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Message: <blockquote data-quote="innerdude" data-source="post: 6642122" data-attributes="member: 85870">The best advice I ever got for being a GM was, "There is no story." In other words, there is no prescribed "ending" or organized "narrative" to which PCs must inevitably be pushed. As soon as I let go of that illusory construct, my abilities and enjoyment as a GM moved forward tremendously. The natural outgrowth of that move was to take a "scene framing" approach to sessions and encounters. I'm not setting any outcome for a given scene, I'm merely setting the "frame," letting the players interact with it to determine its outcome using any and all resources at their disposal, then "spinning out" the next set of scene frames based on the results in the fiction. When @<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/member.php?u=42582" target="_blank">pemerton</a> described his method for GM-ing, it was instantly recognizable to me, because I had been doing it for 6 or 8 months at that point. But it took several years of struggle to embrace that approach. For me the big questions I'd ask other GMs would revolve around how to ensure that you're setting up the right kind of campaign. The biggest problem RPGs have in many cases boils down to unmet expectations on the part of one or more participants. I'd ask questions related to genre-specific principles, like, "To get the right feel for space opera, how do you approach player concern X?" Or, "Are there creative ways to do mass combat in fantasy that don't de-protagonize the players?" Other than that, most of my questions end up being system-specific. Once I've determined the feel and style I want for a particular campaign, and chosen a system (usually this involves collaboration with the players), I'll make a checklist of things I see as being key points that I'm not familiar with. Ultimately I think there are really only a handful of "universal" principles of GM-ing. Once you get past the well-documented general GM-ing stuff, the real "meat" of GM questions will be more tightly focused on genre/style and how to maintain the right "feel" at the table. Among those would be questions on how to radically reduce encounter prep for a given system.</blockquote>

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