It’s easy to hate the GM. It’s a cheap and easy way to look clever – has been for the history of the hobby. One of the first things any would-be game design revolutionary does is alter or eliminate the job. These are shallow, reflexive reactions, but they’re also understandable. A really bad GM breaks a game for everyone, so why not take the guy down a peg or two?
We write rules that limit his (or her, but I’m going to say “his” from now on because the stereotype is patriarchal). We limit the idea of roleplaying to one model, and develop rules for each process within it to get him off the table completely. We want to chain or kill this incompetent, wrathful god.
Every solution creates new problems. GM-constrained or GM-less games make the game the ultimate authority, and it’s even less suited to particular group because no text can replace empathy and a shared history. Anti-GM games tend to have a narrow scope and rigid structure – without those, they can’t really take over the dead god’s reins. This doesn’t mean they’re bad fixes for the GM problem, but they highlight the fact that a good GM is an asset, not just a necessary evil.
Tabletop RPGs have failed to teach people how to be good GMs. I’ve personally failed because I’ve written numerous GMing sections and they’ve rarely had any impact. As time went on I learned to impart better advice, strike a balance between the practical and idealistic, but in professional work you always have to stick to the context of one game or supplement.
This blog is different. I don’t have to talk about any game in particular, so I’ve got the freedom to really get the essence of great GMing. Let’s talk about it in a series of posts, starting now. I’ll avoid repeating a lot of common advice and take a different direction than Robin Laws, the king of procedural GMing advice. Good GMing is one of the things that set tabletop RPGs apart from other forms of roleplaying. It may even help the hobby to survive as electronic games get better and better at replicating (or improve on) the rest of the tabletop experience.
This is called “GM as God” because it’ll talk about the traditional GM: the guy with unlimited power, the potential game breaker. Let’s get started.
Oh boy.
I am looking forward to this. I love the freedom to “say it like it is” that blogging has brought us; so bring it!
How did you get my EN World user pic?
If it’s part of an open avatar standard WordPress can pull it from whatever service manages it.
Sounds like a very promising series. I’m looking forward to reading this.
I find communication helps.
A month or two ago one of the best GMs I’ve ever played with finished an anime game. The game was organized into three ‘seasons’. 0, 1 and 2. Season 0 was a prelude to the real action.
One of the things the GM wanted was to completely trash our characters at the end of Season 0. He wouldn’t kill us. Just throw our characters against their individual fates in order to prep us for what was to come.
Before doing this he warned us “In Episode 13 I’m pwning all of you. I want to do this so as to follow a typical anime story arc.” When it happened we got our butts handed to us, the school we had been attending was burned, mentors betrayed their students, destined lovers were separated, old friends were killed and our characters were completely out classed.
It was awesome.
Because we knew what the GM wanted we had no problems letting it happen. The events of Episode 13 made our game mean so much more.
“Tabletop RPGs have failed to teach people how to be good GMs. I’ve personally failed because I’ve written numerous GMing sections and they’ve rarely had any impact.”
You are one hundred percent right and this is the biggest 30-year failure of this hobby and community. The industry can’t be expected to do better when even the hobby resists any kind of improvement in GMing. It’s been a total. Failure. There has been no organized attempt to improve GMing, train GMs, mentor them, develop and practice techniques and best practices. No attempt to help them learn what their group needs and wants, no attempt to help them learn how to assess stated and actual preferences, no attempt to help them fulfill preferences or challenge them, nothing, nothing, NOTHING.
I’m doing a bit in my local community to try to offset this by organizing a gamemaster’s conference. The outpouring of support has been surprising and gratifying. I think everyone sees a need. We’ve gotten 9 speakers and around 25 attendees preregistered. In a city the size of Tucson (and as laid back about planning ahead as Tucson is), that’s huge. John Wick’s coming down from Phoenix, which we also are grateful for.
It’s going to be fucking awesome.
Southern Arizona Gamemaster’s Conference
Disagree.
Played in GM-less, dice-less games and it was a blast.
I think it is a severe mistake to think that content authority has to come from the GM alone, that he alone has the “insight” to divide good contributions to the game from bad.
What part of “about the traditional GM” escaped your notice? I don’t care that there are other games and you had fun playing them. That’s super, but it’s not what this series is about.
Also – and this is an important point – I’m not one of those twits who thinks it’s all about “having a blast.” There are lots of ways to have fun. This series and this site doesn’t have anything to do with most of them.
Unless you can demonstrate there was something distinctive and aesthetically progressiove about what you did the fact that you had fun means fuck all to me.