I posted a question this morning on Treasure Tables, my weblog for GMs: how did you learn to GM?

My rambling answer is there, in the post ("How Did You Learn to GM?") -- and I'm quite interested in hearing how others answer this question, either here or over on TT. Since I suspect that when folks learned to GM will have an impact on their answers, please post the year if you're so inclined.

(It's also worth noting that I posted this same question over on EN World (where I think the answers might be pretty different!) -- and that this is my first post on The Forge. I've lurked here on and off for awhile, and it's a great place, but it took my curiosity about this topic to squeeze a post out of me.)

This makes it sounds like there's some kind of GM licence that you get once you done it enough. I guess I learned by following instructions, i.e. reading the GM section of the book in the red box some 20+ years ago but that's probably not the whole story. What is it that you think constitues the ability to GM?

Oh, and since this is your first post, I guess it's for me to say "Hi! Welcome to the Forge!" where the debate is robust but well intentioned.

There's a big difference between when I first GMed and when I'd say I really knew how to. I was GMing for my group back 14 years ago playing D&D, Rolemaster, and Twilight: 2000. Actually, that Twilight campaign - about 13 years ago - wasn't so bad. It became a brutal, violent, Mad Max sort of game, but wasn't a complete power-mad bit of nonsense like my attempt at running Rolemaster was. (I got the rules - those were easy. Making adventures, though - wow, I sucked.)

I would say I didn't really learn to GM until about five to six years ago. I learned from a few masters - quite directly from being in the group of Pete Seckler, the world's finest D&D GM (I accept no arguments here), and playing some convention games with a few amazing people, not all of whom are Forge luminaries or anything. Some of the techniques I use most often come from the best convention game I ever played, which was White Wolf's Aberrant run by a true GMing genius. Clunky rules, but the game itself was a mind-blowing use of inter-group conflict.

Lastly, I learned a lot of how to GM from reading Sorcerer and Sword. I think most of us learned what we didn't know we didn't know from there.

Very slowly and painfuly, after a lot of trial and error.

Simon Hibbs

You folks think you know how?  Sheesh... I don't.  I'm still learning, and don't expect to ever stop.

So, how do I learn?  I try new ways of seeing things, new tools for insight, new tools for manipulating the social space, and I keep little mental notes.  This tool worked well in this situation but twisted in my hand in something that looked identical... what was the difference?

It's really more like science than like learning.  I'm discovering GMing and roleplaying as I go along.  I benefit greatly from the discoveries of others, though I often need to verify their experiments in my own laboratory before I can use the results to their fullest.

TonyLB wrote: You folks think you know how?  Sheesh... I don't.  I'm still learning, and don't expect to ever stop.

TonyLB wrote: So, how do I learn?  I try new ways of seeing things, new tools for insight, new tools for manipulating the social space, and I keep little mental notes.  This tool worked well in this situation but twisted in my hand in something that looked identical... what was the difference?

It's really more like science than like learning.  I'm discovering GMing and roleplaying as I go along.  I benefit greatly from the discoveries of others, though I often need to verify their experiments in my own laboratory before I can use the results to their fullest.

GB wrote:
This makes it sounds like there's some kind of GM licence that you get once you done it enough.

GB wrote: What is it that you think constitues the ability to GM?

GB wrote: Oh, and since this is your first post, I guess it's for me to say "Hi! Welcome to the Forge!" where the debate is robust but well intentioned.

GB wrote:
"Science" as opposed to "learning"? Science is learning. It's a process, not an end in itself. Otherwise, yeah, I'd agree with the "standing in the shoulders of giants" bit.

Hi Martin,

I'll repeat, differently, what I put forth on your blog. 

I'm a '78 child, so D&D was getting into full swing when I came into the picture.  It wasn't until I was about 10 ('88?) that my cousin gave me the OD&D box with the blue dragon on the cover.  I couldn't wrap my head around Gygax's love for strange words, but cut my teeth on Red Box Basic D&D by the time I was 11 or 12.  I ended up learning everything from the books and having to teach other folks around me.  Not until I was in high school, around 94-96, did I get some "decent" skills in my opinion, through extensive use of Feng Shui (the game, not the art of, :P).

Chris

What, you mean you didn't attend the five-year university program where you recieved a GameMastering certificate upon completion? Slacker.

Seriously though... I taught myself how to play from the D&D red box. (1987?) Since this was solitaire play, I also simultaneously learned GM tasks, in anticipation of being the Dungeon Master once I had recruited all my friends to play. Unfortunately, everyone else's parents believed that Dungeons & Dragons was somehow linked to teen suicide. So it would be several years before I actually got to play. They played a very Gamist/PvP drifted Palladium-system game, which, not being called "Dungeons & Dragons," was apparently not a suicide risk.

I've pretty voraciously devoured every game text's "How to Gamemaster" advice, and been frustrated how said advice about the "right" way to play never seemed to satisfy everyone. I've taken turns between semi-effectual GM and partially satisfied player. It's a continually refined process, and until recently, something of a fool's errand.

Ron Edwards' essays kicked off the bloody renaissance, as far as I'm concerned. The process by which a game is enjoyable to all participants was dragged from some kind of mystical black art into useful academic discourse. The bulk of game texts were called out as thinly veiled fiction and coffee-table books, designed to be consumed but not played.

Frankly, I've been delighted by designs which more democratically distribute GM-tasks to every player. I find these games more engaging as a player, and less prone to instilling a sense of cat-herding pariah as a GM.

Rifts..... the bugs in that system made me realise why a consistent system is a good one. Then I gave all my books to my brother and never looked back.

As someone else said, I'm learning more with every game though. Handling system is the easy part. Giving the players want they really want - that's hard.

Like most people I have aton of anecdotes, most not too disimilar to what has been said or what might be said.  I think though that point at which I became an effective DM/GM was when I learned that listening to Player's react to the plethora of stimuli available in games. Being a Player and watching my fellow Players and how they reacted to the GM as well as being a GM and watching Players. It was not so much taking advice from other GMs as it was deciding that GMs who pleased Players in certain ways were using worthwhile techniques. Some of this was conscious and some of it was unconscious. The second moment was derived from the first and I topped looking at GMing as work and started looking at it as Play prep, just like I do as a Player. The GM is part of the game and he / she needs to be having fun.

As we grow we are going to integrate new techniques, I think thats almost a given.  I believe it is the fundamental abilities like listening and interpreting Human reaction that makes for the most effective traditional and post-traditional GMs.

Sean

Larry wrote: Ron Edwards' essays kicked off the bloody renaissance, as far as I'm concerned.

Larry wrote: Ron Edwards' essays kicked off the bloody renaissance, as far as I'm concerned.

Clinton wrote:
There's a big difference between when I first GMed and when I'd say I really knew how to.

'From the age of six I had a penchant for copying the form of things, and from about fifty, my pictures were frequently published; but until the age of seventy, nothing that I drew was worthy of notice. At seventy-three years, I was somewhat able to fathom the growth of plants and trees; and the structure of birds, animals, insects and fish. Thus when I reached eighty years, I hope to have made increasing progress, and at ninety to see further into the underlying principles of things, so that at one hundred years I will have achieved a divine state in my art, and at one hundred and ten, every dot and every stroke will be as though alive.'

Hokusai, Preface to One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji

A Games Master’s Learning Curve

“What comes easiest to you is hardest to describe and write about”

Thinking back, I’ve learnt as much from playing in other GM’s games as I have from running my own…

Learnt what?
+ How to hold the attention of listeners.
+ How to moderate tests of free-will.
+ How to hold an idea of a story, imaginary character or a physical space within the mind but keeping it malleable enough to change as play develops new possibilities.
+ Acting skills - like improvisation and devising; adaptation and dramatic flow; knowing when not to ham or hog the limelight.
+ Creating and deploying interesting props cheaply (handouts, models, costumes etc).
+ To explain a fictional or historical world to others who know nothing of it in an interactive, open-ended system way.
+ Arbitration, negotiation, interpretation and judgement of using the rules set.
+ The ability to convey atmosphere using certain language, the voice, body language, music, images, sounds, smells, installations etc.
+ To be authoritative, to communicate a sense of direction to what might seem unstructured make-believe.
+ To think up and run narrative forms (like dramatic situations, action sequences, encounters or mysteries) that are authentic and not too derivative.
+ To believe in Roleplaying as a medium as critically legitimate as any other of the Art forms currently respected.

There’s the Machine-Shop mechanical aspect of GMing:
-Fixing systems…
-Ignoring systems…
-Designing new systems...
-Knowing what works and what doesn’t...

Also – I’ve spent many years not roleplaying but wanting to, surrounded by friends who didn’t want to game for any number of reasons…  That makes you consider how to streamline your style, how to sell the game to strangers, and how to get up and go at a moment’s notice. 

Some published milestones marking progress in my own fool’s journey:

* “Ghostbusters” took me through the hazing ritual of confusion, dice and characters; the adventure-seed book was most useful, I recall.  Those equipment cards were perfect beginner player-hand-outs.

* “Judge Dredd” showed me the power of using homebrew maps and floorplans made on a big scale with marker pens.

* “Warhammer Fantasy” campaign explored the heartbreaker sides of over-arching meta-narratives.

* “Call of Cthulhu” let me in on the ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ tradition of cosmic horror storytelling; also encouraged the simulationalist drive towards world immersion – “I’m actually stood on Arkham highstreet”.

* “Paranoia” began to make explicit that the GM as UV clearance  power arrangement – the GM ~was~ the world in which the PCs wandered.

* “Chill” made me think really hard about exploring the nuances of the whole horror genre, how to extract atmosphere from literature and film for my own games, including collecting soundtracks.

* ”Cyberpunk 2020” made the process of GMing dynamic enough alongside the PC design to allow for continuous inspiration; also the power of fluid graphic design in explaining ideas.

* “Vampire: The Masquerade” made me realise the tool bag of storytelling techniques could be used to break up the continuous flow of the narrative; especially the embedding of live action within a tabletop context.

* “Over the Edge” let me see that the whole medium was more flexible and responsive to artistic endeavour; that metaphor and mood might play a role.

* “The 7th Sea” provided the idea of the GM as a Villain ‘meta-character’ who was manipulating and being an arch-nemesis; the GM going toe-to-toe with their player’s imaginations.

* ”Sorcerer & Sword” mined (or decloaked) a whole slew of techniques and ideas that were unconscious during games.