How am I supposed to do all this?, Hints for a frustrated GM Options

[MrSandman666]

Alright. I've had enough. I give up, where's my white flagß There, that handkerchief will do...

Seirously? How on earth is a GM to go about his job to create a good and enjoyable game while staying sane and having something like a life?

As a GM you're supposed to know ALL the rules or else your players (who know only the rules concerning their character) will use them against you. Most of the time it's not even malicious. It's just that they know their stuff and they're good at what they're doing. In order to be match for them, however, I must know all that stuff as well or they'll bust my plans. This means I have to know all the possibilites of about four or five character classes.

As a GM you're supposed to know any run by heart (and preferably two or three runs at once, in case you finish early or the players decide to simply not accept a job that looks a bit daunting). You're also supposed to change the run on the fly as the action unfolds, improvise and rewrite and STILL keep it a great story with balanced opposition that is challenging but not overpowering. Of course ideally you shouldn't plan a run at all in order to not railroad the players. But then again you have to make sure that every player is equally involved and always has something to do (in the game!) and gets his five minutes of fame.

As a GM you're supposed to be able to know every scene in deepest detail, have maps and everything ready for handout (or at least in you head, so you can scetch them during the game). You're supposed to populate every scene with fleshed out NPCs, each with a distinct character and personality, of course with full stats and equipment lists. You're also supposed to come up with the interiors of every building the runners decide to stumble into, no matter whether it was planned or not.

How am I supposed to do all this? You need a supercomputer or two to do all this stuff!
I'm sorry, I'm a bit bitter right now. I mean, for some reason I never get to play. I'm not complaining. Not really. I mean, yeah, it would be nice to play every now and then but i can play online. And until recently I did like to GM. But the real reason I'm always GMing is probably because I'm the only Shadowrun GM I know. Of course I could go out and try to find people in stores, but I've had some bad experience with that. I find it more enjoyable to play with my pals.
Anyways, I'm disgressing... Where was I...
O yeah, how am I supposed to do all this stuff? I would have to do this as a fulltime job in order to be able to read all the books, learn everything there is to know about the sixth world, know about all the rules, have enough runs and NPCs at hand in order to improvise and get enough practise to be a halfway decent GM. Unfortunately, nobody pays me for that kind of stuff!!!

My whole point in this post is:
How do YOU do this? Fellow GMs, please help me out! What is the solution? How do you manage to deliver an enjoyable game? Are you an Immortal Elf who has all the time he wants? Are you a millionaire so that you don't have to work and can devote all your time to studying Shadowrun? Are you an AI on a huge mainframe?
Help! Please!

[IcyCool]

Well you see, all of that comes straight from the RDB. ;)

But if your RDB isn't very populated try using some gaming aids. An NPC file, stock maps (Sprawl Sites?), a love for the game and great players. If you can get 3 out of 4 of those, you'll be all set.

[Crusher Bob]

Hmm...

When starting a new system, I'll see what people want to play and assign them the task of learning the rules for that as in depth as possible. So when I need to know about combat (or whatever) I turn to the right player and get them to help with the system elements.

Another thing I try to do is collect 'seeds', things that I see of think up, or hear on the news, or whatever... if I think that I could do something with that as GM, then I'll try to file it away for later use. This helps you have a pool of idea to draw on when tryin to come up with a new adventure (or change one on the fly).

When comming up with an adventure, I'll mark the page refs that contain the rules for anything that is 'supposed to happen' in the adventure. If I expect a car chase then I'll make a note that the rules for car chases are on p XX, if I expect some sneaking, I write down that the rules for stealth are on p YY, and so on. Since not every rules is used every adventure, this helps reduce your 'cache miss rate' when it comes to using the rules.

One of the simplest ways to make the opposition balanced is to simply not tell the players everything about the opposition (if possible). They know that they are going to be fighting a whole gang in the upcomming fight. But they might not know that a lot of the gang is doped-up (and thus has pain reistance -3) or is on a really bad trip (most start with moderate stun). This means that the opposiition is scaled on the fly to match the status of the party.

Don't be afraid to de-rail the game if the players become interested in something else (like buying the 200 year old eyeore-like cargo loading bots out of bondage) :silly:.

The 'five minutes' thing can be a bit harder, the simplest way is to spend a few minutes before hand thinks about how to make something available for a player to have their five minutes, but not flesh it out too much before hand... sample: we 5 talking guy, fighting guy, decking guy. I have though (a little bit, anyway) about how to solve the problems in any of these three different ways, then try to offer the characters the choice of how to solve them, ideally they make their own 5 min after that.

[Drain Brain]

[Crusher Bob]

Dunno, maybe Rouges Data Base?

[DV8]

Sandman, I know how you feel.

I started GMing a couple of years ago, and luckily, I knew more about the game than my players did, both rules-wise as well as universe-wise. But, quickly, the situation started to shift that the players got comfortable with their characters and the their abilities, and soon started to be a bit of an opposition for me, and they kept surprising me, and kept me sharp. You see, that's the fun part of being a GM, if you don't think that's fun then there's very little in your game to make you happy...and you play because you like it, I suppose.

Here's where a lot of people take a wrong turn; the GM's job, essentially, is to provide the story. That is, the actions and reactions of a dynamic world. And honestly, that might take a couple of hours a week to prepare, but anything more than that and you're doing too much, or you're maintaining a website like I am. You don't have to beat your players at the game, because, honestly, they have more hands to work with than you do, and in order to beat them, you must predict what they'll do, which every GM will be able to tell you, is never going to work. :)

So, again; you are to provide a sequence of events and the actions and reactions of NPCs, and together with your players, you are supposed to create a good story. If you're simply butting heads with your players than the game is most likely either frustrating for the GM or the players.

[Dashifen]

I usually don't plan too much for the runs. I know what's going to happen and when, but if the players go off of my track, I just improvise. I guess a background in theater and improvisational comedy probably helps with that, but since not everyone can have those, my suggestion is to just make the NPCs act like you think you would. Most of us are probably average people -- average intelligence, average height, average build, etc -- and therefore the average person in a shadowrun game might act as we would.

Or, make up NPCs "archetypes." Mine are typically the drunk, the johnson, the guard, the elite guard, the normal, etc. Each of these types of characters usually act about the same way. Therefore, when you have a new NPC, decide which of your archetypes that new NPC fits and then you have a basic way of deciding how they will act.

Lastly, let the players worry about their five minutes of fame. I do my best to make legwork necessary on my runs -- the johnson never hands out all of the necessary information but rather just enough to get the players started. Then it's up to them to figure out how to do it. By giving them the control, they will inevitably create their 5 minutes of fame -- or more.

For example, one of my players is playing a character that seems to like going off on his own and getting into trouble. He's been implicated in a break-in attempt and the mauling of a guard therein as well as seen at the location of a major accident involving the deaths of three people. This character is off on his own creating his own fame. The others, on the other hand, are creating their own fame by becoming an integral part of the run. The face works hard to avoid combat and talk her way through things, the decker's forte has so far been in legwork, but he'll get the chance for overwatch soon, the fighters almost always get their moments eventually if they're patient enough.

I guess my point there is that as a GM, don't force everyone to have 5 minutes of fame, let them worry about it. When you start forcing a storyline just so that everyone has a good time, you run the risk of making it so that no one has a good time. Further, you may not always know how someone will react to your planned 5 minutes and may want to do it a different way. These two points, I think, make it hard to pull of planned 5 minutes.

And last I'll leave you with this; some famous guy said it:

I can't give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure: try to please everyone.

-- Dash --

[Drain Brain]

I was thinking along those lines as I was trying to guess, but then Icy Cool goes on to list an NPC file as a gaming aid... so I discounted such a thing...


Oh masterful Sir Cool of Icedom, please gift thine knowledge to us!

[MrSandman666]

[MrSandman666]

[Siege]

Not really a trick, but be willing to improvise on the fly. To that end, you might keep maps of various locations, quickie thugs and so on.

That way you can have stats and numbers ready to deploy on a moment's notice.

You might also consider carrying a cheap notepad and pen around with you -- I used to do it all the time while I was working retail, but I still find it useful for jotting down notes and miscellanious stuff.

-Siege

[Crusher Bob]

Best practice your I'm not a terrorist speach too, if your notes are going to includes things like:

'... blow up...' '...poison guard dogs...' '...sneak in though air vents...' :sigh:

Remember that you can also 're-cycle' unused adventures, that quick foray though the sewers that was not used in adventure 2 can be revamped and used in adventure 5 instead.

[Omega Dragon]

What seems to work for me is to not plan much more then a thin red line.

Before i start a campaign i ask my players what kind of chars they want to play and in what kind of setting. I combine that with my own thoughts and ideas (I usually don't give them exactly what they want right away, but i give them the opportunities to get it if they work for and towards it). Based on this i create a red line. This also ensures a common view on the world, and creates a world that both the gm and the players feel good about.

In my current campaign my players wanted something like the fast and the furious, gone in 60 seconds etc. I wanted to gm a low power ganger campaign.

So I tuned down the chargen rules, point system, max attr 3, no cyber, no magic no cash etc (magic can be gained (awaken) later in the game, although players have to say they it, and how they want it, at the start. Thus its gained my (personal) runs, cash etc much like cyber.

Right now my players are participating in streetraces and are in a conflict with a local low-class gang in renton establishing their turf / base of ops.

my group consists of one shitty street punk, a shitty driver (no vcr), a shitty car-thief and a shitty btl dealer. And I do have to say I'm blessed with some exceptionally good players.
We're all geared towards problemsolving and action combined with roleplay. Thus we get it all in the right mix (kinda worked out that way).

Now during the run all i try to do is let events happen in the world around the players that they can react to. And in return let the world react to the actions of the players.

This causes the red line of the campaign to grow and flesh out.

In between 'runs' I think of possible seeds to give them, and for bigger problems i do some thinking about how to present it to the players and think about the possible effects. But i don't plan anything out. This makes for a natural flow in the campaign, and the players feel and really do influence the world around them.

Whether problems are solved is based on legwork, strategy, teamwork and dicerolls. Roleplay adds to the flavour and the fun factor.

I don't know all the rules, sometimes my players know them better then i do. If there is a question on how things work (especially targetnumbers) I just make a ruling on the spot, based on memory, a players suggestion or whatever. rule discussion i ban until after the nights run is over. If things turn out differently we'll just know it for the next time. And in some cases that dont influence the story we can always make some ajustments.

I have a bad memory as wel, and that combined with this kind of playing leads to sometimes leaving loose ends etc. But that has not been a problem so far.
Mistakes will happen, thats ok, you will make them as a gm, your players will make them in char. so what
if your not capable of making mistakes your not capable of doing anything.


The main thing while playing shadowrun is having fun!
Don't be afraid to make mistakes and experiment with different ways of gm'ing.
That way you will develop your a form of play that will suit you and your players best. Also ask your players for feedback. (that doesnt mean you have to do everything they suggest, but its good to keep in mind)

Anyway this is pretty much how things work out here, hope it helps.

[Moon-Hawk]

We all know how you feel, Sandman. We feel for you, we really do.
Y'know, every group has their own style, that come from the GM, the players, and the interactions between them. Different groups focus more on different things, so there's no single key to GM success, but we'll try to keep feeding suggestions.
I've got a couple of groups, and they're great. They're both really great, so I'll tell you what works for us.
First, the five minutes of fame. It goes two ways, you can give them five minutes of fame, and you can let them have it. Let me explain: To give it, it starts at chargen. Help encourage them to make interesting characters. In my games, the more interesting your character is, the more plot hooks and adventures are going to revolve around them. The characters with the better backgrounds will have more in-game tie-ins to their backgrounds. My players know this, and make interesting characters. They learned that if they make a character who's background is:
"His family is dead. He devotes his whole life to training with weapons. He has no friends. He is a stone-cold killer."
Then they're not going to have any cool adventure stuff revolve around them, because that character bores the GM to tears. So right there, good character backgrounds should give you dozens of ideas. Such as: "Oh, his little sister, who he loved very dearly, died three years ago, so I'll mjake the person that they have to bodyguard for the next three runs be the same age girl, and look kind of like her" Stuff like that.
Second, the way to let them have their five minutes. It is SO frustrating to players, when they say they want their character to do something or talk to someone (that doesn't have anything to do with the immediate plot) and the GM says, "Okay, sure, whatever, you do that. Anyway, back to my adventure." Admittedly, you can't always drop what you're doing to spend 20 minutes going into detail about them talking to a contact about something peripheral, often because the players have ideas like this at the MOST inappropriate times in the adventure. But you can stall. You can ask them if they need to do this now, or can wait for a better time. This gives you a chance to think about it for a few minutes. Cripes, if you're really caught like a deer in headlights, claim you have to take a dump and go think about it for five minutes. :D The point is, when the player wants their character to do something, that's sort of a hint that this could be important to the way they want to develop their character, and it deserves a little personality. It's can be a bit of a hastle, but trust me, the ideas you'll get for it make up for it. Suddenly you have whole adventures spawned from the things that the players came up with for their characters, and they'll REALLY get into them.
One more thing, and then I'll shut up. My groups are wonderfully unpredictable. I gave up trying to figure out what they'd do, 'cause it all ended up being useless anyway. Now I spend that same time on fleshing out the situation. The NPCs' motivations and such, and then whatever they do, I just have to react in what is the obvious way. The reactions are obvious, if you've figured out the personalities and motivations of the key NPCs.
As far as having to know all the rules, I don't know what to tell you. It's a slitch. I do know all the rules, so I don't really have any help. Sorry.
The most important thing is that you care. You care enough to ask us, and so that alone tells me that you're a good GM.
Happy gaming. (that wasn't one more thing, was it?)

[MrSandman666]

[IcyCool]

[Jpwoo]

1. Don't worry about the rules so much. This will get better with time.

2. Sometimes your characters dump the run you had planned and do something else. Use email to help set up the job. Send in character emails to the players who are likely to respond, and let them pick and choose. Offer them several jobs that you have vauge ideas about, and when they agree to one, you can flesh it out for when you meet face to face. If they start dumping these runs tell them it is bad for their rep and it pisses you off.

3. The SR world is huge and full of crazyness, you don't have to keep up with all of it. That would be a waste of time. Read what you want. and if you enjoy it keep it.

4. If you are still feeling overwhealmed, eliminate a 'class' No deckers, or no mages, until you are more comfortable with the rules as a whole.

5. try and find published adventures. These will help you gain in confidence and normaly they are pretty good. You can find them on the cheap too in the used bins at games and comic stores.

Have fun. and if you stay frustrated. stop playing for a while. This is enjoyment

[MrSandman666]

Thanks again!

Another question:
How do you go about improvising uilding maps without repeating yourself after the fourth or fifth building and especially how do you go about creating special buildings that you don't really know much about?

[Crusher Bob]

Hint #1 include bathrooms
Hint #2 include fire exits
Hint #3 Get several furniture catalogs

You can also try getting a 'home finder' or similar, since it often includes maps of houses and apartments. You can also practice doing some maps with graph paper and cut-out furniture, so that you have a bit better idea of how places end up laid out (no getting stuck between your desk and the wall, room enough for chairs). Don't forget to include room for trolls (or not, as the case may be)..

[michaelius]

First, i just stumbled across this forum and this topic is AWESOME! it should be sticky or something so all new GMs get to read it. Anyhow...

in addition to all the other cool advice that's been given, a tactic that i just put into use was starting before the character became a shadowrunner. i have a player who wanted a character whose limbs had been cut off by the yaks and he was bent on revenge. i thought that would be really cool to play out, so we started about three years before it happened and played through the dismemberment. it was AWESOME, if i do say so myself (he liked it too). now granted, this is a single player scenario, but it creates so much background characters by its very nature.

i also find that while i'm commuting (on a train, not in a car) i just think about the adventure and envision it in my mind. i may not have to have everything written down, but getting a picture in my head works really well for me.

and most of all, let go of the story. if we, as GMs, try to manhandle it too much it will sound forced. but really, plenty of great stories will tell themselves if you let them. draw from your own experience. if they decide to go to the grocery store (or soymart...whatever) then pull from one you've been to and jazz it up a little. keep it simple. provide as much detail as they want. and really, if they need to know what the checkout girl looks like and it doesn't matter, then say she's average, blah blah blah. if they need to know what color the wall is, make it up. i'm the kind of player who is always asking really banal questions about my surroundings cause i'm always thinking of weird crap to pull. so, when they ask a super weird question, just ask yourself "What color is the floor?" and tell them what you answer. it usually is that easy.

woof

[michaelius]

buildings also get pulled from my real life. i use my office building or the law firm i temped at or my school or the theater i used to work at...see?

woof

[joe12south]

I'm not even GM'ing yet and I feel your pain. I'm in the prep. phase for my first attempt at GM'ing. To make things worse, I haven't even played in 10+ years.

In the process of re-educating myself I was terribly surprised at the dearth of computer/online tools to make the mechanics of gameplay easier. It's just ludicrous that in this day and age we should actually have to remember all of the rules, all of the interactions, etc. Now, I'm not discounting the effort it would take to build such a system for a game as complex as Shadowrun, but it is eminently doable. Imagine how much fun GM'ing (and playing for that matter) would be if you were free to concentrate on the roleplaying, not whether you are screwing-up a roll.

The Shadowrun Tracker character generation program is a good example of what can be done. Sure its interface is a little rough around the edges but it *really* makes that one aspect of game play so much easier. Better, really, because you can experiment in a way that would be too tedious on paper.

My own little contribution is going to be a "semi-smart", Shadowrun specific combat map. It will track and display position, direction, line of site, range of motion (walking and running,) stun and physical damage, a combat turn clock and a dice roller (of course.) Version 1.0 should be ready in the next week or two. If anyone is interested in testing it, send me a PM.

[MrSandman666]

Homefinder... Nice one!

What interests me most are special facilities. Mainly the ones most of us have never set a foot in. Like an R&D department or so... Appartment houses and offices are the easiest.
Corp facilities are hard to do after you're through your third or fourth. They all start looking the same and it gets boring.

[MrSandman666]

As for computer tools, I'm still waiting for usefull ones to come out (of course, NSRCG is already very usefull and I use it all the time). In the meanwhile, I'm planning on writin my own little tool for that. Let's see whether I can do it. I'm a little out of shape and don't have that much time to spare.

And taking ideas from real life: sure, I do that, too. The most obvious way to get ideas for buildings (and people, too, by the way). However, I've been only to so many office buidlings and only so many corporate holdings. And I've actually never been to a corporate R&D facility. How do I come up with different plans if I don't really have any experience or floorplans to foot it on?

[Runner Smurf]

My couple of cents:

1. I know how you feel. GMing a SR game is 10 times more work than a D&D game. Between the "downtime" activities issue, feeding players information about the game world, coming up with stories, contacts, obscure activities by characters...I feel your pain.

2. Rules issues: Cheat. Blatantly if your players start complaining that you aren't following the rules, quietly if you can't. SR has three basic rolling mechanics: Open, Success, Opposed Success. Make up the target numbers - screw looking at the tables except for a rough idea of where to go. If something is hard, make the TN 6, really hard make it 8, or whatever. 10 times out of 10, your gut instinct for how hard something is going to be is going be close. As long as you are fair, your players won't care. Trying to be exact will slow things down to a crawl, which makes the game no fun at all.

3. Cheat sheets: I have cheat sheets made up for most of the major rules sections that outline how the rules work. Sure, it has tables on it, but I mostly use them to remind me of how the process works for a thing, as opposed to working out the detailed target numbers. I have a sheet for IC, a sheet for metamagics, a sheet for vehicle stuff (and frankly, the Rigger rules are so complex, cheating is the only way to run it at a sufficient speed). I have them on hand at all times - I've glued them over the pages in the GM's screen.

4. Prep Work: The more the merrier. I write down the stats for NPCs, critters and vehicles on 3x5 cards. All the rules I need to know I scratch down on the card as well (what the powers do, cyberware, spell notes, etc.). It's a bit of a pain at first (anywhere from 5 to 10 cards for a given evening), but pretty soon you have a goodly sized number of NPCs and things to draw on at short notice. Use the Renraku sec guards for all your sec guards with only the slightest changes. I also make it a habit to re-read one section of the rules (Matrix combat, crash tests, etc.) the night before a game, particularly if I know it might apply.

5. Lie: It's amazing how easily you can fake out the players. If you know a rule is really complex, flip through the book for a few seconds, roll some dice, scratch something down on some paper. They will assume you are doing something complex...while what you may be doing is trying to figure out how the hell to salvage the encounter. I used to get called all the time for not rolling NPC drain - roll a bunch of dice, pretend to count them, assign the drain you think is appropriate...and nobody bats an eye.

6. Railroad: Do not be so terrified of it that you don't do it when you need to. But when you railroad, be honest about it. If the team is about to go off the deep end of what you are prepared for or know anything about (the "Why don't we move to London?" syndrome) admit it, and say, "Look, if you go that way we're going to have to stop for the night. You really want to go this way. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Most players are surprisingly good natured and understanding about such matters. Especially when you have a player (like I do) who is constantly trying to diverge from the group and go somewhere else entirely - "Look, you can go do that, but you'll pretty much be out of the rest of the game if you do. Sorry, but I can't really do both at the same time. Are you sure you want to go to Tir Tairngire while everyone is doing the run in Atlanta?"

Anyway, those are some of my thoughts. A bit cynical I suppose, but it's how I've managed to keep my game running. I still want to pull out my hair sometimes, but it's worth it.

If you want copies of my cheat sheets or matrix host generators or whatever, send me an email. I'd be glad to share.

- Runner Smurf