On GMing Advice

[Umbran]

Rob Donoghue is a roleplaying game designer who helped create Fate (in general, and several of the specific variants) and Cortex systems. Recently, he made some observations on GM advice, leaning heavily into one point - it is very difficult to test whether the advice actually works or not.

Say you are given a piece of advice, and you try it out. The session you first use it in goes really well, or really badly, or somewhere in between. So, did the advice work? How do you tell? Did the session go well, or badly, because of that advice, or in spite of it? Even with a particular group, RPG sessions are not really repeatable events, and there's a slew of things that can go wrong or well - you cannot really focus on one variable to test, because the players each carry with them variables that change from day to day, week to week.

So, you have to try advice several times over before you can assess its value. But many of us only game every week or two - it can be months before you can really say that you've given a bit of advice a fair shake.

Which is not to say advice is useless, but given the long time you have to work at it to determine if it helps, it pays to vet the advice first, and that includes some things that often get lost in our discussions - who is the advice supposed to help, and the reason you want to do the advised thing

We've got a couple of threads now that touch on railroading, for instance, and if history is a guide, very quickly they'll include a lot of "You should do X!" - detailing the action to be taken, but not detailing who that action is supposed to help, or why.

Like, advising people on making their games "less railroady" - before we listen to that advice, we should ask - who at my table is having issues, and is reducing railroadyness really going to fix their problem?

 

[Hussar]

I think that's a very fair point. And, always something to keep in mind when diving into these online discussions. ((And, yes, I know how guilty I am of this)) I find that a lot of discussions tend to get lost in the weeds during examinations of examples. "Oh, but you didn't account for this! Your idea won't work!" doesn't really help a whole lot. Examples are there for illustration, not for points of debate.

Add to that the fact that so many people are working from different definitions because of their own play experience, and it becomes even easier to talk past each other. Again, talking about rail roading, I know how I define railroading (railroading - when a DM is acting in bad faith to ensure an outcome pre-determined by the DM), but, I also know that others don't share that definition. Which means that it's very, very important to be explicitly clear about your definitions before you try to make a point. If you take the view that railroading=any linear adventure then your advice will be very, very different from mine and any discussion between us becomes very difficult as we're approaching from such different viewpoints.

((Note, I mean the royal "you" here, not the you reading this))

 

[prabe]

There's the other, separate difficulty: Aside from some abstract idea of objective value, does this advice have any subjective value? That is, does it work for you? Advice for running the sandboxiest of sandboxes, or the dungeoncrawliest of dungeoncrawls, really isn't going to help me run my game, which is neither of those.

 

[MichaelSomething]

If I recorded and uploaded one of my sessions, would any of you Rift trax it?

 

[Umbran]

Aside from some abstract idea of objective value, does this advice have any subjective value?

That can fit in a couple of places...

While I know someone here will pitch a nutty over this, Donoghue borrows an idea from software development to describe this - the User Story. It has the form:

"As [A PERSON]. I want to [DO A THING] for [REASON]."

In order to provide the thing, you have to know who it is for, and why they want it. We often abbreviate this to, "I want to do a thing" (or even, "You should do a thing") and leave out who or for what reason. We can show how this fails when someone says, "I want to play basketball" and we hand them a full sized ball and a ten-foot hoop, before realizing that it is for a 3' tall first grade kid...

Go look in the railroading or authority threads, and you'll see this abounding - different kinds of players and GMs want things for different reasons, and they won't agree on how to accomplish anything!

 

[Campbell]

I'm not really a fan of "GM Advice". I think you need to have a coherent approach to running a game and become specifically skilled in that approach. Generic advice that is devoid of a coherent framework is unlikely to have a positive long term impact. I would be especially wary about trying any given technique for just a couple sessions before evaluating it. Any new skill is going to take time to develop.

 

[Hussar]

I'm not really a fan of "GM Advice". I think you need to have a coherent approach to running a game and become specifically skilled in that approach. Generic advice that is devoid of a coherent framework is unlikely to have a positive long term impact. I would be especially wary about trying any given technique for just a couple sessions before evaluating it. Any new skill is going to take time to develop.

Well, I'm not sure I'd go that far. There are some pieces of advice that seem pretty obvious now, that newbie DM me could have really, really used. As in "don't be a douche" being probably the primary one. But, also, the different frameworks for describing games I find to have value. If a game is described as "gamist" or "Nar" or whatever, while I realize that like all generalizations, they're only true to a point, it does give me a fairly decent starting point.

I think so long as the advice is given complete with some context, it can be helpful. Without context though, a lot of advice tends to swim into trouble as it can be very easily interpreted in a way that wasn't intended.

 

[Umbran]

Generic advice that is devoid of a coherent framework is unlikely to have a positive long term impact.

Well, most of the advice we see does come from a coherent framework - however, we don't usually take much effort to check if the frameworks of advice givers and receivers match closely enough for the advice to be relevant.

We also have a tendency to think that OUR framework is awesome, and good for everybody.

 

[TheAlkaizer]

You're right that all learnings as a DM take a long time because of the frequency of play. Some things are just internalized through trial and error while playing. You develop experience and a sense.

When it comes to concrete advice (from someone, or from a media source) I agree that it's a bit hard to really seize it up, test it and learn it. But it's something I do frequently. I'll read a play report, or watch an actual play series and go "oh, that's a real cool idea, I think I should do that more often". Then I focus on this one element for a couple of sessions and if it yields positive results, I generally tend to internalize it pretty well. But yeah, I play once every two weeks, so if it takes for or five sessions it means almost three months for one thing. So pick your learnings.

Also, maybe that's me, but advices that are "don't do this" fall pretty flat with me. It's hard to be focused doing things and also keeping in mind to not do something. I also think positive advice (do this) is much more easily applicable to a lot of people than negative advice (don't do this). There's also a tendency for people to explain why doing something is beneficial, "do this, it'll make your combat faster"; and to simply state doing something is bad without explaining why, "don't do this one thing, it's really bad".

 

[payn]

I go to the forums to discuss advice and its implementation in my games. It's very useful for understanding the concept behind the advice and not just the face value of it. Its good to understand what concepts work for you, and which dont. More importantly, that your perspective is not universal, and thus, not a gaming commandment.

For example, I dont like DMPCs on a concept level. I recognize there are techniques that make DMPCs work for some people. I'm cool with that, and limit my participation based on why folks might not like DMPCs and what other options are at DM's disposal. There will, however, be a batch of folks who come at it as a position in which you should cut a DM for even thinking about adding a DMPC.

Replace DMPC with "railroad", "using XP", or whatever gaming methods are being discussed. Expect some folks to be new, some old, and some just ridiculously bullheaded. I tend to just ignore the onetrueway warriors. The lessons are in the journeys, not the destinations.