What do you find hardest when running RPGs?

[Legatus Legionis]

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[Lanefan]

Taking notes of what happens during the game. I'm usually either talking or listening when running a session, and I can't competently do either and write at the same time...not if the writing is to be the least bit legible and-or make any sense, or if the speech is to be more than a drunken collection of random words.

 

[Umbran]

As a DM, it's remembering all of the options my monsters/evil NPCs have.

When dealing with material others have written, yeah, this is an issue I have, too. "Oh, crap! Why didn't I have it do that on the second round!?!"

Most of my biggest problems, though, are not at runtime - they are in prep-time. Largely in finding enough of said prep-time.

 

[Celebrim]

Everything.

Running an RPG is far and away the most challenging mentally taxing thing I do. I never run a session but that I afterwards think of a dozen things that I could have done better.

Pacing. Keeping a game from stalling, but building up enough that winning feels meaningful. That's hard, and it requires incredibly imaginative ability.

Personifying NPCs. Making NPCs say meaningful interesting things that invests the players in them in some way and which moves the story along is just flat out tough.

Omniscience. You somehow have to know everything. This is easiest in a fantasy setting where you are the source of all truth in the setting, and even then it is hard. But when running a game in a modern setting or a historical setting or even a hard sci-fi setting, you literally have to know everything because you never know what detail the players are going to inquire about. And often you have players who are really smart people, so you have to get it at least pretty close to right. Plus at the same time, you also have to be a fountain of rules knowledge and capable of adjudicating whatever comes up, no matter how weird it is.

Preparation is the key. You have to train yourself to do this. You have to research. You have to spend time brainstorming. You have to rehearse. You have to take notes about all the things you thought up. Even if you have pre-written material, you often need notes that are longer than what you've been given to really run things smoothly - especially once you've learned the sort of things that inevitably come up in play like the name of every single NPC and what that NPC knows and thinks about other NPCs.

And the older I get, the less time I seem to have to do the preparation.

 

[ChaosGenerators]

Roleplaying conversations. I can't voice act and while I write well and I think I am good at creating good stories, but I'm not good at coming up with good, flavorful dialog--much less accents--on the fly.

I´ve struggled with this in the past but I´ve improved a lot with the help of some group improv classes.

I never intend to perform but it´s been really good for listening to what others are saying and feeding off of that or reacting to it. It´s also been good for coming up with things quickly under pressure!

 

[DRF]

Doing voices, and finding players I like.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Thanks for the advice! I think I’ll try the “pass the mic” technique next time. I find those sorts of things to be very inspiring. Not to mention, they really can take the game in new directions.

A couple options could be:

Make a skill challenge: Matt Colville in his Running the Game series suggests skill challenges (#21, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvOeqDpkBm8); basically, it combines a whole bunch of skill checks (and even combat) into high-level skill challenges. Done well, it is a fun game-in-a-game that makes skills matter without descending into a slog of skill-check minutia. Rather than me typing out all the details, I recommend watching the video.

If your group likes group story telling, use travel to go around the table and have each player describe one challenge their character over came. Use that to learn more about how they see their character and find ways to work any interesting bits into your campaign later on.

Do a hex crawl. Give them a basic map with hexes that has major geographical features and settlements on it, have it printed on normal, non-glossy paper so that it can be easily marked up. As they interact with NPCs they can learn rumors and intel that they can mark on their map. They have to get from A to B, but need to decide the route to take. The quick way is by road but goes through a canyon where there have been bandit attacks. Over the mountain will avoid that, but there have been peryton sightings. Etc.

 

[Imaculata]

Finding the time to do all my prepping (I prep a lot!), and finding the time to distribute xp awards to my players.

 

[Imaculata]

Pacing. Keeping a game from stalling, but building up enough that winning feels meaningful. That's hard, and it requires incredibly imaginative ability.

I try to keep the pace by not dwelling for too long on boring things. If the players want to buy and sell all of their loot, I tend to sort it out during downtime, or I try to speed it up in some way. It doesn't need to take forever, but it sure has a tendency to. I also try to have players and characters run into each other a lot. I try to concentrate all of the interesting story bits in where the players are. I also think about how I want to end a session at least 2 hours before it ends, and try to find a good cliffhanger (which I'm usually able to do).

Personifying NPCs. Making NPCs say meaningful interesting things that invests the players in them in some way and which moves the story along is just flat out tough.

I tend to flesh out all of the npc's a lot, and give them enough backstory to have an informed opinion on things. Often the first step in making your players care about npc's, is caring about the npc's yourself. But this does tend to lead to a lot of over preparation in my experience. Hence prep time is my biggest problem.

Omniscience. You somehow have to know everything. This is easiest in a fantasy setting where you are the source of all truth in the setting, and even then it is hard. But when running a game in a modern setting or a historical setting or even a hard sci-fi setting, you literally have to know everything because you never know what detail the players are going to inquire about. And often you have players who are really smart people, so you have to get it at least pretty close to right. Plus at the same time, you also have to be a fountain of rules knowledge and capable of adjudicating whatever comes up, no matter how weird it is.

With modern communication and the internet, this definitely makes things more difficult (I especially noticed this when running a modern day Cthulhu campaign). But I tend to do a lot of world building, so it is usually easy for me to give informed answers in regards to the world. The world I make is much bigger than what the players will ever see. But again, it takes a lot of prep time.

Preparation is the key. You have to train yourself to do this. You have to research. You have to spend time brainstorming. You have to rehearse. You have to take notes about all the things you thought up. Even if you have pre-written material, you often need notes that are longer than what you've been given to really run things smoothly - especially once you've learned the sort of things that inevitably come up in play like the name of every single NPC and what that NPC knows and thinks about other NPCs.

And the older I get, the less time I seem to have to do the preparation.

Yeah, same here. I'll often even write down pieces of dialogue way in advance, even before I know what the players might say. That may seem odd and terribly scripted, but it helps my thinking process to have written down some of the things I want an important npc to say. Plus the research I put into my campaigns is mind boggling. I even went as far as to make a huge list of tropical fruits and the trees/plants they grow on, in order to be accurate for my pirate campaign.

So it might not come as a surprise that prep time is my biggest issue as well.

 

[Scott Christian]

Time.