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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SteveC" data-source="post: 4735259" data-attributes="member: 9053">Great thread!For me, I've learned two big things, one positive, and one negative from recent games.To start positive, a recent Con GM I played with reinforced how important it is to read your players and go where they want you to go. We were playing in a city based game, and our small group (there were only three of us and he expected a group of 10!) received a job to investigate the murder of a girlfriend of one of the local military commanders. The GM was expecting us to go off and treat it like a dungeon-bash, but we had chosen to take characters who were mostly social and investigative (it seemed to make sense given the initial scenario he gave us).What followed was one of the best role playing investigations I've ever played in: we had a list of contacts, and we went and talked with them, did some work with the seedier elements of town, and essentially bypassed about 90% of his planned scenario. We still got to the badguys in the end, but we had gone almost 100% roleplay based to get there, rather than using the setpiece encounters he had prepared.That taught me (gave me a great example of, really) giving the group what they want. The goal (finding the cultists, figuring out the noble who was involved, and bringing them to justice) were all the GMs outline, but how we got there was entirely up to us. We talked after the session was over, and he had a series of setpiece encounters planned, but he designed a basic connections diagram with this idea in place, so he had some basic information on who had the dirt on who...and then he just ran with it. The trick was establishing interesting "on the spot" NPCs, which he did wonderfully. So the tip in the end was, a little bit of prep, and work on your improv skills!In the negative side, I've recently played in a very good game where the GM is a stickler for the realistic details of an investigation and unraveling a plot. He's a good and experienced GM, but sometimes we just take too long to get to the interesting stuff he has for us, because he puts a realistic level of detail between us and the eventual fun. There are lots of red herrings and blind alleys to run down, and when we get to the results their fantastic, but to get there!I am guilty of this myself, as I sometimes will draw something out because I think it's realistic to do so. What I've learned is that realism is great, but if you stall too long, you'll tire and bore your players so that they're not paying attention when important events come up.To give another quick example: one of the best GMs I've ever played with likes to include the occasional sea voyage for us. His mistake is to actually play out every day of the trip. Now the thing is, there's stuff happening with the NPCs and such all the time, so it's interesting for those of us who are really into immersive play, but part of our group dreads the multiple sessions where we'll be going from point A to point B.So my second lesson was to not keep the good stuff hidden for too long. You might have a fantastic and dramatic adventure planned for us, but if you spend too many sessions getting there, you'll lose the group first.Just a couple of (long) thoughts...--Steve</blockquote>

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