What is the MOST IMPORTANT skill for a GM to have?

[Velderan]

Reading a room.

Yeah, this one for me. If you can't understand the vibe of the table and whether the players are enjoying themselves or not, all of the other stuff is kinda pointless IMO.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Which will likely lead to GM burnout.

True, which is why no campaign can long survive the DM not being into it, no matter how much fun the players are having.

 

[zottel]

Just as a singular example, managing pacing is a fundamental component of improvisation in response to player agency.

I don't think pacing follows from improv skills. You can be great at improv and suck at pacing, or suck at improv and be good at pacing. if you discount a skill simply because it benefits from another one, the list will be awfully short and bland.
Pacing is a very distinct skill and imho vastly important. If the pacing is off, the whole session suffers from it. With good pacing, the action is gripping, the environment is engaging, and after the session you feel like you got a lot done while nobody was bored.

 

[Manbearcat]

The most important skill for a GM to have is to understand, at a high level, the nature of play premise and gameplay decisions of the particular game they're running. Then use that high level understanding to generate consistent, and consistently compelling, situations and decision-points for players at each-and-every moment of play.

If you don't understand premise and/or don't have expert status on "how the gamestate moves from one state to the next"...odds are good that play will be boring or play will suck or both.

I think of some games I've newly run for the first time. The guy that was running that game may have understood premise, but he didn't have the fullness of "the game layer" downloaded to operationalize. Compared to several months downstream (or several games downstream), that guy's GMing was subpar.

 

[mekhawretch]

There's one kind of DM skill I've been thinking about a lot - mainly cause I find it hard to define. I guess you could call it verisimilitude or keeping suspension of disbelief but it's not really that. It's basically encouraging the feeling in the player that the imaginary game world is an actual 'third thing' that exists between the DM and the players, that's responsive to their actions but exists somewhat independently. Essentially, it's being able to trick your players into forgetting that they're just a bunch of people sitting around a table talking, and also not making the imaginary world so monolithic and unresponsive that they may as well just be reading a novel. I think it's a tough skill to master because - even though the rules of your system can do a lot of that work for you - you still have be quite careful to get a balance between your players whims, your creative directions, and just the raw mechanics of the system - giving in fully to any of those three seems to destroy that feeling of a 'third thing'.

 

[pemerton]

There's one kind of DM skill I've been thinking about a lot - mainly cause I find it hard to define. I guess you could call it verisimilitude or keeping suspension of disbelief but it's not really that. It's basically encouraging the feeling in the player that the imaginary game world is an actual 'third thing' that exists between the DM and the players, that's responsive to their actions but exists somewhat independently. Essentially, it's being able to trick your players into forgetting that they're just a bunch of people sitting around a table talking, and also not making the imaginary world so monolithic and unresponsive that they may as well just be reading a novel. I think it's a tough skill to master because - even though the rules of your system can do a lot of that work for you - you still have be quite careful to get a balance between your players whims, your creative directions, and just the raw mechanics of the system - giving in fully to any of those three seems to destroy that feeling of a 'third thing'.

I'm not sure what systems you're thinking of in your post.

Part of what I think makes for a good system is that it "invites" the players directly into the fiction, rather than having all the fiction mediated by the GM. This is what then leads to the players taking the fiction seriously.

 

[cranberry]

The ability to ad lib as the players do stuff you didn't expect or plan for.

 

[Reynard]

There's one kind of DM skill I've been thinking about a lot - mainly cause I find it hard to define. I guess you could call it verisimilitude or keeping suspension of disbelief but it's not really that. It's basically encouraging the feeling in the player that the imaginary game world is an actual 'third thing' that exists between the DM and the players, that's responsive to their actions but exists somewhat independently. Essentially, it's being able to trick your players into forgetting that they're just a bunch of people sitting around a table talking, and also not making the imaginary world so monolithic and unresponsive that they may as well just be reading a novel. I think it's a tough skill to master because - even though the rules of your system can do a lot of that work for you - you still have be quite careful to get a balance between your players whims, your creative directions, and just the raw mechanics of the system - giving in fully to any of those three seems to destroy that feeling of a 'third thing'.

I don't think immersion is entirely on the GM, although the GM can help. But the system matters there, as do the players themselves.

 

[coralwave]

Communication skills.

Cannot agree more.
I'd add a specific angle- IRL conflicts can oblitirate a group and in my experience, even well adjusted adults can dig in and in most cases the group will look to the GM to mediate.
Tiresome, Infuriating at times, but still neccesary.
Good communication ind interpersonal skills can save a session, a game and a group, but even better- prevent most problems.

 

[TwoSix]

What is the most important skill for a DM to have?

The next one. Always the next one, Dalinar.