As some of you know, I teach in college classrooms, usually small seminars. And the more I think about classic problems that arise in teaching, the more I think that a really expert GM has a lot to teach the college teacher. {Note: by "expert" I mean a GM who has a mastery of a wide range of techniques by which to accomplish various GM-ing goals.} So I want to ask you all, most of whom know far more about GM technique than I do, to help me out.

First a couple caveats:
1. I’m not in any way suggesting that my classroom experience is going to help you be a good GM. I suppose that’s possible, though I doubt it, but I’m interested in doing things the other way around here.
2. I’m not talking about secondary school (K-12) teaching, about which I know next to nothing. If you want to draw from experience there, or comment on that, please be clear that that's what you're talking about: there are real differences of style, technique, purpose, and situation that I think change matters considerably.
3. Lecturing is a whole different thing, and works differently, and I think the analogy does not work: lectures are not railroading, they’re something else entirely.

So as a starting point, what’s similar here? That is, why do I think the analogy valid?
1. In a college classroom, you can pretty much ignore the students who don’t want to be there and can’t be bothered to do the work. You just fail them and leave it at that. Among other things, this keeps your GPA down, which pleases administrators, and allows you to give a bit higher grades to the majority who actually do care about the class. [Note that this is very different from the situation in most K-12 teaching, in which it's a nightmare process to fail a student, usually not worth the trouble -- one of many insane problems facing the K-12 teacher.] Similarly, in an RPG, a GM doesn’t (or shouldn’t) spend all his time agonizing about the wanker who shows up an hour late, eats all the pizza, leaves an hour early, and spends the whole game reading a book and not paying attention. If you are stuck with a player like this, you try as much as possible not to let him be a distraction to the people who matter; better yet, you chuck him (i.e. give him an F) and then you don’t have to deal with him again.

2. Students often think, or act like they think, that they want the prof to provide all the information and content. They want to be taught; they don’t want to listen to each other. This makes them tend to be rather passive. But a really effective class is usually marked by student participation to a great extent. It’s guided discussion, not lecture. The great trick of the seminar teacher is to get the students to do all the thinking and work, within certain constraints, given that the students do not “naturally” act this way as a rule. The analogy to RPG’s is, I think, obvious. The GM can’t do everything himself; he must get everyone else to participate. And in a really great game session, the GM often increasingly recedes into the background, as more and more creative control shifts to the players, who act and dominate the game. This is the whole “How can I get my players to be more proactive?” question.

3. Seminars usually have some point. That is, on a class-by-class, week-by-week, or block-by-block (quarter or third of a semester, for example) basis, you need to get the students to a given point in their learning. If you’re teaching the history of early modern witch-hunts, for example, you don’t want everyone simply to rant about their personal feelings about witch-hunting; they need to be guided to put their enthusiasm and interest to the service of learning something, and in particular to analyze specific materials. In terms of RPG’s, this is not necessarily the case, but often is. If you have a very rough storyline, as in “PC’s search for and find object,” you need to ensure that they do indeed find the object. You don’t really care what they do with it, and you don’t really care how they get there, but you can subtly manipulate things such that they do indeed find the object and feel that they have accomplished something – which they have. So it’s this kind of GM-ing I’m talking about: the kind in which you do have goals in mind, but you try not to turn things into a force or a railroad. Which I see as a particularly tricky type of GM technique, though I don’t know that you’ll all agree.

4. As a rule, if you have a really great seminar in which the students do a huge amount of the creative and analytical work, as well as most of the talking, and they end up learning a lot actively through the process, they will turn right around and say that the teacher was entirely responsible. They will actually thank you for the experience! This is also true of RPG's, to some extent: if the GM says almost nothing and all the players create and contribute constantly, and a great time is thus had by all, they will often lodge the full responsibility with the GM: "He's a great GM!" they say, even though they did most of the work to make the game great.

Okay, having set up the analogy, let me ask my questions:

1. If you were going to teach someone how to ignore and play down the effects of a pain-in-the-butt player, one you can’t at the moment simply get rid of, without letting that person screw up everyone else’s game, how might you do it?

2. If you were going to teach someone how to get players to be more proactive, how would you do it?

3. If you were going to teach someone how to guide players to specific goals without undermining their desire to create and contribute, i.e. without weakening goal #2, how would you do it?

Any advice or suggestions much appreciated. Feel free to use any and all actual play examples, which will help immensely.

clehrich wrote:
Okay, having set up the analogy, let me ask my questions:

1. If you were going to teach someone how to ignore and play down the effects of a pain-in-the-butt player, one you can’t at the moment simply get rid of, without letting that person screw up everyone else’s game, how might you do it?

2. If you were going to teach someone how to get players to be more proactive, how would you do it?

3. If you were going to teach someone how to guide players to specific goals without undermining their desire to create and contribute, i.e. without weakening goal #2, how would you do it?

Eero,

Good point. What I'm really interested in is what you do and how you do it, but I'm hoping people will formulate that in terms of practical instruction. That is, I'm hoping people will say, "Well, what I do is X, and the way I think you might get there is Y." That would help me translate over into my own pedagogy. I think I'm getting wound up a bit in my own discourse, because I'm thinking pedagogy and I want everyone else to think GM-ing, and that's causing me to explain a bit incoherently. "Teach me to be a good GM of this type," is what I'm really asking.

At the same time, I think it could be very helpful to think about it in terms of teaching good GM technique. Can you follow up on your remarks on personality projection, for example? That's something I see startlingly lacking in a lot of the people whose classes I have to observe and evaluate, but it's very difficult to explain what one is talking about and why it's important, not to mention how to go about it.

As to dividing up the questions, I just figure that's a useful way of explaining the kinds of things I'm interested in answers to. If it makes more sense to you to treat this all as one question, go for it. If you'd rather cut things up more finely, that's good too.

At base, I'm looking for comments and remarks about good GM technique of the sort described elliptically here (i.e. with goals in mind but making it seem to come entirely from the players), and I'm not convinced that I have either a total list of the right questions or the right ways of breaking down the right questions in the first place. Any help there is also much appreciated.

Incidentally, I do have this very distant, nebulous idea that somewhere far down the line, discussion of this sort might be very useful in bridging the academic/RPG gap a bit. That is, I have argued before (as have you) that academic theorizing and analytical technique can be useful for thinking about RPG's. But it's not clear, as yet, what RPG's have to contribute to academia, except as a potentially interesting (though thus far ignored) object of study. I think if GM technique could be used to demonstrate and teach really effective classroom technique, that might force academics (a few, anyway) to sit up and take notice. I'm not really very sanguine about this, in the short run anyway, but it's a possibility.

clehrich wrote:
Good point. What I'm really interested in is what you do and how you do it, but I'm hoping people will formulate that in terms of practical instruction.

At the same time, I think it could be very helpful to think about it in terms of teaching good GM technique. Can you follow up on your remarks on personality projection, for example? That's something I see startlingly lacking in a lot of the people whose classes I have to observe and evaluate, but it's very difficult to explain what one is talking about and why it's important, not to mention how to go about it.

Well, on the positive side, I did have some experience teaching undergrad after I became a game referee; on the negative side, I'm not as persuaded as you are that the techniques used in each place so easily cross over. However, it is an interesting notion.

Chris Lehrich wrote: 1. If you were going to teach someone how to ignore and play down the effects of a pain-in-the-butt player, one you can?t at the moment simply get rid of, without letting that person screw up everyone else?s game, how might you do it?

Next, Chris wrote: 2. If you were going to teach someone how to get players to be more proactive, how would you do it?

Third, he wrote: 3. If you were going to teach someone how to guide players to specific goals without undermining their desire to create and contribute, i.e. without weakening goal #2, how would you do it?

M.J.,

Many thanks for your comments. For people who haven't taught, maybe I should clarify that you don't need to do the translation work; that's my problem. But since you (M.J.) have stood on the same side of the desk....

M. J. Young wrote: It's particularly daunting, of course, when you have both the troublemaker and the withdrawn type in the same group, because efforts to squelch the troublemaker must be done in a manner which doesn't threaten the withdrawn type, and efforts to encourage the withdrawn type must be such that the troublemaker doesn't recognize that he isn't given as much freedom. It can be done, but it's a delicate balancing act, I think.

He also wrote: In an RPG context, that could be the next clue, the next encounter, the next event--things that in essence announce that we are moving beyond this to get to the next part. In a classroom/seminar, I would guess that directed questions are the analogous approach. We've been discussing A1 for a while now, but this question moves A1 to segue into A2, and while that doesn't squelch all talk of A1, A2 starts to dominate it.

clehrich wrote:
So tell me: what makes you a successful GM? If you don't like the questions proposed, set up new ones. How do you make players excited? How do you get them to do, and act, and be, and create? What do you do when they seem to lose energy, if there's hours to run and you don't want to scrap the evening? Give, guys! I'm not asking you how to teach; I'll try to translate what you say into other terms, so make that my problem. Tell me what you think great GM-ing requires, in a practical sense.

I've never given grades. And I despise them as a paradigm. But I have taught: kids as an adjunct in public classrooms and my own at home, and adults in grad school when I taught computer use classes to students, faculty, and staff. (Some classes lasted two hours, some three months.) But I don't consider myself an expert GM. I think I have as many faults as skills.

clehrich wrote: 1. If you were going to teach someone how to ignore and play down the effects of a pain-in-the-butt player, one you can’t at the moment simply get rid of, without letting that person screw up everyone else’s game, how might you do it?

clehrich wrote: 2. If you were going to teach someone how to get players to be more proactive, how would you do it?

clehrich wrote: 3. If you were going to teach someone how to guide players to specific goals without undermining their desire to create and contribute, i.e. without weakening goal #2, how would you do it?

First, I think that teachers probably have more to say to us about how to GM well, than vice versa. But as it's not what you want to hear about, we'll save that for another thread.

Just to be clear here, there's this potential for confusion based on levels of abstraction. What you want is help from GMs in terms of how to better theach pupils (what's often called "train the trainer"). We're teaching teachers here, not teaching pupils, right?

Christopher Weeks wrote:

clehrich wrote: 1. If you were going to teach someone how to ignore and play down the effects of a pain-in-the-butt player, one you can’t at the moment simply get rid of, without letting that person screw up everyone else’s game, how might you do it?

I don't necessarily want to validate the idea that this situation exists. My response has been to fire players that proved intractable even when they were friends of mine or of useful players.

But the two techniques prior to that I've had success with are: describing what you perceive as the problem to the offender in private and asking why they're there and what they're getting (or not) out of the experience -- talking about it openly is a wonderful and rare technique, and giving them responsibility (ask him/her to map, manage the minis, provide names for incidental NPCs or color-"text").

clehrich wrote: 2. If you were going to teach someone how to get players to be more proactive, how would you do it?

clehrich wrote: 3. If you were going to teach someone how to guide players to specific goals without undermining their desire to create and contribute, i.e. without weakening goal #2, how would you do it?

Thanks for the comments, all.

Mike,

1. Yes, actually I did notice that this parallels the Big Model. I hadn't expected that, exactly, but it's quite striking. I'll have to think about what that means. Anyone have ideas?

2. You're right that probably good teachers have a lot to offer GM's, but I leave that to people rather more experienced than I!

3. Yes, I did mean to be talking about pedagogy, and what you've said fits well with what I was asking. Sorry if I wasn't clear.

4. A brief note on the "problem student" thing. I wasn't very clear in my setup of the analogy. Basically yes, a college prof can indeed ignore or kick out a problem student, or just fail him. But that's only a good solution if dealing with the student more effectively would impede everyone else's class experience. Talking to the student alone can work, it's true, but my experience is that the real problem student won't come see you in office hours -- the ones who come see you are not the problems, as a rule. You can certainly demand that they speak to you, and that's what I do, but it has mixed results.

But what I really meant was not so much the student who sleeps or makes fart noises or whatever, but the student who keeps asking off-topic or inappropriate questions, who seems weirdly off-kilter from everyone else. Confronting that student directly often doesn't work, because he doesn't know what you're talking about -- he thinks he's participating and being helpful.

The thing is, a GM can do all the same things a teacher can, but at base the GM can't just ignore it, as a college prof often can. And let's face it, gamers as a group are not always the best socialized folks, and quite often gaming groups are an extremely mixed bag. So the GM has to be really very good at handling individual prickliness and weirdness, much of which a college prof can sort of blur over because social pressure will ensure a considerable degree of plain old conformity.

--

At any rate, my point is that in many respects a GM deals with a harder situation than a college prof. At base, a prof doesn't owe the students anything: he just does the best he can and the students have to live with that. To be sure, lots of folks don't even do the best they can, and in fact make a half-assed job of teaching, but I'm not interested in them. By contrast, a GM does owe the group quite a lot, and if he doesn't give it he will soon be out of a job, as it were. Again, not true of profs. As a result, I maintain that a good GM could very well be a masterful seminar teacher.

--

As to technique and theatrics, I'm sort of thinking GM technique at a slightly more abstract level. What I've gotten so far is great; I'd love to see some more concrete examples, though. In short:

As a GM, can you think of a moment when you really made it work wonderfully, and had a sense of what you did right? I don't mean when the group just sort of gelled by itself, as often happens, but when you think you can take considerable credit for making a great game session? What happened? What did you do? What worked? Why?

Thanks.

clehrich wrote: But what I really meant was not so much the student who sleeps or makes fart noises or whatever, but the student who keeps asking off-topic or inappropriate questions, who seems weirdly off-kilter from everyone else. Confronting that student directly often doesn't work, because he doesn't know what you're talking about -- he thinks he's participating and being helpful.

At any rate, my point is that in many respects a GM deals with a harder situation than a college prof.

As a GM, can you think of a moment when you really made it work wonderfully, and had a sense of what you did right? I don't mean when the group just sort of gelled by itself, as often happens, but when you think you can take considerable credit for making a great game session? What happened? What did you do? What worked? Why?

I have run a lot of games in which I didn't have much choice over the players--players brought friends, and the first players were people I barely knew who wanted me to run a game for them because they didn't know anyone else who could. I do demos, and you take what you get. I ran a game once with a guy who said he was there because from what he'd heard about Multiverser he thought it was the worst game ever written and he wanted a copy so he could show people. (Jim said I should have suggested he buy two.) I have had hostile players. I've had players who were socially inept, and I steered them into socially appropriate interaction within the game. I've had people who were withdrawn, and can only remember one who couldn't be pulled into being involved. I think there are a lot of tools I've used for such things.

But, Chris, I think that there's a problem with your connection. As a referee, I don't have to assure that anything in particular is ever done, or that we stay on any kind of schedule. As a teacher, I usually have a syllabus and a timeframe, and by the end of sixteen or twenty or however many weeks I have to have covered at least the essentials of every aspect.

Thus, one of the tools I've always used as a game referee is letting the players take things where they wish to go, and then causing it to be interesting wherever that is; one of the necessary functions of being a teacher is guiding things where they need to be. Those are very different core concepts, and suggest that referee techniques may need to be adapted to a considerably greater degree than you imagine.

Maybe that's not a fatal connection, though.

--M. J. Young

Oh, for Pete's sake.

Look, as I said at the outset, I figure it's my job to make the translation to my classroom. I'm trying to get advice about GMing, because I am and remain convinced that there is a lot I can learn from good GM's, for the reasons listed and probably others. My hope is that I can learn a bunch from you folks about GM technique, the nitty-gritty how to stuff, at a pretty heavy-duty level because you all have spent a lot of time thinking about the intricacies. With luck, in a year or so I will be able to post back and tell you what effects all this had within my classrooms. Until that time, though, this is all an untested hypothesis, and I don't think it can be knocked down or supported on a priori grounds.

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. I know it's not a perfect analogy. I know there are differences. I know that I have to cover a certain amount of material, and a GM does not necessarily have to do that. But what's that got to do with the price of cheese in China, as they say?

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

Mike, you have a lot of "nots". Don't you have any postive advice, things that one ought to do?

clehrich wrote: Mike, you have a lot of "nots". Don't you have any postive advice, things that one ought to do?

OK, so I've been thinking about this thread. And I think the best way that I can help Chris is to think about things from the other side. I was a preK-12 student for fifteen years and a university student for nine. I've been a player for 23, on and off. And I'm thinking about these experiences and wondering what made the great ones great and how they interrelate. And I am seeing common threads. I realize this isn't what Chris is asking for, but it's what I can provide.

As an aside, I really consider the first three years at a big university to be an extension of high school, academically. Only around the middle of junior year (I didn't exactly follow the path you're supposed to, so I'm guessing a little) do you start taking classes that treat you like a participant. But once you do, the parallel to games is pretty clear. And I too, think that there are shared techniques.

The most important of these techniques is steering into my interest. The best games and the best classes, both took what the authority had to present, figured out why I was there to have it presented and tuned their presentation to my needs.

Mike downplays prep in his note above. I think that the best classes I ever took, were taught like that. The prof (who's a world-class scholar in something cloely related to the topic at hand) would come in with a pretty minimal agenda and we'd riff. Maybe eight students and this font of knowledge would play with ideas and I know that the profs got as much out of these experiences as we did. You could see them get excited when the students came up with new twists on their theories and stuff. This may not help with a lecture hall full of "I had to take this class" kids.

Presentation of beauty helps inspire interest. The reason that I took nine years for two degrees is that I took many, many classes that I didn't "need." They were just too cool to pass up. I saw good teachers, even in big lectures (art history, general genetics, American colonial history, English lit, Wines of the World, etc.) start by presenting something wonderous. Whether it's a slide of some , a poem, or a feature of RNA, starting with something really, really cool, revvs up interest that helps carry into the game...er, lecture. And GMs do the same thing. How many of us/them gather pictures to use as source? Look at the one-sheets people post. People use pictures of movie/TV characters to represent their characters. I play in an online game every two weeks in which the GM often starts by posting an ancient Chinese poem, and sometimes passes out photocopies of source myths. I can't help but think these techniques of the classroom and the gameroom are related.

I guess the final common aspect that I want to talk about is player involvement in parameterizing the course. Some of my favorite classroom experiences (over a semester, not a single meeting) were ones where the instructor had the students work together to build how the class was going to work. There were always strictures, either from the prof or the administration, but otherwise the players were able to customize the course with the assistance of the instructor. Bluntly, this is the only way to teach...or run a game. It does several things: It invests the players/students. It best meets their needs while still conforming to institutional/GM needs. It takes the course material in new directions every semester. It broadens the horizon of awareness about how things can be done for both the students and the GM. It makes the students aware of the instructor's priorities and limitations much more explicitly. And it's a fun organizational exercise.

I hope there's at least a tidbit of use in this. To me, the idea of a professor getting better at teaching because of gaming and the Forge is exciting.

Chris

Chris Lehrich wrote: 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.

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