GMs: Guiding Morals in GMing

[Professor Murder]

So something in another threat got me thinking.
So many GM style arguments come down to clashes of what can be called "Guiding Morals." What I mean is, having a few key principles of how a game should be run, priorities of play, that you are willing to bend other considerations to serve.
So these could include such things as "Challenge my players" or "Everyone has fun" or perhaps "Safety First."

What sorts of guiding moral principles govern how you run your games?

 

[aco175]

Good question, interested to see where this goes.

Show up, or at least call/text if you cannot make it. If you take on the commitment, live up to coming.

Be honest (mostly as a player). Live with your rolls and even point out things not favorable to your team like if a monster has advantage to attack or if there is an ongoing spell since the DM cannot remember everything. It should not be a gotcha game.

Being honest as the DM. Apply the rules and judgments honestly and admit if you are wrong or need to change an item or something. You also need to be honest in giving the players and yourself a good game. If you need to change something, you should be able to. I know this one will have objections from other threads with fudging dice and such.

Know your PC. The DM should not know all your abilities better than you. Maybe if you are a new player and need the help, but you should invest in your PC.

 

[Yora]

As GM, I have to be disinterested in whether the players succeed or fail at what they attempt to do. If I make adjustments to what they face based on my preference whether they succeed or fail, because I think it'd be more dramatic or for whatever reason, then all the decisions and plans that the players make become meaningless and all that dice rolling is only a waste of time.
And what's the point for the players to play and make plans and hard choices if they have no impact on the outcomes of their actions? It makes their victories empty and their defeats my fault.

I also don't deliberately deceive the players. As GM, I am the entire perception of the PCs and provide most of the context for all information the players get. It is trivial to make them believe about the world and what's going on whatever I want. There is nothing clever about that.
If NPCs have reason to set up a deception in advance, they will employ them. But I will not give the players deliberately false or deceptive information on what their characters perceive or assume. And given how greatly players are inherently restricted in their perception of the game world and how dependent they are on information from the GM, I give plenty of clues of severe dangers ahead. Players need to know they are in danger and have opportunity to address the danger before they suffer the effects. When players suffer defeat or characters die, they really should understand that it was the consequences of their actions and that there were different choices they could have made that would have lead to a different outcome.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

What sorts of guiding moral principles govern how you run your games?

Everyone dies without understanding anything. Thats the way the world works, after all.

 

[GrahamWills]

For me, the biggest distinguisher of GM styles (as opposed simply to quality) is to ask what they do when an encounter scene starts becoming not fun to play. Is your guiding moral:

• Keep playing; you as a GM have set the scene up and must see it to its logical conclusion
• Change a few numbers here and there or have some NPCs react in ways that get us to move on to the next scene
• Add a story element that finishes or radically changes the scene.

 

[overgeeked]

The only thing the players get to control is their characters. Undermining that control with railroading or illusionism is the single biggest sin. Never, ever do that.

Verisimilitude is more important than rules. When the rules produce nonsense results, ignore them.

Play the dice as they lay. If the outcome of an action isn’t obvious from the fiction, roll for it. Whatever the result, use it. The point of the dice is to produce random results, so let them.

The world exists independently of the PCs. There’s no such thing as “level-appropriate content”. Prep the world and let the PCs bounce around it as they please.

Never prep stories or plots. Whatever story an RPG has should be emergent through play. It should never be planned by the GM and never forced on the players.

Always enforce consequences. Action-reaction. Cause-effect. NPCs always react to the PCs’ actions, good or bad. The PCs can do as they please, but the world will respond accordingly.

Skip the boring stuff. Most travel is boring. Most NPC interactions are boring. Filler combat is boring. If there are no stakes, it’s boring.

 

[the Jester]

I would say that the modern sensibility is the game should be player-first, but I am very much a setting-first DM. That means that I don't, for instance, insert a new race/lineage into an existing detailed area just because someone wants to play a member of that race/lineage.

 

[Committed Hero]

Be a fan of the PCs.

 

[JAMUMU]

Only GM for players you physically outmatch and can intimidate through body language.

Give the players what they want, but only after sufficiently disrupting their plans.

Make sure everyone has fun!

No NPC is untouchable and no situation inevitable, if the PCs decide to get involved.

 

[Umbran]

So many GM style arguments come down to clashes of what can be called "Guiding Morals."

They could be called that, but "morals" has some pretty hefty connotations that are apt to intrude into the discussion.

I'd think "guiding precepts" or "concepts" might help keep that intrusion at bay somewhat.

What sorts of guiding moral principles govern how you run your games?

I don't run just one type of game, so I don't have a single set of precepts to inform play.

 

[Lanefan]

What I try to do (success rate sometimes variable):

Be neutral. This includes no fudging, no on-the-fly changes to encounters if things get too easy or hard, etc. And most importantly, no favouritisim toward any given player(s) or character(s).

Be committed. This means showing up for the game on time (if not early) with my prep in at least some sort of useable condition. It also means running the campaign for as long - as in, as many years - as anyone wants to play in it.

Be consistent. This means sticking to in-campaign precedents and rulings, having clear in-fiction reasons for major mid-campaign setting or rules changes, and so forth. It also means being consistent with setting - if that wall had a door in it last time you were here, that door is either still there now or there'll be a damn good reason why it isn't.

Be malleable. This means that while I'll usually have a macro-level storyboard in mind, the players are always free to (intentionally or otherwise) chuck it out the window and go a different way; and I have to be ready willing and able to go into react mode on less than a moment's notice. Another way to put this would be "Be able and willing to wing it".

Make the game my own. This means if a rule or sub-system makes no sense to me, or is illogical, or potentially produces ridiculous or broken results in play, chuck it and if necessary replace it with something better.

Use every tool in the box, but infrequently or rarely and only when it makes sense. This means yes, I'll occasionally do a bit of hard railroading (e.g. "Yes you've just all been teleported halfway across the continent - you're someone else's divine intervention!"), or now and then coincidence might get stretched a bit beyond the breaking point (usually to get someone's PC into a party), and so forth.

Treat both the setting and the campaign as bigger than the characters. Characters and stories (and players) will come and go, but the setting endures and the campaign goes on. (exception: if the PCs in fact destroy the setting or game world - which I've seen done - that's it, game over)

The characters are native to and representative of the setting. This means the PCs aren't special snowflakes just because they are PCs, their specialness is earned through their actions. It also means the PCs are representative of their species' population, with corresponding benefits and drawbacks.

 

[Celebrim]

I think a lot of systems these days refer to these as agendas.

 

[Umbran]

I think a lot of systems these days refer to these as agendas.

My agenda is the thing I want to get.

My precepts guide how I reach my agendas.

 

[Digdude]

Everyone is looking for something out of a rpg, a good DM knows how to make these points intersect, while having fun themselves. There is no right or wrong way to do it, just what works.

 

[MGibster]

I suppose my agenda has changed as I've softened in my old age. It used to be that I wanted nothing more than to torture the players and drink in their tears, but in more recent years, I've realized their tears offer little in the way of nutritional value.

My main agenda is to have a good time. How we accomplish that depends on the game. In a horror game, yeah, you bet I want my players to be a little disturbed. Do I want the PCs to succeed? Yes. I don't mind if they fail but I'm rooting for them as overall success is more often more interesting than failure.

 

[soviet]

Kill a player in the first session as a message to the others.

 

[JAMUMU]

Kill a player in the first session as a message to the others.

Da comrade. This way, when remaining players look at character sheets, they take game much more seriously.

 

[pointofyou]

So something in another threat got me thinking.
So many GM style arguments come down to clashes of what can be called "Guiding Morals." What I mean is, having a few key principles of how a game should be run, priorities of play, that you are willing to bend other considerations to serve.
So these could include such things as "Challenge my players" or "Everyone has fun" or perhaps "Safety First."

What sorts of guiding moral principles govern how you run your games?

I do not do anything as a GM which I would abhor a GM doing if I were playing. I run games I'd love to play in.

 

[Celebrim]

So in answer of the original question, my "guiding morality" when GMing is: "Be the GM that you would want to have if you were a player." To a certain extent this, as much as I am able becomes, "Be the GM that your players want you to be.", in that I will try to observe what the players like and give them more of that. But I also have to have fun and enjoy the prep and running the game, so there is always a bit of what I want in the game as well. For my current group, I think they would prefer more linear adventures with less problem solving and investigation and more combat, but I balk from that to a certain extent because I don't enjoy leading groups around by the nose and likewise do enjoy more RP and game variety than just one combat encounter after another.

As far as my agenda as a GM are concerned:

a) Players can't be expected to not metagame, so if you want to avoid player actions being driven by meta knowledge leak as a little of that as possible.
b) As much as possible without violating 'a' be transparent and honest about the game and what is happening and don't fudge results.
c) As DW puts it, "Play to find out what happens." Prepare for what the players might do but don't get hung up on fantasies of what you want to have happen or impressing the players or imagining how exciting it would be if the game plays out in a particular way as if the way you foresee is the one right way for things to happen. Allow what happens to happen knowing that not every encounter is going to be or needs to be exciting. It's OK if the players just win sometimes. Likewise, players will find their own ways to struggle or lose without you planning for it.
d) One of your hats is referee, be a neutral enforcer of the rules as much as possible.
e) I tend to pursue a "naturalism" agenda, by which I mean simulate the setting as richly as I can. Make the setting feel lived in and real. My players tend to speak of this in terms of "the side quests", but really to me it is just that things that aren't central to the main quest or "the plot" are still going to be happening. The NPCs have problems and agendas of their own and there are all these other stories playing out alongside the players' stories, that the players have the option to engage with them or not. This also mean that one of the first things I do when planning a campaign is set up some demographics for what average NPC's look like and how they live their lives and what communities would do to defend themselves and what the prevailing social order is like and so forth, so that I have a baseline for extemporaneous play when the players invariably zig where I expected them to zag.
f) Related to the naturalism agenda is that the world doesn't specifically hate or love the PC's by default. I have a particular pet peeve against "All NPCs are useless and exist only to serve as foils of the PCs, even when doing so would be against the NPC's self-interest". I detest "The GM is Satan" gameplay and agendas, where the GM thinks they exist to foil the player's plans and be their adversary.

 

[Professor Murder]

They could be called that, but "morals" has some pretty hefty connotations that are apt to intrude into the discussion.

I'd think "guiding precepts" or "concepts" might help keep that intrusion at bay somewhat.



I don't run just one type of game, so I don't have a single set of precepts to inform play.

The connotations are purposeful. It is part of my contention that people viewing these as morals rather than preferences is part of what blinds some GMs to other perspectives.