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Message: <blockquote data-quote="innerdude" data-source="post: 6089238" data-attributes="member: 85870">I'm curious---What's the hardest lesson you had to learn as a GM before you felt like you were having real success at it? This can be "hardest" as in, "took me the longest to figure out and implement," or "hardest" as in, "this was the harshest consequence of failing to learn the needed lesson, and it really screwed things up." For me, my GM-ing career is actually relatively new, compared to my "RPG lifetime." I've been playing RPGs since I was a kid in the '80s, but didn't play in a pen-and-paper group between about 1990 and 2003. In 2003, I became acquainted with a guy at work, and we got talking and he discovered that I played RPGs in the past. He was an active GM of 3.0 at the time, and I got invited into his group, which I played in almost exclusively until I left the area for a couple of years in 2008. Well, at one point during this period, I offered to GM a "one shot," or maybe even "mini-campaign" (3-5 sessions) . . . but the first session bombed. I got trapped into thinking that it was my job "to tell a story," and it was the players' job to "make the story happen the way I saw it." And you can all imagine how that went over (when the session ended, my buddy pulled me aside and went, "Yeeeah. That wasn't so awesome"). So fast forward about four years, and I'm given an opportunity to try my hand at GM-ing again while another friend prepped for a GURPS campaign. Only this time, I made the conscious decision I wasn't going to have a "story." I was going to have a premise, and maybe a few scenarios, and whatever the players did, that's where the story would go. This didn't mean that the NPCs were going to be "static"; things were in motion outside the characters' viewpoints. It's just that what was happening was reacting to the players, where each scene played out in its own "frame," and then following scenes were based on the results of the last. And wouldn't you know it, the campaign was a smashing success, so much so, that one of the players who'd been playing a long time said it was one of his top-5 campaigns he'd ever played. So, in my mind, the hardest rule to learn as a GM is, You're not telling a story--you're building a scene, a set design, a "space" where your players create one. My second hardest lesson to learn--playing to character's strengths in ways that satisfy the players. It's really easy to just assume, "Hey, Player X is playing a rogue . . . he wants to experience X, Y, and Z in the game." Edit for clarification--What I'm getting at with that, is that you SHOULDN'T assume that just because someone seems to pick certain "thematic" material in terms of class choice, backstory, etc., that that's really what they're interested in. Don't assume what players want, ask them, and then find ways to give it to them. That's still a challenge for me, even now.</blockquote>

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