GM'ing 101: Stories with Details
Following my series on beginning roleplaying, I want to go into more detail about what you might want if you're a novice or first-time Game Master of a tabletop roleplaying games.
I've generally gotten good feedback when I run a game, but I have a few notable deficiencies in my style. I have a bad habit of relying a lot on improvisation. This is actually something that players generally enjoy, because they feel like they have a lot of agency to alter and change the game world, generally, if less emphasis is placed on a particular outcome and more is placed on a particular setup.
However, the problem with improvisation comes in the form of the increased skill it requires. You need to be constantly thinking on your toes, which is why I generally suggest that novices start with some pre-made content in the form of an adventure or adventure frame before they start playing a roleplaying game.
The simple reason for this is that you want to tell stories with details.
I'm not always good at this, but I saw something interesting that could be used as a sort of case study last night. @daan was writing about his travels and how he had come across a church that had been built by ship-makers in Honfleur:
While we were in Honfleur, we visited this old 15th century church, which was built by traditional ship builders after the 100 year war. The ceiling of this church strongly resembles the inside of a ship's hull, as you can see in the pictures below.
Image courtesy @daan, used with permission
This is the sort of thing that marks good improvisation. Think about what we can surmise about the ship-builders of Honfleur from this one event:
- There were a bunch of ship-builders who were called upon to build a structure, either because nobody else was around to do it or because they felt like wanting to do it.
- The people of Honfleur were religious enough to invest a significant amount of resources in building a church.
- This church was deemed significant enough to be maintained and survive for centuries.
- Although it may no longer be as important, this church appears to still be in use for religious practice, given the state of the altar.
When you're GM'ing, you want to build stories around little details like these. If you're running a game in a place where a particular culture, lifestyle, or profession is or was extremely important, you should think about how that is reflected in the way the people live.
This creates details and vibrancy for the players, giving them an opportunity to feel like this is a world they can explore. This is usually where I fall into trouble; I like to give really terse descriptions.
But you have to ask yourself which is better: "You walk into a church." or "The old church at the end of the boulevard has stood for hundreds of years, the arched ceiling in its sanctuary a testament to the ship-builders who created it."
Obviously there's a lot more mental effort going into the latter description, but I find myself usually defaulting to the former. Some of this has traditionally been due to time pressure, but also because as a GM there's a temptation to feel the need to focus on rules-based play and stick to worrying about the mechanics of the setting.
This won't destroy a game, but it keeps it from reaching its fullest potential.
The great thing about improvising, however, is that you don't need to stick with your initial concept, and you don't need to flesh everything out a whole ton.
Even "The old church at the end of the boulevard has stood for hundreds of years." is superior to "You walk into a church." If the church becomes significant, then you can continue to make it more of a big deal and go into more detail about it.
One of the things that I like that some games do is that they associate everything with concepts, similarly to how you might tag a post on a blog.
So you might have a town on the coast and associate it with the concepts of Seafaring, Industry, Piety, and Tradition.
From there you can play with each concept individually (like having players go to the shipyard, a representation of seafaring industry), but you can also find interesting and novel ways to combine the concepts, like having a church that was built by shipmakers hundreds of years ago.
I suggest that you make an effort whenever you run a game to come up with those concepts and work them into your descriptions of places, characters, and events. Don't let them rule your story, but use them as a resource; if you want a character that clashes with their surroundings, explain why. Maybe have someone who is not religious or someone who hates seafaring in a place otherwise associated with piety or seafaring.
This will create a world that the players can perceive as living, and give you a solid base for moving forward. Even if you're running more pre-scripted content, nothing will ever go exactly as planned and identifying the concepts that can lead into more development of details will help you when things go off the rails.
Details are important, they make scenes more alive. I try to use aspects like these and to include all senses. There's a post-it note on my GM screen with two words: "color" and "smell". I tend to forget colors (if it's not for hair or eyes) and smell (if the group's not in a sewer or entering a tavern). But a lot of places have typical smells and colors bring life to a scene.
Though there are some players where you have to be cautious with details - those that think everything's plot related:
The group comes into a tavern you describe it as empty but for the landlord and a group of elderly folk gossiping in a corner.
"Ah - what are they talking about?"
The poor GM makes something up: "Oh, how the times used to be better in their youth, when the mine was still in operation."
Ask me how we spend the next two evenings... exactly, trying to find what dastardly reasons were there for closing the mine. Including breaking + entering said mine and the local lord's house. Well, what a surprise... there were some nasty cave spiders in the mine - a GM's revenge for too curious people ;)
I think that's one of the things that sometimes gets a novice GM upset with the players. However, one of the secrets is that if you're clever enough everything can be plot related.
Abandoned mine? Perfect bad guy hideout, former or otherwise. Link it back into the main plot and presto!
Love the emphasis on details. In improvisational comedy these details are referred to as 'gifts'. And for good reason! They heighten the scene and allow the improvisors to generate more specific and detailed encounters. In this sense, restriction is a good thing. Having too many choices makes it harder to actually settle on decision. For example, "They walked into a church," leaves a lot of options on the table and it's now up to the players to add gifts into the scene. Whereas your alternative sentence about shipbuilders gives a lot of gifts and serves as a great foundation for play.
Tabletop gaming sounds like a lot of fun, but I've never had the chance to get into it. So I never saw the connection with improv comedy. I find it fascinating how close tabletop gaming is to 'longform' improvisation where the scenes are about discovery. Thanks for helping me make a link between the two!
Admittedly, there's a lot of people who don't really do the improv element as much as I do. It started out as a sort of "lazy" moment for me, but later on I discovered that it's a whole discipline.
The roleplaying community seems to be of two minds on whether it's good to obsessively prep or improvise, at least from what I've seen in my personal experiences. A lot of people are big on having really heavily scripted content, with everything in its place and preordained, which is helpful for some games (coughD&Dcough) more than others.
On the other hand, there are games that lend themselves to being run with much less prep, and even ones that focus on the improv method. The real turning point for me where I started to appreciate improv was Savage Worlds, which I only ever played once, but whose adventure frame format was highly influential for me.
The way it worked was entirely focused on drawing connections between main points, so the plot would progress in a predictable fashion and the GM could still do pacing and build up tension as one would for any story, but the players weren't funneled into any particular path of action, giving them the sense that they have a lot of agency in the universe.
Often my prep for games is so sparse that were I to write it down you'd just see a couple numbers and maybe three or four sentences. This can be a little ironic, since I've occasionally gone to a fair amount of effort to draw (mediocre) maps for my games, and I certainly value the storytelling above the visuals.
More power to you. The improv element allows everyone to buy in. I like the way you said it: [Savage Worlds] giving them the sense that they have agency in the universe.
There's probably a happy middle-ground between planning and improv, but the longer you play tabletop games the less planning you probably do. In improv no one walks on stage with zero prep, years of experience has gone into tricks and methods for heightening scenes. I'm sure the same applies for for tabletop role-playing games.
I checked out "Savage Worlds" from Pinnacle Entertainment and downloaded their 'Test Drive' rules. I'll play it with a few friends; if the first time is a wash, I'll use a 'Bennie' and try again!
To be fair, when I talk about prep I usually think of the stuff you do for an individual session. When you spend hours and hours reading through details from a setting, you've actually got quite a few tools at your disposal.
Typically, all I do is build a knowledge of the setting, then think of something that someone in that setting (that the players will interact with) want.
For instance, one session might be: A salvager wants to recover lost technology from a ruin.
The next session: The salvager and the commander of the enemy forces are working together on a plan to facilitate her defection to the salvager's company.
The secret is knowing how much stuff you have to do around that to get it to work. Having decent setting familiarity, encouraging questions, and giving little tasty morsels of mechanically or narratively interesting information is usually enough to go on, if you're comfortable with the underlying framework of the system.
This is why, for instance, I don't run D&D very often: the mechanics are very well balanced, but they're incredibly complex to reach that point, and you can very easily either mulch players or fail to challenge them. The solution would be to just nudge things on the fly, but then why do any prep in the first place? And if you're nudging things, it's also pretty easy to step on the players.
Games like Savage Worlds try to abstract out a lot of stuff, and that makes it easier to do on-the-fly changes and tweaks without feeling like you're just choosing the outcome beforehand. However, even a very mechanically complicated system, like Shadowrun, can have easy "baselines" to follow.
From a mechanics design perspective, you can find systems that are very picky about how you interact with them. D&D, for instance, has high player-enemy asymmetry in mechanics, and multi-stage attack/damage with arbitrary randomness, while Shadowrun is more generally about mechanical symmetry and performance-based results. The latter approach means that you can base things directly off of the player's characters: a weak enemy is just them but with worse dice pools. A strong enemy is just them but with better dice pools.
Of course, a good solution to this is just to avoid combat, since most games have fairly elegant non-combat mechanics, but counting on players to do something that's convenient for the GM is a recipe for disaster.
I hope you enjoy Savage Worlds. I personally liked it quite a bit, but my group wasn't as enamored with it. We were going through a phase where we did new games every couple weeks, and they just didn't click to it.