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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Water Bob" data-source="post: 5874913" data-attributes="member: 92305">Ah, the magic question. Well, there's a secret tool you need. Not every group has one, and like most things, it gets better with age. This tool? It's called a good GameMaster gifted telling a good story. GMing a good game isn't about sticking by the numbers and making sure everything is done the same way every time. If the game is getting boring, then the GM should do something about it. Sometimes, when you walk into a town, and you want to make trade with the local merchant, this brings up a roleplaying encounter. This could turn into a long, enjoyable encounter, full of character, as the player and the GM play their parts roleplaying the situation. Then again, when the characters are moving across country, and a player wants to stop in a town to buy a third waterskin, the good GM does not lock the game into an out of place roleplaying encounter that slows down the momentum of the sessions. What he does is say, "OK, you guys popped into this town. Fern bought his waterskin. It was 3 silvers--remove that amount on your sheet, Charlie. It was good to get out of the dust for a night and sleep in a bed. But, now, that town is hours behind you. You're back on the road, and up ahead, you see a heard of cattle crossing the road. But, as you get closer, it's not cattle, you recognize, it's...." There, the GM just skipped over a type of encounter that he previously roleplayed.   Thus, it's the same with playing traps. Many times, you'll be in a dungeon exploration mode, so playing it out as it says in the document is probably what you'll do. But, nothing locks a GM into that kind of play. Mix it up.  A good GM keeps his finger on the pulse of his game. If the GM starts a trap-like situation as described in the document, but looks across the table at the bored look on his players' faces and realizes that this is the third trap of a similar nature that party has encontered in the last hour of gaming, then go back to the dice. "It's a trap, like you saw in that previous room, except this one lifts up instead of sideways like the other one did. Roll your disable device. OK. Success? You did something like what you did before and stuck a spear in the cog you found secreted in the wall. Let's move on." Good DMing is like good story telling. There are ebbs and flows, highs and lows, and it's always (or should be) dramatic and gripping.   What's the short version of the answer to your question? You GM should always strive to make your game exciting and intriguing. He should use whatever methods or tools he has at his disposal to get his game there. That, really, is the essence--the mantra--of the old school DM.         EDIT:  Yesterday, in my game, the PCs made it back to their village.  They had been gone almost two weeks.  No one knew what had happened to them, and many feared them dead.  They were just kids, after all, 14 and 15 years old. But, they returned, proud heroes, with a kidnapped little girl in tow and stories of how they saw the dead walk and a demon fly through the air. We spent a month in town.  I quickly described many events without roleplaying that much.  I made that call because I knew we would get into a roleplaying quadmire if I kept the entire time at town in that type of pace.  I needed to skip over time quickly, and even doing it that way, it took a real hour to play. I would drop into bits of roleplaying, but then quickly move back into zoomed out scenes, describing what happened from a macro level.   There was the homecoming, where everybody was glad to see them alive--that was a macro scene.  Then, I dropped into roleplaying for a moment as the village elder, with the entire clan gathered around, said something to the effect of, "These you see before you are no longer children.  They are men.  Adults.  They have proven themselves, warriors, now, of the Blue Fox Clan!"  Then, I moved just as quickly back into macro scenes with, "And the crowd went wild, with much saluting and slapping you on the back.  You're heroes in the eyes of your own people." Things went back to normal, and the two characters went back to work.  Once is a smith, the other, a trapper.  So, we rolled several weeks using the crafting rules, to bring some wealth to the PCs.  One of the players wanted to buy new clothes--his had been worn thread bare by the previous adventuring.  That encounter, I roleplayed, with village trader bargaining with him.  Once that was done, though, I just did the rest of the buying as selling quickly, because I felt a second roleplaying encounter would bog the game down. So, really, that last hour of the game yesterday was played mainly in macro scenes with short moments roleplaying added in, not unlike a montage sequence in a movie.</blockquote>

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