GMing Advice: Your Game Should be What it says it is on the Tin

A friend of mine recently had a very amusing experience running Rogue Traders for his group. He presented his group with an assassination contract, meant to disrupt an upcoming vote on who would get to rule some lucrative mining planet.

He was completely floored when his players decided that instead of settling on just doing an assassination, they could rig the upcoming vote so that they would gain control of the lucrative mining planet.

Clearly my friend is blessed with ambitious players. Every single instance of players going off the rails to do something ballsy and epic is a gift that should be cherished by a wise GM.

He summed up the experience by stating:

"In my experience, players will create the type of sessions they want to play through their actions. You just need to follow through once they tell you what they want. Get out of the way."

It's excellent advice, assuming that the game your players have fun playing is a game you have fun running.

This post is largely geared towards readers who are recruiting players blind, and possibly people attempting to coax friends into forming a TTRPG playing group.

Incongruous Expectations

When a GM decides to start a campaign, they tend to have an idea what it will be like. Typically, just choosing a game system is a fairly binding choice right out of the gate. If you're playing in PARANOIA, or Exalted, or the World of Darkness, you have some pretty solid foundations that you can assume will hold true in most campaigns.

But even within the confines of game systems, there's plenty of variance on how each game can be approached. Saving the world quests, hack and slash combat, and political shenanigans are all three distinct campaign styles that you could run in each of the systems/settings above. (If Friend Computer says you saved the world, you saved the fucking world. Happiness is Mandatory.)

With all of that wiggle room and ambiguity, it's easy to see why horror stories abound of people joining new groups, only to discover that what the group considers (fun/acceptable/normal) is completely different than what the new player/gm expected. 

Even assuming some of those horror stories might be attributable to troglodytes and misanthropic assholes, I'm certain that a good portion of them are related to GMs/Groups failing to properly get on the same page about what everyone wants out of the game.

What the GM Wants

I certainly approach a new campaign by asking 'What do I want?'. After all, a GM who isn't interested in the type of game that they're supposed to run is in for a bad time. And so are their players.

Lately some family asked me to start a campaign for them so my goals were loosely:

• Introduce completely green players to GURPS and TTRPGs
• Not run a modern action game because I'm already running one
• Considering that the players are new, whatever I come up with should have some heavy structure to it- I ended up choosing a central heroic quest that they'll hopefully latch onto and enjoy undertaking
  

Usually a GM's goals will align with the system, setting, genre, and premise that they present to potential players. The better you can do this, the easier a time you will have finding players who mesh well with you and the group.

Know Thyself

The Exalted Guru I know is an expert at weaving storylines together and does an excellent job of balancing the spotlight for players who frequently have extremely different gameplay goals. That said, I can't picture him running a mega-dungeon, or staying interested in a hack-and-slash campaign for very long.

I have another friend whose GMing talents revolve around heavy systemic world-building, coupled with good skill at stringing together missions to form a campaign. Building that world and doing the ground-level prep necessary to set players loose in those settings as a sandbox without firm rails is not really within their GMing toolbox.

I myself mostly run skulky-action games set in the modern age. My attempt at running something closer to super-heroes and every single one of my attempts to run Blades in the Dark have been utter failures.

Clearly, it's beneficial to be honest and aware of what you do well, what you can handle, and what you should recuse from and let someone else helm if that's what the group wants to play.

If you set out to do X, tell players they should expect X, and then fail to do it well because you're actually better at Y and unintentionally running Y, you've set yourself up for problems.

Know Thy Players

Discussion of player motivations and how to categorize them into taxonomies have been going on for decades. Given just how much those motivations can affect the course of a game, it's clear why it's a topic that's always good for sparking long conversations with your local grognards.

When your game allows the players to do the things they find interesting to do in play, you're in for a good time as a GM. Especially if what they find interesting also happens to be fun for you to watch.

Which is why it is so vitally important that the way you talk about the campaign accurately represents what the campaign will be like. If players accurately know what they're getting into, the better the chances that they will self-select OUT if the game wouldn't be a good fit for them.

In Summary:

Games are a blend of both what the GM and the Players want. The closer the premise and style of a campaign matches with the temperaments and goals of the players, the less friction there will be.

The better a GM is able to understand their tendencies, and the more accurately they represent themselves and their games, the easier time they'll have gathering players of a similar mindset.

A GM's capability to execute on what they try to do, their skill at the craft, and their improvisational chops  will determine how well things go when expectations clash, or unanticipated situations happen.


To his credit, my Rogue Trader pal handled the curveball from his players with aplomb. If the players pull off what they're planning, it will be a story they retell for years.

Final Thought:

It's important that you've reached zen acceptance that allowing other people to do things in an imaginative space where decisions actually lead to logical consequences will inevitably lead to the game not looking like the color-by-numbers you had originally envisioned in your mind.

If the emergent dynamics of a campaign freak you out, might I suggest becoming a novelist?

My Players, and Working with them

Every gaming group is different. I do believe there is a spectrum that most people fall on between Thespian Method Actor and Hack N'Slash Munchkin. It's safe to say that a normal distribution is probably appropriate- most players appreciate a mix of both, and the populations of fanatics tapers down on either side.

That said, groups also differ on how they approach problems, how much they like to plan and prepare, and even on how much in-character banter they want to have.

So I'm going to talk a bit about my players, and how I adapt my games to run more smoothly with them.

As a Group:

• Group preference is for text-based campaigns. When I floated using voice chat reaction was nearly unanimous that text was the preferred medium.
• Pace of play is fairly slow and methodical- while not nearly as slow as PBP, it's still objectively on the slower side.
• Every player is capable of not being in the spotlight. It is hard to overstate just how easy this makes things for me. Try as I might, occasionally someone gets injured and has to recuperate, a single PC dominates the screen time of a session, or someone gets stuck on overwatch outside while the stealthy party within aces things and no outside threats emerge. None of my players have ever raised this as an issue.
• Engagement is generally high- this is aided strongly by the text format and the maturity of my players. It's highly unusual for people to be unaware of what's going on in game- largely sidestepping issues of having to catch people up on recent events because they went to go pee, or were stacking dice, they got bored because their PC had nothing to do, or had to help their roommate snap out of a flashback.
• The group is Focused. Everyone is highly aligned on the group goal, and having their PC contribute to the mission. This group does a really good job of not deeply exploring what I consider to be roleplaying empty calories- wenching, asking what booze is available at the bar, etc.
• The group thrives off preparation, planning, and executing their strategies. While willing to improvise when needed, they generally take a very methodical approach.
• Pinebox as a campaign doesn't have a huge emphasis on Roleplay, with more focus on the tasks at hand for the PCs. That's not to say that the Players don't Roleplay their characters, it's that they've rolled with the pacing and campaign structure. This goes back to how focused they are.

Individually:

I'm going to use the PCs names as pseudonyms for my players to maintain their privacy.

Gaston is the newest player to join the group, currently playing the team doctor/demolitions expert. He's attentive and does a really good job playing up the generous/selfless nature of his character. Being last to the table and chargen, he filled in missing skills for the group, and has crushed it ever since, which isn't always easy in my games. I might encourage him to consider playing a face the next time a new campaign comes around.

Otto is one of my two players who have stuck around since Agency 17. Otto's instincts for combat tactics are among the best in the group- if he's thinking it's a good time for a retreat, it's probably time to get out of dodge. Otto frequently keeps me on my toes, oftentimes recalling old plot points, NPCs, or piecing things together from clues. He pays way more attention to things than he lets on.

Alex is a long-time IRL friend. His flexibility and overall competence has allowed him to fill numerous roles within the group- from skulk, to hacker, to combat heavy. It's really hard to single out things that make him such a good player, although I will say having the shared context of knowing him about a decade does make dumping specific things into the game much easier. For example, I knew he'd know what the Mirai Botnet was when I referenced it in-game.

Hassan has continually been the one stuck with the leadership role in the group since they participated in my Agency 17 campaign. I largely think this is due to his good executive function and capability to break problems down into actionable items. We have a rapport where he seems to just innately get how things function in my campaigns- which means that if he whips up a plan, there's a high chance his enemies are going to be in for a lot of pain.

Kujo has had the most PC deaths/injuries out of any of my players, a consequence of their preference for playing combat heavies. Kujo is starting to grow into being the closet thespian of the group, steadily improving their roleplaying and characters since their beginning losing their PC session 1 of Prohibition Mob. Kujo's often responsible for bringing a little bit of zaniness to things, helping bring humor and vibrancy to what's going on, all while being just as laser focused as the rest of the gang.

Accommodations :

Currently, we've been playing Pinebox for 122 weeks- 2.3 years. At this point we've settled into a steady rhythm, so it's not so much of active accommodations as it is continuing what already works.

• I generally allow the players ample time to plot, plan, and discuss their next actions. Obviously this doesn't apply when combat's going on or they're on a crashing plane, but there are very few situations where they're rushed.
• I put a large emphasis on allowing the players to decide how they want to pursue their goals. While the campaign has rails ("Your objective is to prevent Imprint Technology from being finalized"), those rails aren't very restrictive. As the plot demands I might throw constraints at them, but the onus is on them to decide what they're doing.
• I do my best to telegraph information to my players when appropriate. They're playing badass operatives, they might just have a hunch that someone approaching them can throw down without needing to roll. Their planning habits also thrive off having information at hand.
• I occasionally skip skill checks when it's obvious success would be trivial for their characters.
• I stop play when it's clear that I'm getting gassed or need time to plan out ahead.
• I allow the players to create unfair situations for their enemies and then curbstomp them.
• I don't fudge results in combat, and the group has occasionally gotten caught with their pants down, wound up in an unfair situation, and almost got hosed because of it. ("Overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer.")
• Enemies generally don't have good enough intel on the players to specifically plan for their individual capabilities.

Observations on GMing Mistakes and Momentum of Play

Some sessions are going to be less energetic than others. Maybe there's a person at the table having a difficult day. Maybe there's multiple players having difficult days. Outside of the external factors, campaigns will naturally ebb from high energy to low, as the story has its beats, rising actions, climaxes, and the fallout.

That said, if a GM mishandles things, it can completely grind a group's momentum to a crawl.

Preparation, usually the lack thereof:

It's on the GM to prepare enough that they can give the players avenues of action that they can take. This varies depending on genre, but if your players can't seem to come up with something to do, chances are there's not enough prep going into the campaign.

For a dungeon crawl game you should likely have an idea of the dungeon the group is going into, a sense of the denizens, or at least the capability to improv on the fly. For games not quite running on the Felltower wavelength, you really should be fleshing out factions, NPCs, and providing hooks.

It's entirely possible to have players who are looking for a quasi-sandbox experience who will hit that wall of not knowing what to do next- even if they are fully engaged actively trying to find a direction.

If your players seem interested in a hook you improvise the shit out of that hook, even if it's not necessarily what you had in mind, or anything you had planned. That interest, that desire to explore and check things out, that's the flicker of momentum starting. A hook meant to develop sessions later is probably better used now if players would otherwise be twiddling their thumbs.

Be practical about your preparation. You really don't need a full character sheet for most mooks or minor characters. It's often times safe to not have full character sheets even for important NPCs who can be reasonably expected to not participate in combat. It's perfectly fine to only lay out combat traits for combatants, and maybe note important social skills for a character who only serves as a merchant, informant, quest-giver, etc.

Furthermore, If players aren't going to interact with it, don't make it a big focus of your preparation. Having the players being adjacent to the most interesting thing going on in the campaign world is often a bad idea, unless that most interesting thing is invariably deadly (plague, mustard gas, swaths of destruction*, etc). It's pointless to make complex magic systems if your players don't want to interact with a byzantine magical system and instead wonder why their death spells get less DPS than an assault rifle. It's a bad idea to create a massive cosmology/pantheons of Gods if people are largely interested in playing secular or atheist characters.

Leave room to react, only the most linear of games allow for planning things out like a TV show. Games are volatile. Some settings allow for resurrections, some don't. It's not particularly fun to have to ass-pull or fudge something when the dice say that a critical (N)PC just ate a x4 damage headshot putting them well beyond -5xHP. Planning too far ahead isn't practical, especially if it's predicated off actions the players are *supposed* to take.

"I don't want to prep too much until I know what the PCs are doing"

So, this at first brush seems like a chicken or egg problem. GM doesn't want to over-invest in prepping in areas where it won't matter (good), but likely doesn't prep enough for the current situation (bad). I see it as coming from a few factors.

Lack of group direction/purpose. Everyone meets in a bar and then just randomly decide to join up together and form and adventuring crew? We've all heard this cliche, and it's a rotten way of starting a campaign unless you've got a good crew of thespians who want to hammer out why everyone's working together in-character for a session. I vastly prefer having strong purpose for the existence of a group of PCs. 

"You're part of the clandestine organization Agency 17, the existence of which is hidden even from the other 16 members of the US Intelligence Community."

"Prohibition has rocked 1920s New York City, leading to ample opportunities for criminal enterprises and their members to catapult themselves to wealth and infamy."

"You're a group of Augmented Humans hand-picked by an angel to fight off the forces of Hell."

This is almost entirely on the GM, right from campaign conception. Unless you're starting session 1 with a strong sense of what the PC purpose is, or an iron-clad** way of determining it through play, you're already behind the eight ball.

Related to overall group purpose there's Lack of Immediate direction. This usually results when players don't have paths, hooks, or things to do/react to. The players might be rip-roaring to do something, stacking dice and browsing on their phones while the group spins its wheels, but without something to actually *DO* it's pointless. This is almost always a result of not enough prep.

Players need information and context to make decisions. In a linear game, some of this can be taken away ("Your next mission is..."), but for many games players are going to be on the hook for choosing their next objective or goal, and they need a solid informational ground to stand on. They need to know the situation, the NPCs, the factions, maybe cultural or geographical details. It is explicitly the GM's job to provide these details.

Other Momentum Killers:

• Allowing players to spin wheels too long, and/or rehash the same conversation multiple times while discussing plans
• Not allowing players enough time to incubate and ruminate on plans
• Not allowing players the capability to follow up on things they find intriguing
• Allowing too much focus on extraneous BS (seducing wenches, drinking plans, trivial travel plan details, etc)
• Specifically tailoring challenges so that a single player has a bad time (because once they clock out, risk of others doing the same goes up)
• Being overly adversarial with players (Are you here to beat them or provide a fun experience?)
• Not properly adjusting your campaign style to ensure it suits your players (grimdark campaign + players who just want to goof off = bad time)
• Making or allowing others to make a player uncomfortable.
• Not recognizing when things aren't working well and changing course/stopping

*A friend of mine knows someone whose Ranger's favored enemy type is Swaths

**Seriously, if you initial sessions happen and the group doesn't gel or establish a purpose, wrap things up cause you likely just scuttled the campaign right out of the gates.

The Burden of being the Party Leader

Douglas Cole recently had a pretty gnarly experience in the Aeon Supers campaign being run by Christopher Rice. From what I've read, Cole is kicking himself a lot for the lack of planning that very nearly resulted in disaster.

I can understand why Cole is frustrated. Cole is playing The Commander. That's not just his character's name, I'm certain it's also his role within the team itself in character.

Many players (wisely) avoid playing characters who are leaders. This is because playing a character who is a leader almost without exception means being a party leader among players as well.

Wring your hands all you want, but the two are largely inseparable.

Mavrick, the guy who plays Sam in Prohibition Mobsters, resisted Sam becoming leader for the first couple of months of the campaign. I've never really asked if it was fear of the responsibility, an attempt to give the other players a bite at the apple if they wanted it, or what.

Now, with Mobsters, my guys plan consistently and constantly. Their tactical planning is overall weaker than their strategic (battle plans vs. plans for taking over the city), but for the most part they're savvy as hell. I should probably investigate allowing Tony a little more oomph for the points he's spent on tactics, natural war leader, and the like.

They're had only a couple of really bad moments of clearly not taking a moment to think throughout the campaign. (Tony's player leads the charge, having had his first PC die session 1 of the campaign and getting Isaac captured much more recently.)

Within the Mob group, there's a lot of group discussion, and Mavrick isn't usually strictly calling the shots. There's a good amount of flex out of character. In character, Sam has things locked down, and is starting to become someone with a decent level of authority over the other PCs and their organization as a whole.

Seriously, pull rank. You spent the points.

That said, if things ever did come down to a serious disagreement about how to proceed, both the decision and the resulting consequences lay at the feet of the leader. Sam's got the high rank, so by extension Mavrick gets to be primus inter pares.

I'm sure the AEON group will figure it out, and I suspect defining the role of leader both in and out of character will provide a useful lever for everyone involved to become a well-oiled machine of great justice.

After all, someone's going to be digging through their trash really soon looking for conspiracies to uncover. Would be unfortunate if they were to uncover incompetence among the ranks.

Improvise!

Players generally have no idea when a GM has meticulously planned out what is currently happening, or whether they are flying by the seat of their pants.

It's part of the disparity in information presented to the players. Unless you (the GM) state that the car about to slam into them is yellow, that car could be any number of colors, and each player is likely to imagine a different color in their head.

A blacked-out SUV definitely brings a different image to mind than a tricked-out low rider with custom rims.

I generally don't see a lot of focus on how to improvise well, there's always an emphasis on the GM doing the heavy lifting for plot.

First, players who can drive plot and take action without having to purely react to everything are amazing and awesome and you should jealously prevent these players with threats of bodily harm from joining games with schedule conflicts with your own. I'm not talking the dingbats that run off doing frivolous shit that only their character cares about, I'm talking the players that hear that a rival mob boss recently got out of prison and does something about it.

They don't wait for that guy to attack, they decide that they want to scout this situation out now. 

The GM isn't Atlas, carrying the entire plot is a recipe for burnout and frustration.

Second, almost everybody plans too specifically. Information that is required for the story to move forward needs to be accessible to the group- and people frequently hide that behind hidden doors, passwords, or in other crafty locations that players never consider to look.

Again, disparity of available information. To the GM things seem obvious. To my players "Out in the harbor" doesn't imply that SOMEONE IS ON A FUCKING BOAT IN THE HARBOR.

Tip: In modern games, especially TL 8 (and for part of TL 7), cellphones and computers will be the go-to source of info being held by an NPC if that NPC doesn't want to share over coffee. I should probably write a post about how much of a pain in the ass warping effect cellphones have on games.

Third, trying to plan for PC actions is near impossible, although part of that is familiarity with your group. Some groups are far more chaotic than others- the Agency 17 boys never made a severe attempt to truly go off the rails. Other groups actively run away from plot.

If your players run away from plot, I suggest getting new players or doing a much better job indicating what your game is about so people buy into the premise.

We're talking about tabletop roleplaying, not writing a book. The GM gets to react to what the players do, just like the players react to what the GM throws at them. Some of the best moments ever are when a player thinks outside the box and comes up with a solution to a problem that is both cool and successful.

Fourth, as a GM you really should be thinking about cause and effect and logic. I've blogged about this previously.

Really improvising well draws on knowing appropriate consequences for the players actions, knowing how the setting, situation and NPCs should react to various occurrences, and making sure that it's all consistent with one another.


So the players have caught you with your pants down. You expected them to accept a deal with this certain duke/capo/politician/government and they decided to fly dual-middle fingers to everyone and go for plan B (#15).

So... uh... what do?

1. Relax. Breathe. Sure, things have not gone as planned, but you got this. Worst case scenario, feel free to end the session and state that you need time to plan around what happened. Your players will feel awesome for doing that to you If you only need 15 minutes, go on a 'bathroom break'.
2. Do not worry about the plans you had. They are smoke now.
3. Focus on the now. You only have to get to the end of the session. Red tape and bureaucracy are your friends here. There's tons of crafty ways to delay player actions to drag things out when you need to slow down the pace of a game. See #57. Be devious.
4. Use logic. People use internally consistent logic to make decisions, even if they can't explain the logic or don't understand the logic. NPCs are the same.
5. Let the consequences happen. If your players ask for trouble- give it to them! So what if that powerful duke/mayor is angry at the players now? Let it happen! Your players have just livened things up and asked for a major challenge! Roll with it!
6. Decide later how things shake out on the bigger picture.

It gets far easier with time and practice. Plan less, think more, react better.