In Your Experience: How Good are GM's?

[Rel]

I think house rules are needed in games with bad rules or with big holes in them. Early D&D had huge holes in it that if they weren't corrected with house rules you had players running around twisting the rules constantly.

That's far from the only reason you'd want house rules. Sometimes house rules can tweak the flavor of the game to capture a different flavor than the RAW.

I wanted to run WFRP as a Pirates of the Caribbean game. There are guns in WFRP but I wanted muskets and cannons and braces of pistols to be more common. So I simply added a rule that anybody could pick up the advance that made them proficient with gunpowder weapons without requiring that they have a Career that contained that advance. That wasn't patching a hole in the rules. It changed the flavor of the game, which is what I wanted.

 

[messy]

i've had two outstanding dms (but see my sig).

one was outstanding at role-playing and winging it.

the other was outstanding at the intricacies of 3e combat.

if they could somehow be combined, the multiverse would explode.

 

[karlindel]

I've had only a few truly bad GMs. I've had quite a few inexperienced and/or mediocre GMs. Most of my GMs have been good GMs, with a few great GMs mixed in.

 

[Haltherrion]

I've got to go with you: most were bad. I guess I have high standards and like to think I do a good job at it so I set a high bar. It certainly takes some practice and a willingness to put in some time.

There is one who trades off with me in my game group who, while he has a very different style, creates games I love. Other than that, my experience has been very disappointing: refs who allow the game to wallow in dullness, ref's who railroad, ref's who run a canned adventure without giving it much life.

 

[Thagdal]

I've played with more bad players than I have bad GMs :/

Most of the time I define a good GM (or group) by "am I having fun?" not 'could I be having more fun if ..."

I also view role play groups as collabrative fun, not just the GMs job.

 

[lamia]

My first DM was godawful, enough to cause me to run back to my console games and hide from pen and paper for years. He wouldn't teach me the rules because he said girls can't do math, so therefore couldn't understand THACO.
But karma came back around and my second DM was fabulous. I could compose epic poems about his games. Stayed with that group for years.
I've played in a few games outside of those, but I've only had two bad DMs. One of them I might feel differently about if he hadn't misrepresented the game he was running. I was told it would be roleplay and story heavy, but when I tried to roleplay he kept forcing my character into nonsensical battles and not allowing me to do anything else. He also had the wife favoritism thing going on pretty bad. Her characters had all the kewl loot and could one-shot guys who were wiping the floor with my poor space druid.
I'm pretty sure I'm not a very good DM, but I have the benefit of running a game for all new folks who have no expectations of me. They are learning to play while I learn the complicated business of wearing the DM pants!

 

[kitsune9]

I played a lot of RPGA games and had many different judges, but overall I'd say only two stuck out as poor. One guy didn't know the rules very well and stunk to high-heaven and another didn't read the modules he was given nor did he bother to sleep the night before so he was running a game that he had to read at the same time while sleep-deprived. Completely boring.

In my home campaigns, I'd say three guys jump out at me as being very poor GM's. One guy loved White Wolf everything and was running a Werewolf game. I was interested, but the guy made up the story as he went along and I had to roleplay out a lot of meaningless stuff like withdrawing money from an ATM machine. One of the bigger hassles of the night was he demand that I realistically come up with a way to smuggle a gun onboard a plane (Uh? Can't I just declare at the counter and get ammunition where I end up? NO.). That killed two hours in which I was frustrated and told him, I don't take the gun. After a whole six hours of this gaming we get to one fight with some mook monster, kill it in the first round, and game over for the session. I quit playing Werewolf.

The second GM ran a 2nd AD&D game. I wanted to turn over the reins to someone else so I could get a break from running. I thought my very imaginative friend would whip up a really cool adventure for us. I was wrong as he too was making the adventure up as we went along and his adventure had absolutely no plot. No bad guys, no adventure seeds, a random encounter here and there, players haggling with blacksmith for two hours of real time on making custom full plate armor. I put up with this for about four game sessions (each was 8 hours long) before I pulled the plug and said enough.

The last guy was someone our gaming group brought it to DM our 1st ed AD&D games. He was a 1st ed AD&D only gamer which was okay with us. He actually did some prep (not much, but he at least made notes to construct a plot and provide an interesting story), but he was completely dice and rulebook aversive. If we got into a situation where it would like it would be a fight, he'd try to get us to roleplay it out instead of fighting. We would bite, but it would get old after the 10th time of running into goblins and kobolds and they want to parley. So we started attacking every monster we came across. He then had the monsters run away--even if they seemed tougher than us. We're 1st level and we're making ogres run away. Other times, he'd just call the fight in our favor before we got initiative rolled. He knew the rules, the guy was smart, but he hated using them and didn't bring any rulebooks. So if we wanted to do some action, it was either an automatic success or automatic failure. I very rarely rolled any dice in any of his sessions. All of us revolted on him after putting up with about three sessions of this and he flat out didn't care so we kicked him out.

Now I've seen my fair share of mediocre DMs and probably know only of two guys who I considered the best DMs I ever had, but all the mediocre DM's I cut them a lot of slack because they always took the time to prep and that always means a lot to me so I would meet them halfway. Some of their styles weren't necessarily my cup of tea, but their efforts in good faith to provide a fun game was far more important to me than their skill as a GM. And for that, I think makes them a great GM in their own right which makes me grateful to have played in their game.

 

[Haltherrion]

In my home campaigns, I'd say three guys jump out at me as being very poor GM's. One guy loved White Wolf everything and was running a Werewolf game. I was interested, but the guy made up the story as he went along and I had to roleplay out a lot of meaningless stuff like withdrawing money from an ATM machine. One of the bigger hassles of the night was he demand that I realistically come up with a way to smuggle a gun onboard a plane (Uh? Can't I just declare at the counter and get ammunition where I end up? NO.). That killed two hours in which I was frustrated and told him, I don't take the gun. After a whole six hours of this gaming we get to one fight with some mook monster, kill it in the first round, and game over for the session. I quit playing Werewolf.

That's a universal sign of weakness. You see it in novels where the author doesn't really know what to do in a spot and drags things out with meaningless scenes. You see it in movies for the same reason. You see it in on-line games where they make something arbitrarily hard or require some annoying grind.

Sounds like a particularly painful experience. It reminds me of the time a ref had us find a brown lumpish object in a secret compartment in a table. We spent 30 minutes on it before discovering it was a... potato. The ref thought he was clever but inserting random junk to cover up the fact that you don't have any idea where to go or what to do that might be interesting is rarely a good technique in any media We, of course, did not play that game again.

 

[Hussar]

I have a confession to make. Back in 2e, when I was DMing, if I didn't have a lot of time/energy/couldn't be asked to prepare for a session, instead of cancelling, I made sure the party found at some point, a Bag of Beans. I had the Magic Encyclopedias at the time, and they had insane lists for a Bag of Beans. I then nudged the players into playing with the bag.

Several PC's died.

Yeah, I sucked.

I got better though. I think.

 

[kitsune9]

That's a universal sign of weakness. You see it in novels where the author doesn't really know what to do in a spot and drags things out with meaningless scenes. You see it in movies for the same reason. You see it in on-line games where they make something arbitrarily hard or require some annoying grind.

I totally hear ya! Interesting example of your own too. I think it's laziness too. Nothing gets my goat than a lazy GM. There was an older thread that I participated last year where the question is "What are some of the no-goes?" or something along this line. The original poster was basically asking what are our pet peeves with a DM that will make us want to quit their game.

Pulling adventures out one's butt as they go along is one of those pet peeves of mine. I'm sure that there are DM's that claim that this style is awesome, they have their players filled with raw emotion, and that they will talk for months about their game, and that they have players lined up around the block to in their game, etc, etc. These DM's sold me on this too and gave me the same pitch. But the truth of the matter was that their games sucked, dragged, had no plot or a weak plot, no real villain, random encounters that didn't make sense, and endless roleplaying over haggling, buying mundane stuff, or just general nonsense.

Anyways, hope your gaming isn't like this.