Ability Score Increase, or: Git Gud, GM
EDIT: I want to be clear about something from the outset: This blog post is about a couple of things: it's about me learning about myself and my friends. It's about setting myself goals. It's not about criticizing my friends. The frustrations I discuss here stem from my lack of understanding, not from my players' actions. My players are great. I love them. I want to understand them better and play better games with them. Now on with the show.
2023 shook my confidence as a GM. 2024 will be the year I try to improve myself and shore up my weak areas (or at least try).
Ego Decay
At some point in the last five years I started to realize that the things I enjoy most about TTRPGs wasn't exactly the same as my friends. It's not that we weren't having fun, but I slowly started to recognize that we weren't steering in the same direction. I steered towards combat and epic drama, while my friends mostly steered towards laughs and slice-of-life interpersonal stories. For a while it frustrated me that I couldn't seem to maintain the tone that interested me during our sessions. I'd set up some grim battle and my friends would crack jokes and spend their time mucking around with throwaway NPCs. It felt like I was missing some key ingredient to make it work, to make the circumstances feel truly dire and to put the fear of god into them. I just couldn't put my finger on what was missing exactly. After all, everyone still seemed to be having fun, just not in the way I expected.
I eventually clued in that it wasn't something mechanical that was missing, but rather that my friends were naturally steering towards the stuff they enjoyed most, which is tremendously sensible. I kinda clued in that we might experience some friction, but I also gave myself permission to continue doing what I felt best suited my strengths: dynamic action and bespoke mechanical subsystems. I kinda figured that my players would still have fun and show up for games and - like a pot-luck - they'd bring the stuff they enjoyed with them. I'd try to bat those things back and forth with them, but I wouldn't worry about providing them myself.
After putting our standard campaign on hiatus, I decided to focus on the game that REALLY interested me: a west marches game with OSR rules. Simple, modular rules that could tolerate bespoke mechanical subsystems? Oh yeah! Some actual encumbrance rules that allow me to challenge my players through depleting their supplies? HELL YEAH! A big world full of opportunities for nail-biting combat encounters? SIGN ME UP!
I spent ages preparing before launching the campaign to the chirping of crickets.
I'm not sure what I expected. This campaign was a perfect distillation of the mismatch between my interested and those of my players. What could be further from what they wanted? They wanted gaffs, laughs, and puttering around causing trouble with their favourite NPCs. They didn't want to worry about what they were carrying in their bags, or if their sword would break on the next swing. They wanted to trim out anything that got between them and the next bit of shenanigans.
I've talked before about the reasons my campaign failed, and how I felt about it. But this post is to talk about how I'm going to move forward from it.
Guidelines
Before I get into the actionable steps I plan to take, I've come up with a few guiding principles to help keep my head on straight:
- My preferences are valid: Writing bespoke mechanical sub-systems to represent stuff in the world rules! Coming up with rollicking combat encounters set in multi-level, dynamic arenas is great! Some of my best moments as a GM made heavy use of those things, and I can't afford to lose my greatest strengths.
- Learn from the best: There's no sense trying to improve at this stuff in a vaccuum. There are so many resources available to learn from. The TTRPG community is built on a treasure trove of blogs and youtube videos.
- It's OK to compromise a bit, and to ask my friends to do the same: We are never going to perfectly overlap in our preferences. No two people like EXACTLY the same things. The goal is to make the best possible use of the areas where our interests overlap, plus a bit extra on both sides.
- I'll never be perfect: And that's OK. I succeed by improving at all.
Weaknesses
With that out of the way, it's time to confront my weaknesses. These are all some facet of "being bad at story games":
Dialing in on the players' interests: I'm evidently not great at this. Part of this requires better communication, but part of it is just having a better idea of what the hobby CAN look like so I can imagine what my players might be steering towards.
Character Motivations: My NPCs are mush a lot of the time. It's hard to get my players to care about NPCs when they are all just a slightly off-model version of myself.
Pacing issues: This is something I've begun to consider more lately, but I really struggle to pace character development. My friends play their characters to the hilt flaws and all. They want to see their characters grow and change and face circumstances that force them to reckon with their shortcomings, and I have no clue when to do this. Half the time I deliver it too soon, and sometimes I never deliver it at all. It's just shots in the dark.
Remembering details: This one isn't specifically about story games, but it hurts those as much as it hurts any other style of play. I've got a bad memory and I'm always doing stuff based on faulty data. I forget that some NPC made a promise to the PCs and now my players are desperately confused as to why this guy is backstabbing them.
Action items:
This is my first draft of Operation Nick Is Not As Bad At Story Games Anymore. It's prone to change, and I won't get through it all immediately. But it's a list I can refer back to whenever I am having Feelings About GMing.
Study storytelling and character writing: There are so many good resources for this. My wife is an author and we both went to school for animation so our house is heaped with books on the subject. There are wonderful blogs that cover various tried-and-true procedures to follow, but I think I should build up a deeper patina of theory before I rely too heavily on the procedures.
Watch actual play games: The Discord channel I use to chat with my friends is constantly filled with chatter about various Actual Play games (largely Dimension 20). If I want to be better at the things that get my friends excited, I could stand to familiarize myself with them. There are a huge variety of these things available for every system under the sun (well maybe not quite - I'm still looking for a decent AP of The Black Hack).
Play in other people's games: This one relies on the mercy of my fellow DMs so it's somewhat out of my control (what isn't?). But watching how others run their games is always a great way to learn. Obviously this will best suit my needs if I am playing in story-focused games, but just about any game I can get into will likely be worthwhile.
Study beloved adventures: This one is a little bit tangental: I don't think most published adventures really deliver character-focused story stuff (though some might), but I think it'd be useful to have dungeon and adventure design become second nature. I know I will struggle with this dedicated study, so building up a strong muscle memory for the other necessary skills will keep my brainpower available. It's also handy to know where to look for cool maps and stat blocks in a pinch if we've gone somewhere I wasn't expecting.
Implement session zero: This one is actually embarrassing. I always toot the session zero horn online when talking to other GMs, but I almost never use them myself. Most of the time I'm playing with the same group of people (or at least a subset of the same pool) so I assume I already know what they expect... except clearly I don't! That's the whole point of this blog post! Coming to session zero with a strong elevator pitch and then hashing it out together will make sure we're all excited about the adventure.
Take better notes: ADHD and chronic fatigue (I'm a parent) make for a memory like a sieve. I will set an alarm every 30 minutes to remind myself to take a one-minute break to jot down notes. My memory is so bad that I often forget key details from the beginning of the session before we've finished. I'll make a little ritual out of writing, condensing, and reviewing notes (no sense writing them if you never read them, right?).
Run games for a wider variety of players: This is sort of the same thing as point 3, but from the other side of the table. I love my regular gaming group and I hope to cast the bones and tell stories with them huddled in the ruins of Earth in the year 2080. But other people are cool, too! I want to run games for people who challenge me in ways my current group isn't interested in challenging me. (If you're reading this guys, I love you! You'll always be my first and foremost gaming group)
Be flexible and willing to rewrite everything: This needs no explanation. This is the meat and potatoes of this whole endeavour.
Games to try out:
I am done with 5e D&D. Well, I'm not done - some day we'll wrap up our 5e campaign. But after that, I think I'm done with it for now. It's antithetical to my needs at the moment. It is not a system that encourages flexibility. It encourages manufacturing stuff in advance. It's intricate and fiddly and making things WORK takes WORK. I have to come to the table with prefab content. I can shuffle it around but the system doesn't hold together well if you play too fast and loose with it. Maybe that's not true for better GMs, but it's my experience.
Consequently, I'd love to try out some other games that are purpose built to be fast and flexible with little mechanical prep. The top two on my list are Blades In The Dark and Dungeon World. They both empower players to take an active role in designing the world, forcing me to roll with the punches and adapt. I'm also hoping to lure some folks in to try Kingdom, a game that's a perfect distillation of the skills I'm trying to practice: all RP, almost no mechanics.
Wish me luck!