Simple Questions 2: What makes a good GM?

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Now that the "why GM" question has been fully hashed out, I want to move on to another question: what makes a good GM? Even more personally, why do you (if you think this) think you are a good GM?

I fully expect some GNS stuff to come into this - please keep it to the minimum required.

Questions to ponder:
- What skills are necessary to become a good GM?
- Can GMing skills be taught, or are they innate?
- What attributes are a detriment to a good GM?
- Is a GM styled towards a certain kind of game? (Frex: could a GM be great at running Over the Edge, but a shitty D&D GM?)

[Mytholder]

Now that the "why GM" question has been fully hashed out, I want to move on to another question: what makes a good GM? Even more personally, why do you (if you think this) think you are a good GM?

I fully expect some GNS stuff to come into this - please keep it to the minimum required.

Questions to ponder:
- What skills are necessary to become a good GM?

LOL. I suspect, if I keep going, I'd end up listing almost every positive trait until we end up with something reminiscent of a medieval conception of God. The GM is infinitely wise, infinitely patient, infinitely challenging, perfectly schooled in all arts and sciences...

The key skills for a GM are:
1) Being able to think on your feet. When the game faulters, the GM is the final safety net. You've got to be able to handle whatever the players throw at you.
2) Timing. Ensuring that the pace is correct for the game, ensuring that spotlight time is properly allocated etc.
3) Facilitation. This can be storytelling, world-building, setting up proper challenges, creating NPCs etc. The GM doesn't have to be especially good at any of these things, as long as they play well off the characters.
4) Evocation. The "colour" that gets added to facilitation. Good roleplaying, interesting settings, well-told stories etc.
5) Domain knowledge - both the game rules, and the setting. The GM doesn't need to be the group expert on either, but he should be able to incorporate the expert's suggestions and corrections into the game.

- Can GMing skills be taught, or are they innate?

They can be taught, but the longer someone goes without GMing, the more they think of themselves as a "player", and the harder it is for them to switch over. They come to think of GMing as something magical and mysterious.

- What attributes are a detriment to a good GM?

Ego. Stomping over the players, either to prove that you're "right", or that your plots are more important than the PCs, or whatever.

- Is a GM styled towards a certain kind of game? (Frex: could a GM be great at running Over the Edge, but a shitty D&D GM?)

If you lack interest in or domain knowledge of a game, then you're not going to do a good job of it...

[joshua neff]

I agree with everything Gar said, especially as he used my favorite word (especially when talking about what a GM, or a librarian, or a teacher) should do: facilitate.

And I agree, GM skills can be learned--I use to be a pretty sucky GM, but now my players seem to really like what I do. And I enjoy it so much more than I used to, it's amazing. I really do think GMing is like sex--you can really only learn how to do it by actually doing it, but you can learn how to do it well by getting tips & suggestions (either from texts or from people). But if you're not open to learning how to do it well, you won't learn a thing. You have to be aware of how you're interacting with the people you do it with & be open to changing your style.

[Bankuei]

I can say a good GM gives the players what they want.

Of course, that's really been said in Robin's Laws, right?  But here's something I think a lot of folks really don't get at:  Protagonization.  Each player has a character concept in mind, and the more they are facilitated in seeing that concept into fruition, the more entertained they are.  For some, it's better powers, for others, its an actual character development(in the literary sense of the term).

When a GM helps a player fufill this seed of potential that lies in each character that players' create, the player is entertained.  When you stomp on it, the player is unhappy.  For example, Joe plays the big barbarian because he wants to see some action.  He doesn't want to see his barbarian get wrestled to the ground and pummeled to death by goblins.  He also doesn't want to talk the flowery speech of negotiation in the court of intrigue.  It goes against the character concept.  So concept isn't just a set of stats or a role to be played, it also includes events that happen TO a character.

Players want to see their characters challenged by conflict, yet not have their concept stepped on or forgotten.  I'm sure more than a few of us have played games where either our wonderful background has been pushed aside and neglected, or a special ability is not ever used, or is made useless for whatever reason.  Who wants to play a mage that can't cast spells?  You might as well have simply said, "No magic" and let the player choose something else.

So the art of the GM is to balance this need each player has and combine them into a good dish.  It is not unlike Iron Chef in any way, even down to the dissimilar judges and the bad dubbing :P

Can this be taught?  hmm, I'm still learning myself.  I believe a lot of it has to do with sensitivity to the crowd(yaay for theatre and music), timing and presence(yaay for spoken word), and total improv(yaay for bullshitting).

What goes against it?  Assumption, unwillingness to experiment.  We get caught up in either our GM story, or the RULES and forget that each player is presenting us with a written request of what they want from us in the form of a character.  

Of course, I'm still a 50/50 hitter on this, so my opinion is just opinion right? :P

Chris

[Petter Sandelin]

I'd like to share some experiences about learning how to GM..

I've been GMing for some years now and for the same reasons as many others, no one else would do it. One of my main problems was just giving a good colorful description. It wasn't even that the description was bad, often it was totally absent. "You walk into a forest, after a while you see a house" type of thing. I read all the "10 tips for giving better description" articles I could find and filled my screen with notes but without any result. After some time I realized that my problem was that I couldn't remember to take time to give a good description in the heat of the game. The preassure from all other stuff I had to keep in mind and myself  constantly reminding myself before the game was too much. My solution was to practice outside the game when there was no preassure. It may sound odd but the I found that the shower is the perfect place. At least a lot better than while walking down the street.

I guess my point is that learing by doing is good but with the preassure of the game it  really isn't a bad thing to practise a little before. Same thing goes for most GMing skills.

[contracycle]

I used to kinda practice by watching the road late at night (I lived near quite a busy suburban artery) and just attaching stories to explain people driving at 4AM or whatever.  "Going to hospital... going to city X... coming back from a club... coming from the airport..."

And I practice practice practice making up names on the fly.

[Walt Freitag]

What does a good gamemaster need? Creativity, creativity, creativity.

Of course, "creativity" embodies so many different meanings with so many different elements that it's impossible to meaningfully quantify or define. Oh, but wait, so does "gamemaster."

Sure, I can be more specific. What a gamemaster needs is just the right kind of creativity for the kind of gamemastering he's doing. Does that help? :)

I'm a firm believer in the "born GM." It's not that the skills cannot be taught or learned, it's that behind the use of the skills there's still an element of aptitude. I could take lessons in playing basketball and practice every day, and I'm fairly sure I'd become a much better basketball player than I am now. But my lack of aptitude for it means that someone else taking the same lessons and doing the same practice would improve more than I would, even though they were probably better than me to begin with. Even more important, they'd enjoy it more than I would.

Where learning and practice are most important for gamemastering are in all the execution and communication skills that contribute to turning the game that happens in your mind into the game that happens in the players' minds. But for that to be of value, there first has to be something in your mind worth communicating. That can be your own individual vision, or it can be your ability to synthesize everyone's vision into a beautiful whole, but either way, that's the part that's difficult to learn or teach.

- What attributes are a detriment to a good GM?   

Ego. Stomping over the players, either to prove that you're "right", or that your plots are more important than the PCs, or whatever.

Or is that insufficiency of ego? In my experience it's the least self-confident GMs who are most likely to stomp over the players and force a pre-planned plot. Those who lack the confidence to improvise or don't trust their ability to entertain through game play itself tend to lean on the plotline like a crutch. Then they react to players who try to influence the plotline much like someone dependent on a crutch might react to someone trying to kick it away from them. Ego, that isn't.

- Walt

[Valamir]

Those who lack the confidence to improvise or don't trust their ability to entertain through game play itself tend to lean on the plotline like a crutch. Then they react to players who try to influence the plotline much like someone dependent on a crutch might react to someone trying to kick it away from them.

Damn, that is one of the most compelling analogies of GMing I've heard.  It addresses many issues of bad GMing, and even makes them somewhat sympathetic.

Extending the analogy some, you can really see players positioning themselves as "therapist" helping the GM to gradually wean himself off of the crutch so he can walk on his own...as opposed to simply mocking him and quitting the game.