How (and What) do New GMs Learn?

[Alan]

Hi all,

We had an interesting discussion last night about how one learns to game master.

We were playing a pre-generated adventure from the Unknown Armies book.  The adventure was framed as an investigation to find a mystic object.  Our GM for this one-shot game is expanding his skill repetoir - he hasn't GMed for many years, and his previous experience was largely AD&D dungeon crawls.

In after game discussion I and Wil (Rafial), the two other players, gave some advice about running illusionist scenarios.

At this point, I reminisced about my own history of learning to GM.  I started with AD&D, running dungeons, went through Champions and Fantasy Hero, which I ran largely in illusionist simulationist styles.    Only in the last few years have I learned the more player-directed style typified by games like Sorcerer and InSpectres.

Wil mentioned a similar history.

What occured to me is that we all started in a style of GMing that set up a very controlled environment, where player input was constrained to an arena, then later to play where player actions were constrained, and finally, where the game is focused by constraints on things other than player input.

Here are the elements of the three phases I've experienced:

Dungeon Crawl - GM has almost all directorial control.  He prepares a physical environment (situation), with placed encounters or responsive elements.  Players are allowed to wander and engage the encounters as they like.

Illusionist (or participationist) Flow Chart - Again GM has strong directorial control.  He prepares an event environment, with placed and connected encounters.  Players are tacitly expected to restrict actions to addressing the elements presented.  Encounters can be shifted or adjust, to ensure players encounter them in order.

Group Plot-Goal Discovery - An initial situation is prepared, often by a GM, but not always exclusively.  During play, all players including the GM have some influence on how the plot unfolds - and where it's going.  The GM no longer carries the weight of making a session turn out a particular way.

What I observe are these points:

- These are all attempts to resolve the tension between structure and a sense of free will within the structure.

- I think the Dungeon Crawl and Flow Chart both load a lot of responsibility for structure on the GM, and try to aid and reassure the GM by providing a restricted arena for the players.  

- of the three, the Dungeon Crawl appears to provide the GM with the most stable platform.  It doesn't require that he juggle possible events, or remain flexible in response to player input.  (Though it does require a lot of advance preparation.)

So here's my point:

A novice will probably have some uncertainty about leading a role-playing game.  The urge for a large degree of control may seem appealing in this situation.  


My questions for discussion:

Granted that my personal experience follows the historical evolution of popular RPG designs, is there perhaps some attraction for a beginner to more control - and do they only tend to be confortable with more distributed credibility later on.

Finally, actual play: What do you observe when new players learn to lead games these days?  Do they adapt naturally to, say, InSpectres, when given a chance, or do they gravitate to the simplicity of the "dungeon crawl" where they have a great degree of certainty?

[John Harper]

I don't see your three phases as progressional at all, Alan. Descriptive, yes, but not as a series that a new GM moves through from novice to expert.

In the last year I have played two games with complete novice GMs -- they had never run anything before, and had only been gaming at all for a short time. One GM ran InSpectres and the other ran Wushu. Both of these games are very high on the "Group Plot-Goal Discovery" side of things. And yet both of these novice GMs ran their games with aplomb.

Both would have had trouble with the "basic" dungeon crawl, though, and they said as much to me. Not having grown-up with D&D-style play, it was totally foreign to them. The idea of preparing an environment and encounters ahead of time seemed like too much work -- and a daunting exercise when not totally familiar with a complex rules system like D&D.

The concept of cooperative story creation, on the other hand, was totally natural to them. They had no gamer habits to unlearn and instead fell very easily into a "let's pretend" mode that games like Wushu, InSpectres, Universalis, and The Pool handle very well.

What I'm saying is: I think there are as many progressions of GM style/ability as there are GMs. It depends greatly on many factors unique to the individual including personality type, past game experience, familiarity with the rules system at hand, intimacy with the play group, creative agenda preference (and clash/dysfunction at the game table), etc.

[Alan]

HI John,

I didn't mean the description of my learning experience to be taken as a proposed evolution - but I see that the way I presented it implies that.

I guess there's two issues that interest me here: first what does a GM who's conditioned to one style need to learn to manage another?.  But I'll set that aside for now, and focus on

the more interesting point:

When recruiting new people who have not been conditioned by existing RPG play, what approach actually "comes naturally"?  Ron has asserted that the more collaborative style comes more naturally, and I suspect this is so.  It draws on skills most of us develop in other areas of our social life.

And related to that, how do such new people cope with the anxiety of leading a new activity?  I was suggesting that the dungeon crawl offers one way to do that.  I speculate that a more collaborative game takes the pressure off by sharing the load.

Is the pressure I percieve for novice GMs in the "dungeon crawl" and "flow-chart" largely an artifact of the centralization nof credibility?

[TonyLB]

I think that any participant in a roleplaying game learns to play the game through practice.  As with many learning experiences, the trick is to find a way to practice that is more fun than it is frustrating, more empowering than it is intimidating.

Freedom and responsibility are frustrating, intimidating elements of being a GM.  You have (correctly, I think) identified Illusionist techniques as a way to free the student-GM from the onerous burden of freedom.  You have also identified cooperative game-play as a way to free the student-GM from the burden of responsibility.

I think you haven't gone quite as far as you could though:  The best way to train a student GM is to give them an extremely constrained situation (say, they control only one character and his actions) and a large amount of external story input (say, someone else provides the main story and they contribute only as they see fit).  In other words, they should play the games.

Being a player and being a GM do not (IMHO) comprise different sets of skills.  Any skill that helps with one will help with another.  The skills are those of contributing to the shared-imaginary-space, and to the fun everyone is having around the table.  If being a player makes that more comfortable for a prospective GM then I think that's the best training.


Any new group is going to create its own style.  This will often (but not always) be influenced by the strong opinions of experienced roleplayers.  But whatever style your group ends up using, that will be the style that people are learning to use.  I don't think that any style "comes naturally" for an individual:  They will naturally learn whatever they get a chance to practice.

Whether a collaborative style "comes more naturally" to a group as a whole is a question upon which I do not yet have an opinion.

[John Harper]

Tony's response really resonates with me. In traditional Japanese martial arts training (or at least the daito-ryu jujitsu that I'm familiar with) beginning students would spend several years being thrown around by the advanced students before ever being allowed to try the techniques themselves. The idea was that by having the techniques applied to your body, you would be able to internalize the moves almost by osmosis. This is similar to the idea that one can learn how to be a good GM by playing in games run by a good GM. For some types of people, I think this works very well. I learned how to GM in this way.

In post-war Japan, Western teaching techniques began to creep into the dojo. The idea of actually explaining the moves (and letting students step through them slowly and carefully) began to take hold. Even though practice on the mat was still focused on moving the body and not chit-chatting, the addition of a procedural explanation of the techniques added another tool for teaching certain types of people. The division of techniques into "beginner" and "advanced" also helped. This is how I've been taught jujistsu and Aikido and I find it to be a good process for me.

This "western way" may be applicable to learning gaming skills, as well. I think there's some merit to the idea of "teaching" GM (and player!) skills through a process of procedural explanation, mentorship, and practical examples. Most game books I consider well-written do a large part of this job, already. Consider the procedural explanations in Trollbabe, Primetime Adventures, and Dogs in the Vineyard, to name only a few.

To get back to Alan's point in a tangential way, which way of learning "comes naturally?" This may be a good place to start before even going down the road of "which style of play?" Some people will learn a lot by observation and experience. Others will learn better through explanation and guided practice. I think both ways have merit.

And, finally, there's another lesson to be taken from martial arts training: The student decides how much is learned. It's the student that chooses whether or not to practice, whether or not to focus, whether or not the instruction is useful and good. The novice GM will decide for herself how to learn, what guidance to seek (if any), and how interested and committed she is to the role in the first place.

[Bankuei]

Hi guys,

Interestly enough, I think probably the most critical skill, the social skill that gets applied with the Social Contract, is typically the one least looked at or addressed for many groups- hence the problem for many players or GMs to shift to a different style of play.  Once you recognize that the Social Contract is the big box, and everything else is happening within it, you get a lot more freedom to try out different things and recognize what is actually going on.

Coming to this level of understanding though, actually works best through using both play through osmosis and explicit explaination as John is pointing out.  Introducing folks to games with hardcore rules that break their conditioned understanding of roleplaying is a great way of giving concrete experiences-that's why I recommend certain games like Inspectres, Rune, etc. to use as learning games.  

Once folks have an understanding that there is more than one way to play, it becomes a matter of introducing the ideas of Social Contract and Lumpley Principle.  When people get that, then they understand that any given way to play is not the only way, and that there's really a lot of room to explore.  

That understanding makes it much more comfortable for folks to try new games and techniques, without worrying as much about "doing it right".

Chris

[TheLHF]

Granted that my personal experience follows the historical evolution of popular RPG designs, is there perhaps some attraction for a beginner to more control - and do they only tend to be confortable with more distributed credibility later on.

I learned to GM first by reading every published adventure I could get my hands on. I think many new GMs start out with a more controling style of play because many published adventures are writen that way. The notes I wrote for my first five or so adventures read exactly like a published adventure. "The players to X, then Y, then Z then defeat the bad guy!"

As I learned more about my players and how I liked to GM, my notes became more like, "The players do X (or A) then Y (or B) then Z (or C) then kill the bad guy!" Same basic idea, only a little more freedom for the players.

My last game, I had a basic "X,Y,Z" game planned out. Then the players through me a curve ball and went wondering off to find a healer. So, compeatly on the fly and with no pre-writen notes, I made up a whole adventure. And it was great! One of my bast, says my players. So for the next game, I have some characters in my head, some names written down and that's it.  That's going to be tonight, so we'll see how it goes.

That's my GMing evolution, so far. I think the evolution of a GM has a lot to do with finding where that GM is comfortable running their game.

--Victor

[hyphz]

If I can throw a curveball here - this order didn't apply at all for me.

The first thing resembling an RPG that I played - although at the time I didn't know it was an RPG - consisted of me and my mate Craig making up stories that took place in our school (this was secondary school btw).  One would, basically, play themselves and the other would say what happened.  Exactly the way it went would change constantly every time through - sometimes the player would just want to run amok, hit people and play pranks while avoiding getting caught (which was usually done by deep and detailed strategies like 'I know Craig hated Mr S's lesson last week so if I ambush Mr.S with the foam fire extinguisher ingame I'll probably be safe'), whereas sometimes they'd be something resembling a mystery emerging, and so on.

So you'd think that, with this background, when we entered the "real" world of RPGs (or when I did, since I lost contact with Craig long before I learned about RPGs properly) we'd have a handle on the whole nar/no myth kind of thing, right?  Well, uh, no way.  In those games we had a common basis - we both knew the school because we both went there IRL, and all the NPCs were people we knew IRL, so there was no difficulty imagining whole layouts and scenes in complete pictorial detail.  But jumping into a gameworld where the players didn't already know most of the setting details - and, in fact, where they were actively supposed to explore it - bodyslammed everything I had learned from those earlier occasions.  

Because we were exploring something different - or were we exploring Setting on both occasions, but in different ways.  So I'm not sure the Dungeon Crawl is automatically the start condition for learning to GM, but I *do* think that the type of exploration done in early games can exert a defining influence on any individual's perception of what role-playing "is"...