I keep an eye on the various subreddits and discord channels of my favorite games. A theme I see often is players looking for games, because they can’t find one much less a playgroup that fits into their schedule. There just aren’t enough good game runners to go around. The term “Forever GM” gets thrown around for those that do nothing but spend all of their gaming time running a table. Why is that?
Because being a good GM (DM, Handler, Narrator, Storyteller, etc…) is time consuming, a labor of love if you will. It takes a funny set of skills to be successful at running tabletop roleplaying games; you must be organized, you must know your game mechanics (as good or better than your players), a working knowledge of plot design is helpful, a sometime graphic designer, a writer, a people wrangler, generosity, time management, a fortune teller. There is a lot of obligation that comes with it.
I’m not going to go into any specific game or system, this is mostly a best practices kind of thing. Some of you will be, “Duh, Captain Obvious”, but the lack of this common sense advice has caused many a role playing group to collapse.
Know Your Game
If you are going to run a game, you should understand it, and you should love the idea of it. Read that core book, more than once. You should know the same game mechanics as your players, preferably better. That doesn’t mean you should have everything memorized, especially for a particularly crunchy system, but you should know where a rules clarification is located or you should be prepared to make a ruling in order to keep the flow going.
Know Your Players
As GMs we can’t always pick and choose who is in the play group. Players can be frustrating depending on the game/day/group. Sometimes you have someone who is great at the table, only they flake out on you and pull no shows half the time. Other times you have an extreme rules lawyer who forgot that they are a PLAYER and not the GM. Of course, there’s always the lone wolf; they showed up to play in a gaming group, but being a solo/emo/antisocial/edge lord that won’t interact with the other players other than to be a pest is more important to them.
The list can go on and on, but you get the point. Mostly though, you have a decent group of people and knowing their expectations of the game to give it a good start is invaluable. Run a Session Zero, you’ll thank yourself later by setting those ground rules right from the beginning.
Learn their personality quirks and their preferred play styles:
If you have a players that loves to blow crap up throw them a bone and let them demolish the occasional small building (hopefully not filled with innocents).
You know that character with NO useful combat abilities in a crew filled with death dealing assassins but heavy in all the social skills? Let them shine in a scene where they have all the skills to get by. The same goes for the opposite situation, an emotionless murder machine wants to well… murder a bunch even if only once in awhile.
That being said, those same players shouldn’t rely on you to gift them what they insist on doing that is counter to the rest of the party. The Session Zero should have covered this kind of thing.
Be Flexible!
Your players are going to go off track often, possibly all the time! Take note of this because it tells you the kinds of things they are interested in doing. You are there to help tell a story and facilitate scenes and situations. If they decided to not go into your painstakingly created haunted orphanage, that’s OK. If you want to run a game, you must be able to go with the flow.
That isn’t to say you should be a pushover. If the players were hired to investigate that haunted orphanage then took the advance and took off without even trying, there are consequences for doing that. The players should understand there are always plot consequences for the weird things they might decide to do.
What you should never do is railroad your party into doing the thing you want them to do simply because you want them to do it. Subtle pushing can work, but forcing them into that aforementioned haunted orphanage before they’re ready or just because you want them to go there is a very bad idea. Consistent railroading causes games to implode.
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