Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 thimble_the_squit Jul 09, 2003 17:30:16	I've discussed this quite a bit with my own DM, comparing our different styles of running games; his are more down-and-dirty whilst mine are more action-adventure -- but, basically, we agree on the function of the DM: to make a good game. That sounds simplistic but there are very many considerations involved in this most fundamental mission statement. The game is at its best when all the players and the DM are having fun playing it, purely and simply. So what constitutes good fun? This varies for every group, based on personal taste. Some players prefer combat and high action to intrigue and roleplaying; others, vice versa. It is the DM's responsibility to adapt to her group's preference whilst not sacrificing her own. It is the DM's responsibility to write a good story. The players provide the characters and motivation for a strong campaign but, ultimately, the DM provides the milieu, conflict, mystery and all the other things that complete the game. The DM should be arbiter and adjudicator on all things regarding mechanics and campaign flavour. If an argument ensues over BAB, CR, AC, VIP, AWOL or whatever, the DM decides what goes. And this may annoy many rules lawyers (it certainly irks me but it's still the truth): it does not matter whether or not her players may know the rules better than she does, she remains the final authority. On the other hand, she should also be fair and impartial -- it does not make you a bad DM in deciding that rolling a natural 1 to hit (a fumbled weapon) provokes an Attack of Opportunity; it is unfair to apply that only to the PCs. It is not unfair to have someone's fighter fall to his death from a 100' cliff because he failed his Climb check by 5; it is bad DM-ing to grant another player's rogue a saving throw against the same eventuality, "[because] the rogue's more agile and he's a better climber". "One rule for one, the same rule for all," should be the DM's credo. Sometimes this means that a ruling can have unforeseen consequences, can set an unfortunate precedent. Perhaps you have decided that archery is quite weak (maybe you've looked at the difference in damage between the elf and his friend the greataxe-wielding half-orc) and you've raised the threat rating for all missile weapons; by 9th-level, that archer, with the Improved Critical feat, a +1 shock longbow and a quiverful of +3 arrows, is making a pepperpot out of all his foes... The DM must be also a prescient and considerate authority. Player choices, on the other hand, are not her responsibility; if a player makes a stupid choice, the DM has the right -- nay, the obligation -- to make his character suffer for it. She should not say, "You can't charge into melee with that troll, you're a wizard!" -- as this is a player's choice (and the DM should not deny her players the option of choice) -- but she could ask her player, "Are you sure you want to attack that troll? You saw what it did to the dwarf." It is a DM's duty to present appropriately challenging encounters and to provide appropriate reward for her players' efforts. If the opposition is too weak, the game becomes monotonous -- hack, slash, hack, slash, next? -- but if the foes are too difficult to defeat, too many PCs die and the game suffers. Either resurrection and the like become too commonplace or the players have to keep rolling up new characters. The first slows the game down too much (as everyone's held back a level for dying) and powerful magic loses its mystery. The second option cheats the players (and the DM) of a sense of continuity and direction, slows the game (as they generate stats, etc) and forces the DM to artificially introduce these new PCs into her story (at the cost of verisimilitude). Character death, in general, is only fun when it's heroic and only deserved (whether or not it's fun) if the players have been exceptionally stupid or reckless. As for reward, in my experience, players prefer intangible things like recognition, respect and authority for their characters, even above a few gold pieces or a magic sword. (They especially dislike the opposites of these: lack of due respect and getting bossed around like pawns.) Accomplishments should not necessarily be rewarded only with material treasure but with things their characters would enjoy; promotion in your job is not just about the pay-rise. On the other hand, wealth and magic is always desirable! Roleplaying games are built around the idea of challenge-reward; this is one of the reasons we play: it is an escapist ideal to be rewarded for the things we endure. The DM should reward her challenges appropriately and accordingly. Too much treasure unbalances the game (especially if it's all handed out to a single character and not to others), too little reduces the players' sense of achievement for their characters. As a little hint, from personal experience: more, weaker powered magical items are generally preferable to individual, powerful ones. I had a 4th-level paladin once with a +3 frost brand greatsword -- it was fabulous! I was chopping my way through everything I met. But it defined my character in a way that my personality, ability scores and class never could. If I was higher level, my own power would have been adequate to compensate. Returning to the subject of player choice: it is a lazy DM who bases every plotline around threats to a character's family and friends, who builds every encounter around an ambush, who designs her campaigns never around the stick-and-carrot but always upon the cane-to-the-behind. These all deny a player choice, which limits his enjoyment and, ultimately, makes the game less fun. The kidnapped daughter trick is fine, in moderation, as is the bandit attack from the bushes (or its higher level counterpart: the wizard with the crystal ball, teleporting his cronies in to strike while the group are sleeping). Similarly, it's all well and good to base your game on a militia band under the command of a general or a group of Harpers sent on a mission by Khelben Blackstaff but, somewhere along the line, those soldiers, those Harpers, are going to want to create missions on their own initiative. The DM should let them -- otherwise, she is once more denying them the opportunity of choice. Whether they actually get to go on those missions is another matter; the DM has every right to interrupt her players' plans, to throw spanners in their works... The DM has the responsibility to create a vivid environment within her game, to provoke her players' imaginations with well-rounded NPCs, engaging descriptions and intriguing stories. To quote the authors of the much under-rated Tales of Gargentihr, "You are a movie director with an unlimited special effects budget." You do your players a disservice by not exploiting your own imagination. A DM should be articulate and expressive, clear and authoritative, impartial and sensitive. Above all, she should have fun doing it. This is just some of the many things that are needed in order to make a fun game but the most important of all is: the DM's duty is to create the game she would enjoy playing in. Not to do so prostitutes her talent and is denying her players the fullest pleasure in roleplaying: the shared fun of the game. Enjoy your games, people.
#2 thanuir Jun 17, 2007 11:23:48	One easy way to add more choices, in addition to letting players create their own adventures, is to give them two, and see which they select. E.g. Save a barmaid's daughter (reward: lifelong free lodging and meals in the relevant bar) or kill/rob/bring to justice a dishonest and quite unpopular dwarven merchant (reward: excessive or large, depending on the way it is handled). Are the characters a greedy bunch of mercenaries, or heroes with good heart?
#3 Dan_Hemmens Jun 18, 2007 11:47:30	So, if the job of the GM is to create a good game, what are the jobs of the players? Serious question. If the GM is trying to create a good game, what are the players trying to do? Kill it and take its stuff? The idea that the GM, and only the GM, bears responsibility for making the game enjoyable leads to both bad play, and bad GMing. It leads to bad play because players don't take responsibility for their actions, they assume that it's the job of the GM to make sure everybody is having fun, and their job to do whatever the hell they like. It leads to bad GMing because if the GM takes it upon himself to make sure everybody has fun, he starts to define "fun" as "what I decide people should be doing." If the GM thinks his job is to write a good story, then he starts to define the best possible story as "the story that I wrote." The job of the GM is to *react* to the players, to *support* them in their decisions, and to work *with* the players to help *everybody* contribute to the game.
#4 zombiegleemax Jun 19, 2007 9:17:33	One easy way to add more choices, in addition to letting players create their own adventures, is to give them two, and see which they select. I like this method, and I have used it several times in the past. The only problem is when your PCs are stupid. I once offered the party the choice of either working with the Thieves' Guild or the Town Watch (yeah, I know, it's not very original). They chose to work with both. I ended up having to have a huge fight between the two factions to force the players to choose between the two. In hindsight I should have had a harsher punishment.
#5 Dan_Hemmens Jun 21, 2007 17:44:06	I like this method, and I have used it several times in the past. The only problem is when your PCs are stupid. I once offered the party the choice of either working with the Thieves' Guild or the Town Watch (yeah, I know, it's not very original). They chose to work with both. I ended up having to have a huge fight between the two factions to force the players to choose between the two. In hindsight I should have had a harsher punishment. This is the difference between CRPGs and Tabletop RPGs. In a CRPG the PCs can, by default, do nothing. Giving them even *one* option requires effort on the part of the design team, giving them two therefore constitutes "choice" and is to be celebrated. I was overjoyed in NWN2 when I got to choose to side with either the Watch or the Thieves. In a tabletop RPG however the PCs can, by default, do *anything*. So giving them two choices is actually *limiting* their options, not increasing them. If I were presented with that situation I'd want at *least* six options: work for the thieves, work for the guards, work for both as a free agent, work for both and play both sides against the middle, exploit the situation to my own advantage, ignore the situation. And I would want the DM to support me whichever choice I made.
#6 zombiegleemax Jun 22, 2007 0:56:34	Lyle Tealeaf: that's funny.:D Have had my share of gaming groups with that sort of dynamic. For myself: I LOVE it when the players come up with things their characters want to do. It helps inspire my own efforts as well as the players. My only caveat on the this is if one of my players suggests something that basically runs along the lines of 'and my character is actually heir to the throne/king of the world/a living god/yada yada yada.' But I don't get that very often. As a player I also love it when the GM actually takes my character's back story on board and allows me to follow up on what I've created. (Yes, I'm one of those players who writes a couple of pages back story for my characters.) No doubt about it: RPGs are interactive, GM and Players should contribute to the plot/world creation and PC development.
#7 Shiftkitty Jun 24, 2007 19:21:06	A development that has formed in my campaign is the one of delving companies. I used to hate this idea, but my players have executed it wonderfully. My core group at one point decided to name their party "The Barrels of Durgal" after avenging the death of a party member's friend. One character who had a taste for the nightlife spends a good deal of down time in the local taverns and hot spots listening to every rumor or hint of adventure he can overhear. He then takes those rumors back to the party's HQ, an office they've rented for storing their equipment, filing their maps, and recording their now illustrious history as well as for a central contact point for each other and for anyone who might hire them. (They have npc employees who maintain everything and guard it.) As DM, I keep the game world dynamic. I'm constantly working on it like a subroutine in my mind. I can imagine various NPCs going about their business, even non-adventure business, and I stockpile articles, maps, etc., anything that might kick up some dust and seed an adventure. Then I contact the group's "designated party-goer" and feed him the rumors and things that have developed. Some are nowhere rumors designed just to keep the atmosphere of a real world. (Why would the party care if the duke is too fond of one of the stableboys?) Should the party mistakenly bite at one of these, I try to steer it to one of the real rumors. (They decide to get the dirt on the duke only to find out that the stableboy is a spy for a secret society trying to wrest control of the region one city at a time.) I also inform my players of changes in the game world. "The price for slaves has hit rock bottom." If a character has the right skill set, I feed inside info. "The slave market is about to bottom out. Better sell now!" I keep the character sheets here, so I can reference what developments will be relevant to the players and their characters. My players inform me of changes they want their characters to make. Instead of just "I don't want my character to be a paladin anymore", they'll e-mail me with something like "After that last run, my PC is losing his faith. He's starting to lose his distinction between absolute right and absolute wrong. I want to move him to a standard fighter class." Then I'll tell him something like "You're ready to let go, but your god isn't. Shannat is having disturbing dreams of dying." Or, if I want to make it easier on Shannat, "After a long walk to clear the demons of the past adventure from your mind, you find yourself standing on a hillside that looks out across the valley. You know that at this very moment, you must make a choice to continue to honor your sacred vows or to stop pursuing a path you feel you can no longer faithfully follow." The player then sends me his response, so I start making the hard changes to his sheet and leave the player's choices up to him. So that's how I see my role as the DM. I not only create the world they play in, I am the world they play in.
#8 thanuir Jun 29, 2007 11:30:09	The idea that the GM, and only the GM, bears responsibility for making the game enjoyable leads to both bad play, and bad GMing. It leads to bad play because players don't take responsibility for their actions, they assume that it's the job of the GM to make sure everybody is having fun, and their job to do whatever the hell they like. It leads to bad GMing because if the GM takes it upon himself to make sure everybody has fun, he starts to define "fun" as "what I decide people should be doing." If the GM thinks his job is to write a good story, then he starts to define the best possible story as "the story that I wrote." The job of the GM is to *react* to the players, to *support* them in their decisions, and to work *with* the players to help *everybody* contribute to the game. Agreed. Very good points. GM is the facilitator: (s)he helps the (other) players to enjoy the game as they like it. GM should also like the happening game for itself, too, or burnout ensues. I like this method, and I have used it several times in the past. The only problem is when your PCs are stupid. I once offered the party the choice of either working with the Thieves' Guild or the Town Watch (yeah, I know, it's not very original). They chose to work with both. I ended up having to have a huge fight between the two factions to force the players to choose between the two. In hindsight I should have had a harsher punishment. If players work for both organizations and manage to do it in secret from both, more power to them. They have deserved the benefits they get. If one or both sides get a hint of having "double agents", they are quite likely to demand something big from the party, something that proves their loyalty (or maybe they'll resort to assassination). In any case, players made a choice, and fun play comes from it. No need to declare the choice wrong, just because it wasn't the one you thought they would make. That is in my not very humble opinion.
#9 Enlightened1 Jul 12, 2007 0:29:06	There's a certain amount of truth to the idea that GM needs to make a good story - but it does take a lot of care to do it right. The simplistic view of "creating a good story" casts the GM in the role of author - someone who creates the background, setting, characters, and has the ultimate authority over the flow of action in the story. There's two problems with this, and they stack. One, just about everything I've read by good writers about good writing indicates that a well-written character often starts to take control of their own actions; that is, when the author wants them to do some particular thing, the author gets a very clear impression that this character just wouldn't do things that way, or wouldn't do that at all. And, when the author decides to write it that way in spite of the objections, the result is false and flat. So even in a regular, single-author novel, characters aren't simply putty in the creator's hands. Now to GM and PCs. GMs have to deal with the fact that players are active, creative, and very real people, with their own ideas about what their characters will do - which may not fit very well with what the GM has in mind for the adventure, or even what the GM expects from the character. The "free will" of the character in the GM's story is much more forceful and unpredictable than a novelist's characters. So, one has to be careful when calling the GM a storyteller. Ture, there are storytelling elements in good GMing, but in few other forms of entertainment is one forced to juggle the intentions and demands of other creators so directly, and on the fly during performance (improv theater comes to mind, and maybe a freewheeling jam session). When I GM I try to call out the players to move the story along, and allow them to guide, to a great degree, the pacing and course of events. I've found that if I plan a certain sequence - whether it's getting into/out of a deathtrap or assaulting a fortress of evil, whatever - the players will almost every time come up with something that I didn't think of, or some way to take an idea I had and twist it just so to make it much more effective and entertaining. Some GMs' knee-jerk response seems to be "you can't do that;" mine is "well, you can try; how are you going to make it work," and then start working modifiers, skills, etc. per the rules. My basic ideal as GM is that I'm setting the stage for the PCs to be heroes (or at least protagonists). That means that I need to create situations which challenge them in as many ways as I reasonably can, and make things hard for them; after all, if being a hero was easy, more people would do it, eh? But it also means that I need to work with them - the players and their characters - to enable them to be the heroes they want to be. I will freely help people with rules, and I will offer them (especially if they're new to the game!) specific options for a particular action (but always let them choose without pressure!). I know this makes me a "soft" GM; I very rarely kill PCs (though I do KO them or drive them down to near-zero HP a lot!), in part because it's no fun to not get to play half a session cause your dead, in part because I usually run genres that don't expect heroes to be killed (pulps and other high-adventure stuff). But both I and my players have really enjoyed my games, because I offer serious challenges, and I allow them to strut their stuff, both with personal creativity and with game-rule manipulation. The best word for me as GM is "Facilitator." Not that the other GM roles/tasks are trivial. But, to my mind, facilitator captures best the idea that the GM's primary role is to enable a good game for everyone, using any and all tools s/he has available. "Facilitator" also contains the idea that it is not the GM who alone determines the events of the game, but is acting to coordinate and, to some extent, guide others in their co-creation of the game.
#10 crescentscar Aug 15, 2007 12:26:36	In my experience as a player and DM, I've found that a DM's role is Facilitator first, story teller second, and rules-judge third. As effectively God (we're talking Greater Deity here), the DM should make the game fun and balanced (party balanced). When I DM, my players are often times highly overpowered, compared to creatures of a CR meant to challenge them, and I say "Big Deal." But, since I play with people of varied experience, power gamers might easily overshadow more casual players. Again, I say "Big Deal." That's where your role as Facilitator comes in. Just because Jimmy the Fighter/Ranger can lay waste to many more baddies, much faster than his party members (especially Lizzy the Bard), doesn't mean anything if you handle it properly. If you, as God, balance out how often Jimmy's bad-ass arrow slinging can be used with how often Lizzy's silver tongue is necessary, everything's A-okay. Personally, I try and make it so that, every session, every character gets _at least_ One Big Moment. It's much easier to do this if, before your campaign starts, you find out what your players _want_ out of the game, and during play, you pay attention to what really makes them interested. So, yeah, Cal the Great-Cleaving Barbarian ends up with a horde of Zombies around him, and Lizzy gets cornered by politically powerful, yet gullible Noble, and Jimmy's insane-spot check just happens to catch some sneaky rogue trying to rob someone 100 yards away. I stock the encounters with stuff that makes the heroes seem more heroic. Does it mean that you have to bend the rules all the time? Absolutely not. But, just don't be afraid to sacrifice the rules in order to make a memorable session. So, there's the facilitator. As a story teller, I've found the small stuff goes a long way. Flavor text, baby. When a character rolls high, describe it as such. I'm not gonna lie, I never use the Sunder Rules, but, man, lots of enemy limbs/equipment gets banged up when somebody rolls particularly well. Almost every bad guy gets his head chopped off, or cut in twain, with the final blow- just to boost the killing characters' ego. Having a story in mind is good, but keep it loose- the players come up with all their own stuff that fits in better, and is much more fun to work in.