game.
Thanks again.
Sniff sniff… I miss playing
@Baboune: if you ever come back in the region for some vacation or else. We’ll probably be able to schedule something for old time sakes. 😉
Hell yeah, we’d happily play with you again my man!
@Chatty – Unfortunately when you’re running a game based on a military leader, someone has to be CO.
Vulcan Stevs last blog post..World D&D Day 2009 at The Core
When you see that the mood is slipping or has gone sour, you need to make something happen in game to bring your players back.
At this point, Laws’ suggests that you review your players’ preferences (Storytelling, Power Gaming, Butt kicking, etc) and drop a healthy dose of what they like urgently… to hell if it isn’t planned or makes no sense.
Okay, last week I saw that my players’ mood was slipping in the last room of the adventure. The McGuffin was across a pool of venomous snakes and they had tried luring them out of the water, sniping some, and throwing in pets from a bag of tricks to draw their attention away so they could sneak over to the McGuffin. Then they just sent someone in to swim across the pool (I didn’t give a good enough signal that throwing in pets was a brilliant solution I hadn’t thought of), and he was getting poisoned to death by the snakes, and it had been more than an hour and I knew everyone was pooped.
I chose to just keep pushing them because I knew even if the one PC died there was a resurrection mechanic in the adventure to make it worth it. But what could I have introduced into that tiny room under the ocean swimming with venomous snakes that would have got the attention of a Tactician, an Instigator, and a Lurker?
Lessee.
I would have given a stronger hint that throwing a pet while the PC was swimming was a great idea. If they didn’t take the bait, I would have described some sort of Cave Animal fall in the pool and described how some snakes were going toward there.
If all else failed (and I’m not saying I would have thought of it at the table, these things are not easy to do unless you have hindsight like you’re giving me), I would have a flayed humanoid appear over the pit and fall into it, attracting all the snakes away from the PCs. The flayed corpse being a potential hook for a later adventure… like maybe some villain later in the campaign had a trap that teleports a victim into the snake pit.
However, given my style, and depending how pooped people were, I’d have told them to use the Bag of Tricks again.
Hey, thanks for the personal comment effort — I know you do it to everyone but this was particularly helpful. You could almost put a link to it in the main post as an example of how you can get away with literally pulling something out of plain air — there’s plenty of time after the session to explain who teleported him in there, or that the bag of tricks is a rogue bag that builds up and gives you 1d6 cats all at once instead of 1 a day.
Or I could have had a pirate come through the portal right there. Who cares if all the pirates detailed in the module were dead already or where exactly he got there? In this case it would’ve even made sense.
I’m seeing this as a general rule — check the wandering monster table and say “could it improve things if one of these showed up”? You could even design wandering encounters to be the kind of thing that would help break up deadlocks.
The idea of using a Wandering Monster table, especially if used creatively, to help get out of a game funk is a great idea.
Having a Troll charge in and fall in the pit would surely have solved the party’s short term problem for sure!
Thanks for sharing that Noumenon.