Comments on: GM As God, Part One: Three Ways to Use Your Omniscience

By: mateo

mateo — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:25:59 +0000

I philosophically agree with you. It is key to listen to players. When the scenario is complicated they will discuss their theories. Sometimes they come up with a better one than I did and I have sometimes adopted their plot theory as the actual reality so they feel like they figured it out. This makes it more of a collaborative storytelling game even though they do not know that I did this.

By: magicbox

magicbox — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 01:15:25 +0000

I’d go with “So, last session when happened, you guys seemed sort of pissed about how that went down. What do you think went wrong?”

Of course, you can only do this if a) they’re honest and b) they were generally miffed about how things worked out. I’d definitely follow Malcolm’s advice about having a solution prepared, but be flexible with that solution because they might be ticked about something completely different that may catch you off-guard.

In fact, Malcolm missed the session of my game where I did something similar to my players except *I* was the one explaining what they could do to help me out.

By: admin

admin — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 20:44:26 +0000

You know, I think I’ll write an article to follow up on that.

By: Tyler

Tyler — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 13:41:20 +0000

I’ve found the casual bull session can be a much more open conversation than trying to directly elicit feedback from players.

“So what do you think?” tends to garner nods and vague murmurs of agreement, unless a player was really, really unhappy with something.

Do you have any general purpose questions a GM can ask to break the critiquing ice?