GM Technique and Teaching

[M. J. Young]

I should have just posted an "advice on how to be a great GM" thread and left it at that, but I thought it might be interesting to explain why I wanted to know, specifically.

Ah, but then we'd all have asked about what game you wanted to run, what style you preferred, what agendum you wanted to support--you did manage to sidestep all that with your explanation, so don't feel too bad about the decision.

M.J., you mention a lot of difficult situations in which you have GMed, I hope successfully.  How did you pull it off?

Actual play stories? I'll give it a shot.

We'll call this player Mike, because that's not his name and I don't remember ever having a player named Mike. Mike was a geek's geek; his brother was the same, and even his father had trouble fitting with people to some degree. I knew people who wouldn't let Mike play in their group because nobody really liked his company. At the time, I was rebuilding a group after some unknown person had stolen several hundred dollars worth of tech objects from our home during games (mostly video games, some videos, and a bass guitar). I knew he didn't do it, so he was on the short list to be invited to the game; several of the other players were reluctant to have him involved, but they wanted to play and I was running the game at my house, so that made it my decision.

Mike immediately recognized that no one took him or his character seriously. I used an in-game system for deciding who would be the leader of the party, and the player whose character landed at the top was the sort of person who actually was good at managing people. Mike landed at the bottom. He tried to take over by being pushy and annoying. It was rather simple in that situation to tell him that it didn't much matter that his character was a samurai--he was an unimpressive uncharismatic samurai who had never proven himself in any situation at all. This focused the player on attempting to make the character someone the other characters would respect; in shifting his focus to playing the character well, I defused his efforts to nag and niggle people into doing what he wanted, because that clearly was not how his character would act--or, if his character did act that way, it was counterproductive to his goal.

So I guess I harnessed his desire to get more attention into doing so by fitting his character into the group expectations more effectively. I forced him to win the respect of the other players by playing well, and refused to allow him to influence play significantly by out-of-character annoyances.

At the other end, I've had a couple of passive players. With passive players, I always focus on finding out what they want to do. This is difficult sometimes with big groups, but I think it's important.

One thing we use in our D&D games is what we call the Turns rule. In essence, when you reach about ten to twelve people at the table, it is often so cacaphonous that no one can be heard. The rules states that at any moment any player can call "Turns", merely by saying it loudly enough that I, the referee, can hear it. At that point, all play and all discussion stops, and I start with the player who called turns and ask him what he wants to say. It can be a description about character action, a question about the game reality, a comment or question to another player, even a request for more soda (although generally it was something game-relevant). Then I move from that player to each and every other player in the game, and give each of them a chance to speak, one at a time, until everyone has said something--and everyone must say something, and everyone knows that his turn is coming.

I also engage those withdrawn people by asking them whether they are going with the party or doing something else, or whether there's anything they particularly want to do in the context of going with the party; and somehow I manage to enlist the other players--they pick up from me the idea that anyone who is not involved probably is not enjoying himself, and so they work to involve people. I try to make players aware of the strengths and abilities of the other characters, so that they know to turn to this or that character when they need something. Thus the withdrawn player is pulled into the interactions not merely by my efforts but by others in the group. In part, I think, taking the attitude that this withdrawn player has something valuable to contribute makes others in the group perceive that player as having something valuable to contribute, and so inspires them to try to bring him into things.

Those are the techniques that come to mind; they are the ideas which I'd tackled in brief above, but hopefully this added information will clarify them.

--M. J. Young