[X] My Assistant

[Talia Invierno]

There were comments about communication and consistency which need to be added to this list. That I'm not doing it myself is only because those suggestions weren't mine originally - although I'll gladly adopt them!

13ish. Thou shalt ensure the existence of challenge in every session. Thou shalt not limit the definition of challenge only to the relative power interpretation: bigger, badder, stronger, harder is not the only name of the game. Always, thou shalt remember that an unAwakened mosquito can potentially do more to ruin the day of the most tweaked of PCs and plans than any number of souped-up minions and bad-ass Ultimate villains and Johnsons and competitors.

[Phaeton]

...I never thought of that before, Talia. The mosquito idea, anyway.

:ork

[Talia Invierno]

[toturi]

The Zeroth Law: Thou shalt ALL enjoy thyselves.

[Talia Invierno]

Yes :)

[Dawnshadow]

18th? Thou shalt not allow anticipation to draw out for too long.

Great anticipation should build up, but not constantly. There should be little releases made, and major events and questions shouldn't be dangled too long over players heads. Leads to frustration, anger and general grouchiness -- and disappointment when the event comes to pass.

[hermit]

19ish (adding to 12ish): Thou shalt not play in a group with people you either personally despise or have had fundamental disagreements in terms of ideology, religion or otherwise with, that thou can't overcome or push aside. Furthermore, thou shalt choose your fellow players carefully to have a gaming style resembling your own. And even further, shalt thou come to dislike a fellow player, thou must not let this boil over in gaming; if the hatred runs too deep, thou can always pick a location and time for a good old fashioned duel outside the gaming group.

20ish: As the GM, thou art not the players' friend, but5 even less art thou their enemy. Primarily, it is your mission that the players enjoy themselves, and if you do, the better. Thou shalt not lash out on players you personally despise in-game (see 19ish).

21ish: Even when thou liveth in a lonesome cottage on a high mountain in the heart of a desert, finding a new group of players is the best thing to do when 19ish and/or 20ish can't be abided to. A relationship that cannot be fixed must be allowed to die to allow all involved to resume their search for happyness elsewhere.

[MrSandman666]

I know I'm going to sound like a complete jackass but anyways, here goes...

Reading this thread really reminds me of all the reasons that made me stop GMing. I absolutely love roleplaying, I love the Shadowrun setting and I even like the core mechanic of Shadowrun (though I hate the rest of the rules with a passion).
For years I've been the only guy willing to GM amongst my fellow runners. We played on and off for a while and I finally managed to get a half-way regular game going and I was overflowing with cool ideas for a campaign but about two months ago I couldn't take it any more. This thread is listing about all the reasons that make GMing impossible (for me?)
Of course there are some good replies as well, such as the need for everyone to have fun, to not bring ooc conflicts to the table, to not kill of any players without a good reason, etc.

How is one human who goes to college/school and/or has a job going to manage all this? Build a series of interconnected stories, make sure the story stays intact despite of all sorts of spontanous ideas and other "abuse" by the players, weave in about 4 or five backstories, 15 to 25 long- and shortterm goals, several different player desires and styles, make the world, the NPCs and the story believable and "realistic", even in areas that normaly aren't your expertise, avoid railroading, keep up the challenge while carefully trying not to make it too hard, know all the rules or where to find them in a hurry and do all those other things that you guys suggested? And all that while still enjoying yourself?

What you are describing is the "perfect" GM, the guy or gal every one of us would love to play with. However, I'm afraid, a person like this doesn't exist. Not unless this person has no other things to do and is devoting all her life since early childhood to mastering the high art of GMing.
You're describing an ideal, not a basic guideline of behaviour. I would love to see just ONE Gm who manages to keep up this style throughout a whole campaign of weekly or biweekly games while still having a life.

Sorry about this rant but things like that make me furious! You are (like many other players I know) running around like kids in a candy shop saiying "I want this! And this, too! And some of this!" without worrying about how to pay for all this. How about you stop adding even more to the list and instead start to think about how in the world a normal guy could possibly follow your "commands".
I've been trying very hard to be that GM for years and I haven't even gotten close. Closer, yes, but not close. Still, I'm willing to learn, so if anyone would care to enlighten me...

Again, sorry for this harsh rant. I'm in a shitty mood lately.

Still yours,
Sven

[hermit]

Sven, this ten commandment thingy doesn't mean we want all this realised in every GM. It's, like the biblical commandments, more of a guideline, or a set of ideals. Only really nutty christians expect you to keep all ten commandments, all the time (what makes theft, and disrespecting your parents, and idol worship, is open to debate anyway), right?

And I myself am a GM. I wrote my post to contain my ideals, at least those not already covered. Ideals are soemthing to strive for, but ideals that can be 100% reached don't work. Those aren't ideals, they're goals, whcih is a different thing. Don't be pissy about not being perfect, noone is, and most players don't expect their GM to be perfect.

As for weaving stories, I usually have no problem with that. It's what my mind does while my body commutes to work (when I have driven a given track a couple of times, I can just let the lower parts of the brain handle thuis, only maintaining a bit of attention to react to bad stuff happening. I have no memories of how I drive, but hey, at least, 45 hours of roads to and back aren't boring that way). And since my campaign usualy is bi- or tri-weekly, I have plenty of time in planning the campaign ahead. Furthermore, since I know the players and the way their weird ideas work, I can accomodate for that. And I prefer a scenes-based, rather than linear storyline-based, campaign anyway.

[Crusher Bob]

In addition, it's not doing nothing wrong that makes a good GM. Everyone here but AH is human, this meansthat we will make plenty of errors. Being a good GM is about doing more right stuff than wrong stuff.

These commandments can be though of as a sort of 'procedure' even if you screw something up, taking care of everything else will probably see you through.

One of the best analogies I can think of right now is learning to land a plane in a complex flight simulator. I was supposed to be watching all this stuff, the windspeed and direction, my angle of descent, my heading, the qeues from the ILS, and on and on. The thing is that that I could not watch all of that stuff at once, which meant that I kept having to abort the landing. After trying and failing to land (for several hours), I got frustrated and said to myself, 'Screw all these fancy doodads, I'm just going to land the plane!' Once I started concentrating on landing the plane rather than keeping all of the fancy doodads in the cockpit happy, landing became easy.

So despite these rules being pretty good, don't go into any GMing situation, 'I have to follow rules x, y, and z'. You will end up wasting your mental time on trying to 'stay within the rules' and hardly have any time left over for actually GMing... Instead, just check up on the rules every now and then, to be sure that you are not doing something 'stupid' then forget about them while you concentrate on running the game.

[MrSandman666]

Hermit, I'm totally with you and actually I found your replies to this post to be among the more usefull ones. Actually, I didn't see your post until I replied since we where writing at the same time.

I, too, prefer scene based campaigns rather than linear stories. Linear stories pretty much never work due to the chaotic nature which is inherent to roleplaying as a group activity and are actually going against the basic principles of roleplaying games (interactivity, creating a story together).

Comming up with stories isn't really a problem either - preserving them throughout the game is the problem and integrating the players even more so, especially if you want to keep things believable.
The basic story is never the problem. The problem is that most stories (most of my stories at least) don't survive the contact with the players.
And if something goes wrong with the game it's always the GM who gets to take the blame. Either it was too hard to get to the story ("Yea right, how where we supposed to know that we had to look there!") or it was too easy ("Yea right, as if things would just be sitting there waiting for us. You're railroading us because you don't trust us!")

Crusher Bob, you're probably right. I guess I'm a bit anal about doing everything right. Trying to keep all those rules in mind and then trying to adhere to them is total overkill, which is what I was complaining about in the first place.
It just gets pretty frustrating when you see all these hours of reading and plotting fall apart at the gaming table and have players whine about all sorts of stuff you're doing wrong. Maybe my gaming group is a little weird, too. I somehow get the feeling that they are sitting there, waiting to be entertained and if they didn't have fun all the fucking time or the story wasn't totally smooth they blame it on me being a bad GM.

Priceless example: They complained that all my runs take too long (we usually need two sessions per run, mainly because the players "waste" abot 3 hours per session on planning). In response I came up with a run that could be (and was) finished in one session. Then they complained that the run was too short and too easy and that they didn't have a feeling that they have accomplished something. :please:

Luckily I got another player to do the GMing for a while so that I can play and recover from my trauma while getting some fresh ideas. I'm very anxious to see how he's doing. So far he's run a pretty simple and linear jailbreak run that was supposed to last 1 or 2 sessions and was finished in a rush after 4 sessions. And it was the non-linear part in the end that made things fall apart completely. Well, he's pretty inexperienced so I'm not really blaming him. I made the same mistakes back in the days...
I'm pretty exited about this coming friday when we finally get to play a "real run" with him (or so I hope).

Maybe it's just me but I find it next to impossible to be a good GM.

Argh, I'm ranting again, sorry... Hope I could get my point across.

I guess my main problem was the way this whole thing is represented. You (as in "most of you" - don't mean to adress anyone specific) didn't say "Well, you should try this or that but instead followed the biblical commandments in saying "Thou shalt!", which is very imperative and sounds more like "If you don't do it you aren't a worthy GM". I know it was meant to be viewed with an ironic touch but it once more shows the pitfalls of asynchronus communication via the written word. And I stumbled over it in a foul mood, which didn't help.

Well, sorry for the intrusion. Please continue with the scheduled program.

[hermit]

I feel your pain. Players have a way to not only manage to completely not need the stuff you made up, but also t force you to improvise a lot, bvut hey, that's also where the fun in GMing is.

Take my current adventure (sceduled for one session, but It'll take at least two now, thanks to some random encounters I brought in to flesh out the whole Amazon Jungle feel - one turned out that a player adopted/got adopted by a devil cat, and took roughly half the session to play out), where I made up a very complex background for the main NPC character, and instead of investigating their Johnson a bit, the players spent hours cntemplating what one would need for a stay in the jungle, what shots to take with the street doc, whether two-man tents or small one-man tents were the way to go, whether one propane gas cooker was enough, whether it was nescessary at all (the joy of concentrated survival bars! No taste, 100% nutrition) ... and, yes, Patterson's Guide for South America, 2060 edition (new and improved) was bought right before lft-off, too. But any investigation into the Johnson? Zero. Meh, their loss. It's not that she's what she seems she is. They'll find out the hard way then.

But the Devil Cat encounter - originally just a random critter I had pop up - became an issue where we had some terrific roleplaying, with the character who 'adopted' the cat defending it tooth and nail, two other characters wanting to quietly to dispose of it, and the cat (GM played) using it's many critter powers to make life miserable for those hating it in a very subtle way (influence, force and other mental influence powers are fun to play with!).

So, the players neatly made me waste hours, and forced me to improvise, but hey, that's the job. If you don't like that, GMing just may not be your kinda thing. No shame in that, a lot of people rather play than GM, that's why there're always more players than GMs.

Also, take care that you don't only GM, to recuperate. Our group has three GMs, neither does GM all the time. We actually switch regularily, each advancing their campaigns. This is kinds hard on the players to remember stuff, which is why we instaled a 'reward' system - Karma or money, as you like - for submitting a "mission report", written from a player's character's pov, summing up the run (we got the idea from Earthdawn 1, which had a similar system).

[toturi]

The N th Law: Thou shalt not take these commandments seriously. :D

[Dawnshadow]

I'm kindof stubborn.. even if you had every single GM within a hundred miles walk up to me and tell me that I must do my games THIS way, if I disagreed, it would not happen. Thou shalts and Thou Shalt Nots are just fun language for me.

That being said, most of the things about GMing are internal. What I've found, at least, is that I decide on the primary line and a few personalities, and let it play out. I don't try and make everything go in one specific way -- I just let it all flow out of that spot in the depths of my soul from which stories come... and run it through the filter appropriate to the game. Doesn't matter if it's a heavily house ruled game or not -- all that stuff, if it's in my head, it's in the appropriate filter. The trick, I think, is to find the group that's the right size for you. I can do at most 4-5 people. More than that, it starts to get chaotic. I sometimes have trouble with 3, if the stories are too intensive on single characters.

Beyond that.. all of these rules are just subrules attached to Toturi's '0th' rule: Everyone has to enjoy themselves. Wrapping it all up in formal language.. that's just flavour. Really, all the rules given are different parts of one way you help everyone enjoy themselves.

[Talia Invierno]

Since it apparently needs explaining: when I'm using them myself, I only ever use "thou shalts" as fun language. I mean, come on! I'm the original anti rigid canon person! :D

[MrSandman666]

Oh my gawd, what have I done? :eek:

It's ok guys/gals, I got it! :D

No offense taken! Really!
I stumbled upon this in a foul mood to begin with and "got it down the wrong throat" as the saying goes here in Germany.
Good old misunderstanding, that's all.

[Talia Invierno]

Disagreement is a good thing :)

It's in the disagreements that we find the obvious stuff that's otherwise overlooked in the "not worthy's" -- which, honestly, always make me a bit uncomfortable: I mean, most of what I've written here, I've learned by running into it the hard way! Run into a brick wall enough times, and even I'll eventually learn that it's more solid than I am.

But nothing I'll ever write is intended as rigid template. In fact, I'll even suggest that rigid template is antithetical to fluid story. (Might have already written that somewhere, so forgive repetition, if any.)

Re scene-based campaigns vs linear stories:

Hmm ... rather than commenting on "chaotic nature" or agreeing or disagreeing, I'll just mention that after I took it over, I consider Dragon's storyline from the Living in the Shadows campaign to be a linear story, in the sense that it has a basic problem, a series of encounters, and a solution -- but the structure is utterly environment-based. (It's this storyline that, given some of the earlier comments in this thread, catalysed my raising of this thread.) In fact, a recent comment in the related OOC thread points out that even the basic problem could be completely sidestepped by those two, just by abandoning their contact to her fate. In several ways and especially from the players' pov the whole thing looks utterly chaotic -- but every last bit of that is environment-structured, to the point that there's things that can't happen against them because the environment, including NPCs, just aren't set up that way; and at the same time there's a very clear goal toward which they're working -- and not because I'm railroading them into it either.

Anyway, that's one example of why I don't see a necessary either/or for linear story vs. scene-based; but I could be misreading what people mean by this ...?

[toturi]

[The_Eyes]

I dunno, this guy looks pretty unbalanced to me: :silly:

[Dawnshadow]

Personally... I despise using linear or scene-based storytelling purely and completely in and of itself.

Every game I've ever run, there is an overriding plot (sometimes incomplete, sometimes one that I'm not even entirely aware of, but it's always there). There are lots of scenes that are present -- if people go to x, situation y happens.

Going purely scene based, well.. it lends itself to making players TOO important. I give hints of situations, and if players choose to deal with those hints, they get a scene. Either way, the linear plot advances.. and whether or not they went to that scene affects later ones, but they can't just go back to that scene. If it turns out that not going to that scene puts a serious handicap on them, that's too bad -- I'm not going to railroad them into the path that makes it nice and easy.

Going purely linear on the other hand.. well, that just gives me headaches. I'm not good enough at divination to be able to predict what all the players are going to do. I can predict trends somewhat, but I'm caught off guard often enough. Saving grace, I'm at my best on improvising storylines and scenes.

I guess, if you want to look at it, I favour 'web-based' campaign.. You can bounce around to all the different scenes, and it forms a linear plot (looking backwards), because everything you've done influences what you're doing -- actively. It's also a little like scene based, in that people can pick and choose what stuff they go to, and they don't get penalized for it, beyond that whatever is happening there continues... if it's an important event, well, it comes back and bites them. Hard and in places they really don't want it to. Usually there's a few flashing neon signs, but I'm not about to force them to pay attention. And, like a linear campaign, there are lots of events that ARE chronological. They will happen at time x -- and the players have to schedule accordingly.

[Talia Invierno]

Hah. Thank you, Dawnshadow: I'd been trying to figure out why I had to change "scene" to "environment" in order to approach that question (although "web-based" works even better). You found the words.

[Dawnshadow]

Took a while.. my first go had 'tree' but that wasn't right either. Takes more work then just linear or scene-based though, but I know from GMing that I enjoy it more. Altogether too much fun in making the character mistakes come back to haunt them, and the opposition learn from the tactics used.

Best part though, is that it neatly avoids railroading.. the story advances no matter what the characters do. If they want to go running off and do something else entirely, then they can. If they want to be meticulous and undercut all of the power base before moving against the final opposition (in whatever form they choose), then they can. And when people look back at it, they see a coherent campaign that everything ties together nicely-- and have the satisfied feeling of having truly wrote part of it themselves, not just acted out part of it.

[MrSandman666]

Okay, as I see it we're running into some difficulties concerning definitions here...

Saying that a story is linear is kindof a misnomer. Stories are always linear. This is given by definition. A story is a chronologicaly sorted accumulation of events. Gameplay however can be linear or totally chaotic with many, many shades of gray in between.
Purely linear gameplay would be something where players really don't have any chance on affecting the flow of the game that much. Either they make it through or they don't but no matter what they do, the flow of the game will pretty much be the same. The old Super Mario game on the GameBoy would be a good example. No matter what you did, you were always going through the same areas in the same order meeting the same enemies. This kind of gameplay can be very fun, depending on what you want from the game. In linear games, players are pretty much specators, whitnessing a story told by the GM. They can not do much to it. This is generally very hard to do in Roleplaying games and most players (not all) would not have much fun with this. It requires loads of railroading and the willingness of the players to submit to the GM's story. Old-school D&D Dungeon Crawls were usually leaning heavily in this direction.

Purely non-linear games would be games where there is hardly any structure. Nothing is pre-planned, everything is decided "right now". This is actually a good bit easier to do in roleplaying games and it is actually what appeals to most people. Players have great freedom and everything they do affects the story. This requires the willingnes of the GM to not get too caught up in his ideas of what the story should look like.

Most games fall somewhere in between. I guess you could even break it down like this:
linear -> predertimened
non-linear -> flexible.
Of course this is overly simplyfied.

What I found works best is to prepare a scenario with all the involved parties, their goals, lots of background information and a starting point that gets the players hooked. I believe this is also what Dawnshadow meant by saying web-based campaigns and I believe it's also what most people mean by saying scene-based or scenario-based.

Again, this is a matter of taste.

Another related thing to note is the issue of "illusionism" versus "freedom". In Dawnshadow's example the players can do what they want, the GM's plot will unfold. They have to decide for themselves whether they want to participate or not. Some people could call this lazy since the GM is not particularly willing to do adapt his idea of the story to the players. I call it justified! ;) After all, I'm there to have fun, too. I don't think the GM should do anything and everything to please the players, they have some responsibility to have fun as well.
The counterpart is illusionism, which bends the story around the player characters. The PCs don't find a crucial item? No problem, relocate it so that they find it. They asked the wrong persons? No problem, these persons know the right answers as well. The players think that they achieved a lot while all that happened was that the GM was chasing after them, always putting new steppingstones under their feet, so to speak. (Does that sentence make any sense at all?)

Anyways, just some food for thought.

I somehow get the feeling I haven't been expressing myself very well again. I guess I need to learn some better English. And some better German, while I'm at it ;)

P.S.: I hope I'm not hijacking your thread, Talia. If I do, tell me and I'm gone!

[shadow_scholar]

Not sure if this is worthy of becoming a commandment, but to add my .02 :nuyen: , thou shalt not overuse the plot twist. When your players begin to expect them, like when watching any M. Night Shyamalan movie, they lose their impact.

And I just wanted to say to Talia, I am officially in love with you. Well, not really, but I do love the way you write, the way you vocalize (is that term appropriate?). I find it literally mind numbing, which is a beautiful gift that you give to us mere mortals.

[Talia Invierno]

Considering you've just set out a detailed examination of definition and connotation that native English speakers were stumbling over, MrSandman, I'd say you were expressing yourself very well indeed :)

Did I mention I'm also a strong believer in valid tangents? Because that's when you start getting into the interesting parts of the discussion!

Actually, it's a bit ironic: me, I play fast and loose within the spirit but not rigid structure of every last rule -- but in the LitS threads, if only for the sake of consistency, we're all doing our level best to stay as canon as possible. It's an interesting study in interpretation ... and in just how limited most of our rules knowledge actually is. (That might perhaps fall under the "GMs also have lives" sub-rule ;) )

[Edit -- argh, I'm generally terrible at coming up with plot twists. Things generally are what they've been all along in my own structures: but they tend toward the intricate, I've been told it's like trying to figure out the picture on a jigsaw puzzle from a few random and not-yet-connecting pieces.]