{"id":31772,"date":"2016-04-23T03:38:32","date_gmt":"2016-04-23T07:38:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=31772"},"modified":"2016-04-23T03:47:58","modified_gmt":"2016-04-23T07:47:58","slug":"rutskarns-gminars-ch1-your-job","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=31772","title":{"rendered":"Rutskarn’s GMinars CH1: Your Job"},"content":{"rendered":"

Before we get into any specific advice or instruction, I want to rectify the most basic and chronic misunderstanding about what goes into running a good roleplaying game.<\/p>\n

Anyone can spot the external functions of the GM: you’re referee and storyteller. You enforce the rules, you describe people, places, and events, you establish how difficult certain kinds of actions are. If you’re good at all of those things, great–they’ll absolutely make you a better GM. But they won’t, by themselves, make you a good one–and you can be terrible at one or all of them and still run a good game. They’re your job, but they’re not your real job.<\/em><\/p>\n

They’re not your core responsibility, which I will state as bluntly and unromantically as possible:<\/p>\n

As a GM, your real job is to give your players something to do.<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Obviously I don’t mean just anything. <\/em>Worksheets, dirty dishes, and yardwork are unlikely to form the nucleus of an enriching tabletop session. But never forget that your players are not there to watch a movie or play a boardgame; they are there to play a character. They’re there to encounter situations and respond to them, and you<\/em>, above anything else, are there to give them those situations. Your GM superpower isn’t that you know the rules or get to describe what the carpet at the castle looks like–it’s that you can conjur from thin air consternation, obstacles, opportunities, and mysteries for players to interact with.<\/p>\n

Making sure your players have things to do is the only skill you absolutely need<\/em> as a GM. If you can tell an interesting story or administrate the rules fairly, that’s great. If not, that’s absolutely something to work on. But if players get bored because they’re not doing things, that’s a critical problem no amount of skill at the other stuff will address.<\/p>\n

Once you start looking at your job not as referee<\/em>, not as storyteller<\/em>, but as stuff-to-do-giver<\/em>, it takes some of the pressure off–and makes it a little easier to prepare. Approach the job as though coming up with stuff for your players to do is your only real job and you’ll be off to a fine start.<\/p>\n

At the very beginning, before you’ve even figured out what your game’s about–before you know anything about your system or your storyline–talk to your players and figure out, above all, what stuff they want to do. <\/em>Do they want to explore dungeons, kill monsters, gather treasure? Do they want to fight or lead a war? Do they want to run a kingdom–or tear one down from the inside? Do they want to hunt vampires? Solve mysteries? Fix spaceships? Are they going to want to react first, think later–more suited to a madcap game where things happen with little warning and problems are smacked down as they emerge? Do they want to sit and think through problems–as they could in a game with riddles or mysteries or grand-scale tactics? What kinds of movies, books, videogames do they like? All of this is crucial data you need to prepare the right game.<\/p>\n

When you know more or less what kind of game you’re going to run, share that idea with your players. See what they think. Then study up on how players can make characters in your chosen system, teach them those rules, explain the basics of the setting, make clear the broad scope of possibilities, and let them all make the kind of character they want to play. And most importantly, for the love of god, d<\/strong>o this before you do any more planning–before you name a bad guy, create a faction, or plot out one session.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Why? Because by creating their characters, in a very real sense, your players have just created your campaign. Your job is to come up with stuff for those characters to do, and there’s no sense starting to do that before you know what the characters are and what they’re about. Your players didn’t create a big tough bruiser just to play in a game with no opportunities to fight, wrestle, or bully at important moments. They didn’t create a character with a terrifying appearance only to encounter a world full of disaffected, jaded people who aren’t moved by scary looks. They didn’t create a battlefield mechanic because they don’t <\/em>want stuff to break on them all the time. Plan a game where their character’s skillsets are suited to:<\/p>\n