First Time GM Tips?

I'm planning on G Ming a game of GURPS at some point. Problem is, I've never G Med before. I've done some playing, though, so if anyone could help me, that would be awesome!

PS. If it matters, I'm using 3rd Edition R&R.

GURPS is kind of rough to do for a first time GM. If there are experienced players in the table, in fact, I would avoid it altogether, because GURPS gets really rules heavy and an experienced player can literally snap it over their knee so hard that it makes Exalted and Wo D powergamers look on in sheer awe.

For example, Gunslingers that pretty much can not miss their target regardless of circumstances, or martial artists that can take on the entire setting with both arms missing.

Yeah, don't start with GURPS. It's an unholy mess of math and numbers. That said, even if you do start with GURPS, the rest of my advice is systemless.

• COMMUNICATE WITH YOUR PLAYERS. I really can't stress this one enough. Talk with your players to learn what's working, what's not, where they want to take things, etcetera. Similarly, let them know what you feel is working, what you'd like to see from them, and how you tend to operate as a GM. Since this is your first time, take a look at your campaign notes and see if you can figure out your own style.
• Plan ahead. I'm not saying you need to allow for every eventuality—because let's face it, there's no predicting PC's—but you do need to at least start with a framework each week so that you can at least start your session off on a high note. That way, when your players jump the rails and you go from confident explanations of their situation to "Um, well over here there's this guy, and.... crap. Give me a few minutes to throw something together," it's their fault, not yours. Note: Anyone who has played with me will tell you this is a definite case of do as I say, not as I do.
  • Plans can break down. You cannot plan the future. Only presumptuous fools plan. The wise man steers. Schrödinger's Gun is your best friend. Players are a lot more forgiving of railroading when they feel like they're given a choice of whether or not to follow the tracks.
  • If you feel up to it, try penguin plotting. An example from my game that didn't end up pulling through, because I was in a rush to get somewhere through that session:

• "Because I said so" is a valid reason for why your player can't do something logical that you hadn't planned for, but not a good one. You and your players are monkeys with typewriters, and there's more of them, so they're bound to be more creative than you at some point. Your best bet is simply to go with it.

• Make your one-off NP Cs stand out. The players probably aren't going to see them again, so have fun with them and you might get an Ensemble Dark Horse on your hands. Whether it's putting on a funny voice or giving them an interesting personality quirk, this will make your games a lot more memorable and can really help to flesh out a world. I've had multiple NP Cs that I improvised on the spot become integral parts of the campaign, and even had one graduate to PC status after that player's old character died, because I did things like giving them a Russian accent.
• Make every encounter count. If it's just there to kill time, it's going to eat up your session time that could be used for roleplaying. I'd rather play a game with fewer fights and have each fight be an epic set piece battle than go through a bunch of repetitive orc-slaying motions. Again, this is a case of do as I say, not as I do. Also, credit where it's due—I have some issues with They Call Me Tomu's DM style, some of them rather severe, but I do have to admit that he excels in this particular area.
• I'm a big believer in getting to the action as soon as possible.
• Challenges exist to be overcome, not to screw your players. There are people who like a Killer Game Master, but I find that this sort of confrontational attitude quickly becomes detrimental to the game as a whole.
• The rules exist to facilitate fun. If you find yourself in a situation in which following the rules as written would hamper fun, feel free to throw your books out the window and wing it.

That's it for now. Might come back with more later.

edited 6th Nov '13 5:07:03 AM by KyleJacobs

Everything Jacobs up there said, plus this:

Remember that the heart of roleplaying is the roleplaying. People will say that the heart of roleplaying is the story, but they're off a bit; it's the actual process of roleplaying. In other words, the more your players are involved, the more they'll enjoy the story. Instead of lengthy plot exposition, dangle the plot like a worm on a hook; let the players find out what's happening through roleplaying, and it will be more fun for everyone.

Furthermore, the scene is the basic unit of roleplaying. When you're planning out a session, instead of coming up with what plot you want to go through and then designing around that, come up with a few scenes you think would be really fun- a parkour chase on top of moving trains, a climactic battle, an intense roleplaying scene trying to procure valuable info from an NPC, that sort of thing. Then integrate those scenes into the plot. If something doesn't work, no loss- save that scene idea for later and proceed.

1. Find what your players like. Not everyone gets into RP Gs for the same thing. I rp with my friends for the past 10 years so I got a good beat on what they like, but when R Ping with strangers, I like to make them rate from 1 to 10 how they like the following:
   1. Combat
   2. Puzzles
   3. Character Interactions
   4. Story
2. A corollary to the above, there's no "Right" way to RP or run a game. The right way is the way everyone has fun. A light on plot, heavy on action game is fine if its what everyone gets the most fun out of. Consequently, a game with almost no action but big deep plot and huge social elements is also fine.
3. The GM is a player too!! I can't emphasize this enough. It's not your duty to put up with whatever dickish things the players do, especially if it kills your enjoyment of the game. If a player's actions repeatedly make running the game not fun for you. Tell him. Explain to him that if you're not having fun, you don't have much incentive to keep running the game.
4. Plan, But Don't Over Plan (AKA Moving the Goal Posts). You aren't writing a book. Don't settle for a set series of events. A puzzle with an obvious solution to you might not be obvious for the players, so be ready to create a new solution, or accept one of theirs who is sufficiently clever, rather than just wait for them to stumble onto your own logic. Be ready to move things around so if your players don't walk the path you had planned, you can move the stuff you planned into the new path they made for themselves - ties with Kyle's "Disguising railroad by making them think they chose" idea.
   1. Corollary to the above: Don't punish players for being more clever than you. There's many of them, and only one of you. It'll happen. Don't begrudge them for bypassing certain encounters or challenge by being clever or thinking of things you had not planned for. It'll happen.
5. Find out what motivates your player, use it to manipulate them. For example, one of my group, the players are rather vengeful - they hate someone getting the better of them, and I can spur them into action by just hinting they might be able to get their hands on a person they feel wronged them and got away.
6. Even if you're not planning to run it, I recommend reading the 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide. Especially chapter 2. It's entirely a "new to G Ming" guide with advices for running a game for the first time that can be applied to any game - how to deal with troublesome players, how to deal with expectations, how to describe environments, time management, etc.... Even if you never plan to touch D&D, it's a valuable read for the new GM.

edited 6th Nov '13 6:32:16 AM by CobraPrime

My best suggestion is that you should always have at least an idea of where things are going to go if the players don't get involved with a particular plot thread. Because it's inevitable that they'll either screw up or just actively ignore a given thread, and you never want to be left going "and then what?" Rather than railroad them into a thread, show them the consequences of ignoring a thread. If they can deal with it, hey, that's their choice.

To reiterate what Kyle said, communication with the players is a must. The best game I was ever in had frequent discussions between the GM and the players (I was one of the players). In addition to the points previously mentioned about getting to know what works, it also provides an opportunity to conduct solo spots that are horrendous to handle at the table.

Always be ready to award brilliance. This is related a bit to the previous point about "Penguin plotting," but different in that it's letting players bounce around different ideas to solve a problem rather than find one. I don't know how many times my players have started snowballing about what skills might be applicable in a given situation, and one skill I hadn't even thought of sounds like it would reasonably qualify for success. Also, this encourages players to put ranks/points in all sorts of interesting skills, which can lead to good role-playing opportunities.

Another thing on players bypassing shit: Theyw ill. They will absolutely ignore your plots, bypass important things, and everything else horrible you can think of. Be prepared for it, and don't begrudge it too hard. However, if they do something- or dont'!- in a way that would dick them over, don't feel like you have to let them off scott-free. Don't be too harsh on them, but it is okay to remind them, even a little forcefully, that there is a plot.

No matter how much you love your plot idea, remember that the players are not characters in a novel. There's only so much you can force the usual group through before they'll stop playing with you. What you should do is come up with a goal (ie, stop supervillain plot, rescue kidnapped princess, whatever) and then, think of at least three ways the party could accomplish that goal. Then be prepared for the players to come up with at least three completely different ways to also accomplish that goal. If what they come up with is similar to what you thought of, awesome - modify and run with it. If it's completely different, roll with it anyway, or come up with something good to distract them.

But most of all, be prepared to improvise. Heavily.

Thanks everyone! I'll take your advice and not do GURPS. I have a few other choices:

• Star Wars RPG (the West End Games version)
• Spycraft (First Edition)

Also, that Penguin Plotting idea seems really interesting. I'll certainly try it!

Oh, I have another that came up in my game this past Friday to keep in mind -

Your goal isn't necessarily to give them the encounter that they expect, but an encounter that they have a chance of overcoming.

My personal example? Playing Pathfinder, my players are basically rent-a-cops for a merchant guild. Their latest assignment is taking them through an area known to be covered in zombies. In fact, they ran into a few last time they were kind of close to where they were headed this time. They arrive near sundown to a village that was dead silent. They get closer, they see plenty of corpses - some fresh, but some that had "somehow" rotted a bit before being ripped apart near town. The players all tense up, ready their various anti-zombie preparation (including burning an invisibility to undead scroll)... and they get charged by giant skunks.

The players prevailed in the end, mind you, and in some ways the fight was easier (fewer targets, no worries about DR) - though of course there were some ways in which it was harder (they had more hit points, reach, and skunk musk, enough said). But the challenge was a reasonable one, and certainly memorable (in no small part because you remember nearly being ambushed by giant skunks), and the players all responded positively to it.

Mind you, if you are going to do this bait-and-switch, you have to keep two things in mind. One is that they players should be able to handle a challenge completely different than the one that they optimized for. Two is that you should at least have it make sense (in the case of the above, the skunks had been dealing with zombie incursions and decided to aggressively strike back against the problem - so they attacked the nearest place where they could find zombies, which was the town that the zombies started attacking). I don't care if your players can handle a war hippopotamus; if they're in the middle of the arctic, you're just going to derail the game with confusion (unless, of course, your game is the sort of off-the-wall lunacy that happens to have stuff like arctic war hippos).

You sound like a wizard player's worst nightmare.

I want an arctic war hippo mount.

Celestial Template applies cold resistance.

So Artic Celestial Hippos are a possibility.

@11 That may be the highest praise I've ever gotten about GMing. The funny part is that I generally don't like playing wizards - it's only apt that wizards would yank out their ridiculously long white beards out at the prospect of dealing with me.

@12, @13 - Well, I guess it wouldn't be that difficult to come up with a version of a hippopotamus that was suited to arctic environs. Genetically, they're close to cetaceans - since we have plenty of those evolved for colder environs (for example, orcas and narwhals), you could just have your world naturally evolve one of those species so that it goes on land, and happen to have stats similar to a hippo. Alternately, wooly hippos may have evolved. Or, of course, A Wizard Did It. I imagine it only requires a bit of tweaking in terms of stats, though you may want to cull from cetaceans for how they'd be different ecologically.

I think it would be a mark of good storytelling to drive your players to the point where they actually invent the Invisibility From Hippopotamus spell.

All of this actually leads me to another tip - one that I've had issue with in the past, no less:

Have a plan for dealing with derails.

Some derails will be due to things the players say - side jokes that continue into the game, the inevitable Monty Python quotes, making fun of stupid things the other players have done in-character... these things will all happen.

Then, of course, are the derails that you accidentally cause. Maybe you describe just a ludicrous scene. Maybe your role-playing of an NPC was hilariously bad... or hilariously good. Maybe you just said the phrase "arctic war hippos." Regardless, you've unintentionally pulled out a Level Breaker at the table. This, sadly, happens way more frequently than most GMs care to admit.

Regardless, it helps to have an idea of how to get things back on track, lest the session devolve into Night At The Improv, with dice. If you know how folks are likely to get back on track, you can tailor your specific strategies (for example, at my table, one player happens to enjoy getting under the skin of one of the others - when he tries, I tell the first player to shut up before the second player gets riled up). But it helps to have a few ideas in mind before things get underway.

I'm more into the "the only way to not to derail is to have no rails at all" idea though.

I'm not talking about plot derails - I'm talking about game derails, when the players seem more interested in talking about anything except the game in front of them. When table talk overwhelms game talk. When the players are more interested in rehashing old in-jokes and South Park sketches than actually participating in the game.

And those can happen regardless of how structured your plot is. In fact, I sometimes think that the greatest danger to such a thing happening is to have a completely unrailed plot, as there's very little about the game to focus the players' attention.

I'm actually probably going to be G Ming my third session tomorrow. I only played a couple times before finally getting enough of an itch to start my own campaign. It'll most likely be just me and one player (the others have things that happened and one is bitter along with myself at our plan to play yesterday falling though, understandable). This is a good time for me to get practice in running things, but I wanted to run through what I'm doing to see if I've got the philosophy down:

First off, this is a campaign built on jokes and shenanigans. It's my first campaign, but I'm running it this way to make it more fun for my friends and I, and also to let us improvise better with wacky things they do to try and break me. The least strange idea they came up with was seducing the king to try and defuse a standoff (part of the magic city activated and flew away, long story).

Second, I have only an idea of what's going to happen. To get this guy into the campaign (this is his first game ever), I'll have him in a different area that will come up later in the main sessions, hearing about the events of the previous session. The end goal is to get him to the location of the other players, and I have a few ideas about how to do that, but I don't want to force him into anything. I'll also introduce a few other things and bring some minor characters over from earlier sessions to tie him in better, since it's been a month since we last played and I'm making it a couple weeks in-game for now. It'll be a month when the whole group is together.

Third, I'm only going to have a small handful of fights at most. I feel like too many fights takes meaning away from them. Instead, I'll have obstacles that require thought, moral tests, that kind of thing (he's being a Paladin, after all).

Does this sound kosher?

You know, if you are running a campaign just based on jokes and shenanigans, why not check out Maid RPG?

I forgot to mention it earlier in the thread, but it's actually a fantastic and yet simple system with very rapid yet robust random character and setting generation.

Not to mention the fact that random generation can lead to things being ridiculously awesome.

You know a system does something right when you flat out lift its chargen system for other things you GM. These days I literally do not run any game, under any system, without Maid RPG handbook within reach for when I need to randomly generate an NPC or when a player gets stuck on character creation.

The system itself is also a great way to practice your ability to improvise and learn your player's habits as a Storyteller. I've seen a few people improve rapidly in their storytelling and learn how to avoid GM BSOD just from running Maid.

Seriously, if you are new to G Ming, check it out for chargen alone.

edited 16th Nov '13 1:39:48 AM by Alkonost

What's the premise of Maid RPG?

Everyone randomly generates a maid. GM randomly generates a Master (GMPC, effectively), the mansion, and the setting.

Currency of the game is Favor, which can be used on anything from increasing attributes to purchasing random (of course it's random) items to literally interrupting the narrative flow by forcing a GM to generate random events.

Hilarity is guaranteed to ensue as players compete with each other. Pv P is generally heavily implied by default, as it is in no players' interest to let others gain too much favor. So something like cooking the breakfast can literally turn into Game of Thrones levels of backstabbery and schemehatchery, with chainsaws and combat helicopters thrown in for a good measure. Except no one can actually die.

Basically if Hayate the Combat Butler was a pen and paper RPG, this would be it.

Great for one shots or whole campaigns if you want. Also can be combined with literally any system to create hilarity. I believe there was a Dark Heresy/Maid crossover on these forums a while back, most noted for its Ork maids. Still waiting on Exalted/Maid crossover to happen.

On a more serious note, the chargen system is both fun and robust, and can be used to randomly generate personalities quickly, creating sketches of characters on the fly. Of course, the appearance generation is extremely anime skewed, so you may want to eschew that unless you are totally okay with blue haired purple eyed albinos in your setting.

I actually looked into Maid RPG and I'm going to play it with some internet folk via Skype on Sunday because it's so simple. I've also got some chums from my usual flesh-and-blood group that want to try it, but we're going to hang out and do that, the two will be separate.

Only have two players for the online game, but I can't find anyone else, so we'll see how it goes.

After reading about Exalted and Maid, I really want to play a game with both as well.

Mansion-Cleansing Broom Technique is a charm that definitely needs to exist.