General RPG DiscussionDiscussion of all RPGs and non-system-specific topics. DM/GM/player issues, settings, etc. Rules discussion belongs in one the forums below.
Truth: when a man lies he murders some part of the world.
Wait, that's the best quality in a knight. At least according to Merlin, anyway.
For a GM, there are two of them:
1. The ability to craft a first-rate story.
2. The humility to throw away that story when the players want to make something better of their own.
The best GM I ever had put together the most amazing story for a campaign background you've ever seen. When our group wanted to riff off of it and go in a different direction, he worked with us to make the campaign truly our own. That was a once in a lifetime game to be involved with.
--Steve
__________________ Be a rebel...order your coffee in one of these three radical sizes: small, medium or large.
"Sure as I know anything, I know this. I aim to misbehave."
--Capt. Malcolm Reynolds, Serenity
I play 4E, and it's every bit as much Dungeons and Dragons as any other edition, including the one(s) you play. No more, and no less.
Good gas mileage and a big trunk. I've had my GM for about 12 years now and she's as good as the day we first got her. She's older now and a bit rusty, but she can still take me & my players on a good ride.
The first piece of advice I always give GMs is "Know your players."
Being a good storyteller is great, but it's really not helping you if your players don't care about the cool story and only want intense combats. Being a good tactician is great too. But it doesn't mean a damn when your players mostly want to interact with the NPC's.
Priority One should always be to understand the sort of things that your players like the most and then finding the sweet spot where those combined desires meet what makes the game most fun for you as a GM.
I really love those times in the game when the GM describes a scene or action so well I can clearly imagine it.
One of my favorites: our players were carelessly barreling through a crowded city when we abruptly came to the 'edge' of the sky high land mote the city was on. His description of how we suddenly broke through the crowded buildings into the blinding light and the roaring wind, nearly tipping off the edge over the roiling sea below, had my stomach do a flip.
The other day I was thinking about my GM-fu and of course, I always look for ways to improve it by reading blogs, posts here and a couple of other places, and just published stuff.
Sounds like me pretty regularly
Quote:
Originally Posted by kitsune9
My question is when you play, what’s the best quality your GM has? What is it about him or her that makes the game "kewl"?
Hmm, tough one because I don't think it is one specific aspect - I also have a few DM's (play in multiple campaigns).
For me, I feel like I need to keep the group entertained, that's my #1 job if you will - they need to have fun and that requires of me multiple skills.
I'll name one of them here that I feel is very important, but often overlooked...
...The ability to maintain flowing conversations. NPC's know what they know (whatever that might be) and when a PC asks them questions and talks with them, there should not be a lot of "oh's" and "um's" - the NPC's reaction should not be halting or slow to react as I think it takes away from the suspension of disbelief (imho). Good, flowing dialog (to me) shows that NPC's have a life beyond what the PC's see day to day and this makes the world feel more real - players get more drawn in and their imaginations have an easier time of taking over. You can see this in the faces of your players (at least I can in mine) and it's great.
Now, there is a time and place for halting, jarring dialog if that is an aspect of said NPC for example - if they are slow, unintelligent maybe.
This may seem like an obvious thing (flowing dialog), but most DM's I play with could do a lot better.
I'm not perfect, but I'm pretty good imo - it takes a good bit of improvisation and quick thinking and it's something that I really work at.
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Dark Water Campaign run in the Last Lands
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I think the most important trait is the ability to take the various actions of PCs and the ideas they bring to the table and run with them in a creative manner. Listening to the players, using their ideas, and giving them a lot of freedom is important, but it is just as important to take all of their ideas and actions and do something unique and interesting with them.
Of course, creating a campaign where the players feel free to take control of the campaign and are inspired to do creative things is an important skill for DMs, too.
Examples:
1) Altering your prepared material for a session in response to the unexpected things the players do, so you manage to retain the best parts.
2) Changing your campaign plan in response to player interests.
__________________ The female tiefling's horns are not 'handlebars'.
The first piece of advice I always give GMs is "Know your players.".
You are my Sherpa on the mountain of Gaming.
This man, he speaks much truth.
__________________ "Conversely, I'm amazed at the number of people queueing up to tell people that don't like 4e that they are wrong. Why can't people just agree to disagree, and get on with actually playing the game?" --Delericho
If there's one dragon, it's a solo monster.
If there's five dragons, they're standard monsters.
If there's a dozen dragons, either most of them are minions or your DM is tired of the campaign.
--Lizard
Good gas mileage and a big trunk. I've had my GM for about 12 years now and she's as good as the day we first got her. She's older now and a bit rusty, but she can still take me & my players on a good ride.
Awesome Oryan. Have you thought about Cash for Clunkers?
...The ability to maintain flowing conversations. NPC's know what they know (whatever that might be) and when a PC asks them questions and talks with them, there should not be a lot of "oh's" and "um's" - the NPC's reaction should not be halting or slow to react as I think it takes away from the suspension of disbelief (imho). Good, flowing dialog (to me) shows that NPC's have a life beyond what the PC's see day to day and this makes the world feel more real - players get more drawn in and their imaginations have an easier time of taking over. You can see this in the faces of your players (at least I can in mine) and it's great.
Now, there is a time and place for halting, jarring dialog if that is an aspect of said NPC for example - if they are slow, unintelligent maybe.
You touched on something here, Weem. I knew this guy who took acting lessons just so he could be a better role player and work on his spontaneous GMing and not doing "oh's" and "ums" was amazing. He did multiple voices, styles, etc.
This is a really good point, because I also sat on the end of a table of a guy who didn't do any role playing and just stated "you do this" or "you do that" and that was fairly boring.
I really don't mind a railroaded adventure ("Hey, you guys hear about this haunted keep full of monsters that come out and raid the local towns" - sign me up!), I definitely do mind an adventure that doesn't have anywhere to go. I played with this one GM who never prepared a damn thing in any of the adventures he ran - we'd spend ages on total minutiae, like descriptions of every single day of a two-week uneventful journey on foot. If it's stuff you wouldn't show in a movie, it's stuff that really shouldn't show up in your game. We'd do a whole four-hour session, and we'd ask each other, "What did we achieve in that session?". We couldn't think of a thing.
So yeah, I think before you do anything else - have an adventure planned. Have a few encounters ready, think of a task for the adventurers to do, think of some reward for successful completion of said task. That's basically all you need to be a decent GM. The rest will come in time, and is frankly gravy.
Some qualities I would endorse, or add, are guile (I don't want to be able to predict things, I'd much rather be surprised), cleverness, craft, and originality (I don't want to be able to predict things), ruthlessness and harshness (I'd much rather the adventure be really, really tough and challenging, than easy, and I'd much rather barely survive a good fight than walk all over it with ease, walk-over fights are a waste of my time - I want my own survival skills and my ingenuity and resourcefulness to be truly tested, not just those of my character), and general inventiveness and creativity (I don't want to be able to predict things, I'd rather be dead than dead-bored with a mere rehash of the same old crap and the same old enemies and the same old situations).
There are just too many hats a good GM needs to wear for me to pick just one, but in the spirit of the thread I'll say a GM that doesn't lose site of the fact that we're all playing for fun (the GM included).
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“It only surprised me up until around 1977, ... I had thought we were going to have a considerable audience of gamers and science fiction and fantasy fans. I thought easily with those we'd have 50,000 or more [buyers], but when people began to write me [with questions] about what fantasy books to read, and I saw the wide range of both younger and older people who were attracted to the game, I understood that it was reaching a deeper chord, something deep within us.” – E. Gary Gygax (July 27, 1938 – March 4, 2008)
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