What's it like to DM?

[Regal Worm of Slopp]

i know its off topic, but read the thread on the longest running joke...its hilarious

-The Canadian Regal Worm

 

[kamosa]

To follow up: Sometimes you can force the round peg into the square hole. Violence may not be the best answer to all problems, but it does work. Of course one has to know their DM and his style, as this works better with some DMs then others. So, sometimes the Players might not know the answer, but they come up with a solution that somehow works.

I think your right on the money here. Often the GM - Player relationship is the critical part of the game. If they grok eachother then a lot of short comings can be over come. However, as might be the case of the Regal Worm, sometimes the players and the GM are on different pages.

Those are the situations where the GM has to use good social skills to get everyone rowing in the same direction. Sometimes that's hard and sometimes that's impossible.

In a good game everyone seems to figure out how to do what the GM wants and still have an independent character. When you as a GM you create that situation, you feel like a rock star.

 

[Crothian]

A famous detective writer - Dashiel Hammet? - once said something to the effect of "Whenever I'm writing a story and I don't know what happens next, I have armed thugs kick open a door. It gets the action moving every time." That's true in D&D, too!

I'm so using this for my game. That's brilliant

 

[Derulbaskul]

What's it like to DM?

Sublime.

 

[Talmun]

What's it like to DM?

Sublime.

What's the sound of one die rolling.

For all the value of the wonderful advice to be found here, nothing can take the place of running a game yourself. Take a deep breath, find willing players and dive in!

 

[ThoughtBubble]

Can you tell the people who have good groups?

Since so many people have covered the good part, I'll cover some of what it can be like with a bad group.

Arguements. They're stupid, petty little things that can come up from a group of people who normally get along well. But suddenly every little thing someone does is deemed judgemental, threatining, or cruel, and are grounds to be argued about until someone's frusterated enough to leave. We had one particularly spectacular debate about trying to work as a team, which quickly degenerated into attempted shifting of blame for a PC death.
Imagine dealing with a group of little kids who don't like each other, or, seemingly, you.

Then there are the times when I feel unappreciated. Sometimes someone will say something like "All the NPCs ever do are have a catch-phrase and sometimes a little bit of information. I wish you had some NPCs with motivation or personality." Sometimes it just comes up when I spend a lot of time on something, or put in something I think is cool and have it promptly ignored. But most often it comes up when people don't seem to want to play. PSO, whatever's on TV, or phonecalls sometimes seem to take precidence. And when I spend every free hour for a week working on a game and no one seems to want to play, I get vexed.

There's a lot of others that can come up. As has been mentioned several times before, there's the occasion where something catches me completely by surprize (I'm finally learning how to deal with that). But that's actually fairly fun.

On the ups, DMing is wonderful, on the downs it's painful and a seeming waste of time. Finding the right group, and the right game, and the right style goes really far into keeping the ups high, and the downs pretty high too.

 

[Regal Worm of Slopp]

Sounds pretty awesome....it could be fun to DM some time when i have more experience....for now...i think that i will just play a pc and leave all the work up to my DM

 

[Agemegos]

A famous detective writer - Dashiel Hammet? - once said something to the effect of "Whenever I'm writing a story and I don't know what happens next, I have armed thugs kick open a door. It gets the action moving every time." That's true in D&D, too!

I think you'll find that was Raymond Chandler rather than Dashiel Hammett. This will come as no surprise to you if you have read some of the works of each. Hammett's stories are much better put-together.

 

[Celtavian]

re

DMing is cooperative storytelling with the DM as narrator and the player's as characters. It's great fun because as the narrator/DM you set up interesting encounters and then watch how the player's react to them. You as the DM definitely have no idea what is going to happen next in the story because the players decide. This makes running the game as interesting, if not moreso, as reading a book or writing your own story because you are often as clueless as the players to the resolution of the story.

 

[Agemegos]

lol....ummm...the main h=thing is i am curious about is what do you do if the players dont do what you want?

Usually, I make up an adventure about the things that they do. This still leaves me with a problem when the player characters won't do anything at all. This problem comes up most often if I let the characters get into a comfortable and secure position. Keep them hungry, keep them under threat, and they'll keep wriggling.

how do you incorporate things if the players did somethim differently than you imagined?

The way I make this easy to deal with is always to think of the characters as being bound into conflict with an antagonist. A dramatic situation always consists of two opposiing forces: conflict with an antagonist and a motivation that drives teh protagonist on despite the conflict. If the situation changes so as to diminish the conflict, I introduce a development to keep it advancing to the crisis. If a character does something to weaken or loosen the bond that prevents them from simply wandering away, I do something to maintain or tighten the bond.

But of course this advice is only useful if you design adventures in terms of a developing dramatic situation. It is not useful if you design adventures in terms of a network of places with monsters, traps, and treasure in them. There is a third way to design adventures (apart from any I don't know of), essentially as a flowchart of character actions. I find tht approach hardes, and for that matter don't do it very well.

how do you make it feel real (the world)?

I do that (insofar as I do achieve it) by bearing in mind that NPCs are always doing something, and doing it for their own reasons, and that they don't see interacting with the PCs, and especially don't see laying down their lives to use up 25% of the PCs' combat resources, as their reason for being. Whenever I introduce an NPC, I ask myself "What is this guy doing, and why?". And I try to avoid using stock answers. Whenever I introduce a structure or complex of structures, I ask "Who built this, and what for?", and lay it out accordingly: but in this case I do use stock answers, and it impresses and convinces the players as they learn that one of my settings has an architectural and engiineering tradition, with things tending to be done a certain way for a certain purpose, so that they can take account of these regularities in their planning. Consistency is convincing.

My secret hint for young GMs is that it is much, much easier to produce and maintain a world that seems real if the world is real, so it is much easier to GM (especially when you are cutting your teeth) in contemporary, very-near-future, and recent past genres than it is in fantasy, parallel-universe, and far future SF settings, or even a galaxy far away a long, long time ago.

how do you make sure that the players do the right thing to start an adventure? how does anything ever work out when the players dont truly (though they may have an idea) know what the adventure requires them to do? i know that this uncertanty is the essence of the game, but how do you, as the DM, make sure it all works out???

In this area the very best asset you can have is that the PCs should be understood as doing some particular thing together for a common purpose. For example, if it is understood that the players will be a team of 'dungeon-delvers' who raid gilded holes to murder and rob monsters, all you have to do is place a hole that looks suitably gilded and not too infested, and down they go. The problem is that dungeon-crawling may get tired after a while. One of my favourite stock situations is the team of PCs who are a criminal investigation team for some sort of law-enforcement agency (usually in a modern or SF setting): a crime is discovered, one of them catches the call, and they go investigate as a matter of course. A team of agents in a romanticised intelligence agency gives you the same automatic quality. So does a small firm of private investigations: the femmme fatale comes to their office and gives them a job, a wire from New York offers them a job, and they do the job.

These stock situations also give the players strong hints about the sorts of things their characters ought to do to get and keep things going.

If you don't have a stock situation that drives the PCs as a team automatically into the adventures, the best thing you can have is a firm understanding of what the character's motivations are. Knowing what a character wants to do, what goals he or she strives for and what evils he or she would prevent, is much more important for designing an adventure than knowing what his or her class and level are. You can adjust for the class and level by changing the difficulties of encounters, but the whole adventure structure depends on the former. The thing here is that the charcter-players often don't think of their characters in dramatic terms (in terms of core motivation, defining characteristic, physical, psychological, and social dimensions) unless you suggest it to them an encourage them. And you can know the motivations if there are no motivations. So give your players a little prod. And while you are about it, make sure that they design charcters to be bound together with some sort of bbond, so that motivating one will drag them all along. It is much harder and less reliable if you try to take a group of PCs who are unconnected strangers and tie them together with circumstance.

That is the distillation of my experience GMing since March 1981, in just about every genre including romance, and under more than a dozen game systems. Other people have had different experiences, and so have learned different lessons. You may be more like them than you are like me. So don't dismiss what I say out of hand, but don't take this as gospel either. The best thing you can do is start, and learn your own lessons from your own experience.