In Your Experience: How Good are GM's?

[Haltherrion]

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.

At least it sounds more interesting than the potato I'd rather fight random monsters than mess with kitsune's atm machine or our potato...

 

[Hussar]

Well, to be fair, it was kinda fun. Totally random and pretty much pointless, but, fun for a while.

I think the players got a bit peeved when I added a bean which caused the planter to turn invisible, be cursed with the reverse of a Tongues spell and then covered his exact location with a programmed illusion of a hideous monster.

It got even worse when one of the other players declared that he was going to cut open the dead hideous monster to see what was in its stomach. Negative hit points to dead.

 

[Rel]

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.

It's interesting that you say this. Historically I tend to fall toward the center of the bell curve in terms of preparation I think. But for my one shot games at GenCon or the NC Game Days I tended to do a lot more preparation.

I think that was for a few reasons. It was easier to do more prep because my one-shots tend to be a bit more "railroady" in terms of how the action would unfold (as I think most such games are and should be if you only have 4 hours to get it done). And I also knew that I'd be running the same game more than once so it was worth investing extra effort into the preparation.

Lately however I have decided to go in the opposite direction when running systems that are fairly simple (Basic D&D and Old School Hack) where I will simply make up an adventure on the fly based on the composition of characters at the table. I've found this to be a fun challenge and the feedback I've gotten from the players is that they've enjoyed it a great deal (some have challenged the notion that I hadn't prepared the games in advance).

One principle difference between these two styles of game preparation is that in the heavy prep style I was using pre-generated PC's (which of course matches the expectations you'd have for regular campaign play) whereas in the no-prep games the PC's were generated at the table thanks to the quick chargen for the associated systems. Also Old School Hack has a slot on the character sheet for "Adventuring Goal", which is something that individual character hopes to accomplish outside any "primary goal" of the party.

What I did at the DC Game Day in October was to have them all tell me their Adventuring Goals and then I rather quickly wove together an adventure that would provide opportunities for each of them to complete these goals. The players seemed to appreciate that and the game as a whole was quite fun.

I'm not trying to brag and say that I'm a super-creative GM who can make up fun stuff on the fly (ok, maybe a little) but mostly I just think that doing that sort of thing gets easier with more experience because you have a longer history of games to pull ideas from. I mean it's not as though ALL of my ideas are fresh ones! Just ones that this batch of players haven't seen from me yet.

 

[kitsune9]

[MENTION=99]Rel[/MENTION]

For me, I'm really into prep. I'm kind of a prepaholic when it comes to preparing my sessions for the players--write out the encounters, handouts, draw the maps, key them, and prepare the random encounters just for that Ye Olde Skool Feel. Since technology allows me to save a lot more time, I use toward my prep.

I think for the GM who could pull off the making up the adventure on the fly needs two things--1) significant experience and 2) simplicity of the rules that one knows from the inside out. You seem like the kind of person who runs quite often or at least you're constantly in these forums day in, day out and you're running Basic D&D doesn't get much simpler than that. So you probably got something going on there that puts the odds of a decent story from having to make it up on the fly fairly good.

My experience with these types of DMs unfortunately clearly lacked #1 or #2 or both. And the one thing that was truly endemic of their gaming style was that they were lazy people and this propelled itself in the game sessions as well.

But in the end, it's whatever works for the DM and keeps the players coming back. No wrong or right style so long as everyone is having a good time.

 

[Rel]

I think for the GM who could pull off the making up the adventure on the fly needs two things--1) significant experience and 2) simplicity of the rules that one knows from the inside out. You seem like the kind of person who runs quite often or at least you're constantly in these forums day in, day out and you're running Basic D&D doesn't get much simpler than that. So you probably got something going on there that puts the odds of a decent story from having to make it up on the fly fairly good.

I would agree with that in general.

Running something well on the fly doesn't always require a super simple ruleset. But, at the very least, you've got to get your monster stats from somewhere. When I was running 4e and the players took an unexpected turn that forced me to make something up I hadn't prepared for, I'd either recall an appropriate critter from one of the Monster Manuals I had and run the encounter with the book open to that page or I'd flip to something that was close enough to what I needed in the big binder full of printed monsters I'd prepared for my game. Then I could modify the stats on the fly fairly easily, but I needed some raw material to work with.

With games like Basic D&D or Old School Hack or even Savage Worlds, I only need to know a very few key stats and the granularity is such that it's pretty easy to decide if that monster has an AC of 4 or 6 or whatever. That simplicity frees up a lot of brain space for other creativity like setting the scene or weaving together some kind of coherent story. In fact when I create games on the fly like this I pretty much ONLY focus on the story part, comfortable in the knowledge that, when it comes time for combat, I'll be able to throw together stats in my head without any problem.

I'll reiterate though that this is generally the way I do things for a select group of one-shot games. For one-shots with pregen characters I always do extensive prep. For my ongoing campaign games I like systems best that let me do lots of prep in terms of thinking about the game and small amounts of prep in terms of actually sitting at the computer and printing stuff off. I found that to be very much the case with 4e D&D as well as Savage Worlds.