D6 Basic Ways to Improve Your GMing

Gamemasters are the beating heart of an RPG home game. Their hard work creates the adventures player characters play through and the world their characters experience. If you’re a GM you are constantly honing your skills. Here are d6 basic ways to help you improve as a GM or start for the first time.

Picture courtesy of Pixabay​

As you consider these ideas, think of tabletop RPG home games as a three legged tripod. You have creativity and story telling, rule design and adjudication, and the social interaction with your players that all combine to make up actual RPG game play. If you deeply understand and apply these first three concepts, you will have the basics to understand GMing. The last three concepts are needed to be a competent GM and build on the first three ideas.

1. Read Books: A foundation for running RPGs, reading fiction lays the groundwork for world building, NPC creation, and adventure ideas. Read everything not just fantasy, science fiction, or horror. Non-fiction too. A book on architecture may hone your map making skills. A murder mystery may inspire your next adventure when the king is assassinated. You want to steep yourself in the underpinnings of the hobby: Tolkien, Lovecraft, Burroughs, Vance, Heinlein, Howard, Asimov and more. Don’t neglect the newest works either though: Tad Williams, Terry Brooks, Neil Gaiman, Chine Melville, Jim Butcher etc. I also enjoy J. A. Jance’s modern crime thriller series starring Sheriff Joanna Brady. If you are at a loss, choose a Hugo or Nebula award winner or a Pulitzer Prize winning book to read.
2. Read RPGs: If fiction builds your appreciation of world and NPC building, then reading RPGs will hone your knowledge of rule design, game play, and GMing. Read more RPGs than you play and you will be exposed to a variety of new ideas, new ways to run games, and even new ways to think about running game. I may never run certain RPGs but my understanding of my favorite RPGs are greatly broadened by reading the rules for other systems.
3. Play as a Player: If you want to understand your players, what hosting a game looks like, and the nuances that go into GMing then play a few games as a player. The easiest way to understand a player’s mindset and goals is to be one yourself. Just remember to leave your GMing hat behind and put all your effort into helping the GM and other players create an engaging game session. Remember how you felt as a player and keep those feelings, thoughts, and goals in mind the next time your GM.
4. Know your RPG: You read a lot. You play every once in a while as a player. To take your game to the next level, also delve deeply into the actual RPG you are running right now. Take time to reread rules, especially those sections that trip you up. Delve into the lore of the RPG and seek to deeply understand the tone and themes of the game. Immerse yourself in your RPG of choice.
5. Know Your PCs and Your Campaign: Take the time to understand the characters your players are running, not just the game stats but who they are, where they have been, and where they are going. Try to memorize the names of each player’s character and use those character names in game. Review your previous adventures in the campaign. Update NPCs who survived previous encounters, update visited locations, move the timeline forward, and figure out what scheming villains have accomplished since last session. Remember what your players enjoyed in previous adventures and build on those experiences while at the same time introducing one or two new concepts and experiences.
6. Know Your Adventure: Whether you write your own or use a published adventure, you need to organize your adventure. You need to carefully read a published adventure and turn the information into your own adventure notes. Try to configure encounters to one page including map and rule information like stats and defined terms. Write quick reminders on how certain rules work. If you can’t remember what the blinded condition in D&D 5E does and you need it for fighting a medusa, write needed details in your adventure notes. Keep a random list of NPC names and leave space for information you don’t want to forget after you actually run an adventure or as a place to count down hit points. Monster and NPC stat blocks usually leave out critical information like what class features and feat do, spell descriptions, special weapon and gear abilities, and more. Decide what you need to know to run the creature and record the information in your adventure notes.

If you use these basic tools you will continue to hone and improve your GMing craft. If you’re thinking about GMing for the first time these techniques will help get you a good start and will support you as you continue to GM for your players. If you’re already an expert GM, consider these basic techniques as kudos: you’re doing great, keep doing what you’re doing, and continue to hone your GM craft.

 

[Charles Dunwoody]

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[Doug McCrae]

To fully investigate the sources for D&D one can't restrict oneself to books. Chainmail and other wargames, horror movies (especially Hammer), and Doctor Strange comics are all significant. Like D&D spells, Doctor Strange's magic is reliable, flashy, useful in combat, requires incantations and gestures, and is used by the protagonist. I don't think this combination is found anywhere in Appendix N. Harold Shea's magic isn't reliable. Magicians in Vance's Dying Earth use incantations but not gestures. Gandalf rarely needs to speak his spells, and he's not a point-of-view character.

The following excerpts are from Jon Peterson's Playing at the World (pgs 65 and 109):

Arneson chose to design his new game around the fantasy elements of the just-released Chainmail. He found inspiration in the writings of Robert E. Howard, whose Conan stories set the original parameters of the sword-and-sorcery genre, and in classic B-movies like those of Hammer Studios, Roger Corman, monster-perpetrated disaster extravaganzas and anything featuring the inimitable claymation of Ray Harryhausen.​

With his spells learned from books, his magic cloak and amulet and constant assumption of ethereal form, it may raise eyebrows that Doctor Strange receives no explicit mention from the authors of Dungeons & Dragons—however, the illustration on the very cover of the game’s box (as well as the first booklet inside), cribbed from a panel of Strange Tales #167, should count as testimony to the relevance of the comic. The very presence of a type called the "Super-hero" in Chainmail indicates the pervasive influence of comic book concepts.​

 

[Azuresun]

I've actually found video games to be the most useful media for teaching me about DMing specifically, rather than general storytelling techniques. There's a lot to learn from them about pacing, using the environment to create a certain mood, telling a certain story while giving the players agency, and steadily introducing new elements of gameplay through different encounters.

 

[R_Chance]

I must be old... like @Charles Dunwoody I found books the best, but not only source of inspiration. I didn't see him say other sources were "bad / wrong", just that books were essential, or perhaps to put it simply that books are the best source for your vision and imagination.

Comics, Manga, Anime, Movies, TV, and video games can be inspiring, but compared to books they are (imho and ymmv) a bit shallow. I think the LotR movies are a good example versus the books. Mind you I love the movies, but entire characters (Tom Bombadil for example) and some interesting bits are missing (for example interactions between different Orcs in the books, etc.) completely.

The movies visualize things, but at the same time they limit things and generally lack the level of detail in books. I know comic and manga fans will disagree as well (and I've spent a lot of time with those mediums) but again they are primarily visual media who define and limit what happens to what they show you. Cool, and you may love the take on what you're seeing, but they kind of stifle, or perhaps channel would be a better term, your own imagination. Fine, but your own vision might be as good or better. The same goes for TV and video games. And, the gods know, I have played tons of video games (mostly shooters and RPGs -- of course ).

Someone will probably point out that a lot of RPG paraphernalia, like miniature figures also define and limit things, but not as much as primarily visual media when you shop around for a look you like and paint your own. And modify them

This is all my 2 cp of course. Anyway, it's all useful, and fun, but I think books are, if not essential, certainly the best source of inspiration for developing your own vision and imagination.

 

[pemerton]

I have read a lot of RPG material - rulebooks, settings, adventures etc. The amount that I've seen that is apt to produce a plot experience or an emotional experience with the depth of Blade Runner is certainly a minority of what I've read. The amount that is apt to produce an experience with the depth of a film like Hero or Ashes of Time is an extreme minority.

There are a range of reasons for this. Some is related to the medium, a bit like @Campbell posted upthread.

At least some of it is related to techniques: a very common approach to RPGing puts the GM in charge of the plot, but allows the players to establish the emotional responses of the protagonists. This will make it very hard to produce fiction with dramatic depth.

 

[Dioltach]

I think that the media landscape has changed enormously in the decades that RPGs have been around. Back in the seventies, eighties and nineties, there was a limited amount of visual inspiration that you could draw from the movies and TV shows available - and I can't speak for everyone, but growing up in a small provincial town in the Netherlands in the 1980s I had very few chances to actually see most of the sources that were available (remember when we thought Willow was one of the best fantasy movies ever?). So at the time pretty much all my inspiration came from books: fantasy, sci-fi, historical, contemporary. I read voraciously because every word I read fired a dozen images in my mind.

It's different for me now. I'm a translator: I spend up to 16 hours a day reading and writing, pondering every sentence, every word, every comma. At the end of the day, I just don't have the energy to read. At the same time, though, television has evolved. There are some visually stunning shows being made, and I can watch them where and when I want. I'm finding that my inspiration is being driven more and more by a few images from a movie or a TV show: a landscape, a building, a facial expression, the movement of an object, a tense scene. That will give me the kernel of an idea for a plot or an adventure location, or a monster or antagonist.

I still read, and I love some of the fantasy works being put out now by authors like Scott Lynch, Joe Abercrombie, Mark Lawrence, Ben Aaronovitch and several others. But it's rare that my games are influenced by them.

 

[pemerton]

I'm a translator: I spend up to 16 hours a day reading and writing, pondering every sentence, every word, every comma. At the end of the day, I just don't have the energy to read.

I can relate to this, in that I also have a job that involves a lot of reading and writing and editing, though not with quite that same attention to compositional detail.

When I do read for recreation it's more often non-fiction than fiction.

my inspiration is being driven more and more by a few images from a movie or a TV show: a landscape, a building, a facial expression, the movement of an object, a tense scene. That will give me the kernel of an idea for a plot or an adventure location, or a monster or antagonist.

I can relate to this too. To plot, location, monster or antagonist I would add theme, motif or feeling.