GMing Thoughts (March 2023)

I’ve been talking to one of my old friends from high school again, and doing a bit of catching up. They mentioned they’re nervous about running a D&D game for the first time, and they spoke fondly of the game I ran for them back in college in 2010. As we talked, I started to crystalize more and more what sorts of things comprise my GMing style.

I was telling him about a fantasy game I never got off the ground and ran, because hello depression and anxiety. I used this example because he had asked if I come up with worlds first, or characters, to which I responded that I bounce back and forth.

• I start first with a seed idea “OK, so there’s this gate that shows up and whoever goes through it first gets a wish granted”
• Then I followed it up by going “Cool! How does that affect things?” Well, obviously, this has world altering capabilities for good and for ill. Is this thing permanent? No I don’t think so, i think a wish granting gate would be a problem. Maybe it appears every 1,000 years or so, and information about it always seems to get lost or muddied in the intervening year? Really make it a mystery to uncover.
• “Alright then, who would want such a thing? Who would even know about it?” Well, I think I’ll have a prince from a kingdom search for it, maybe to help stop a plague in his lands. Sort of a last ditch effort thing. And I feel like a Lich could represent the “power hungry” aspiration. Then of course, a few other groups of seasoned adventurers to act like rivals.
• “Finally, what sort of complications can we have?” Maybe the prince commondeers a town to resupply his troops as they march? The lich should absolutely start leaving behind trails of undead if the party is slow. The adventuring parties should have some reason to want stuff from the party, but also want to keep information from them.

And I think at the end of that, I had a realization. The thing that is my like, one kernel of advice: Pick an idea that you think is cool as hell. If you’re not 100% bought in to your own shit, it’s not hard for it to fall flat with players. If you’re not bought in to like, running Curse of Strahd or if your home game has to be in a certain system that you’re not stoked about, or if a player has a specific thing you can’t figure out… If you’re not all in the game has a greater possibility of faltering.

You want to run what’s cool for you, and that’s why my Shadowrun game is this bombastic pink-mohawk of a motherfucker that has the subtlety of a brick through a police station window. There’s no depth, no hidden motives, no nothing, just “hey, here’s a fuckin’ Car Ghost, have fun chasing it”

The really funny part about all this is that I am starting to HATE rules dense games, and would love to run a Forged in the Dark or Numenera or Apocalypse Engine or whatever else there is type game that isn’t D&D. While LANCER and ICON are cool, they might push up into the edges of what sort of rules depth I would want to engage with. I am Good at working with Combat, I do not want fiddly Combat Rules.

I don’t have the chops for major story telling, or dramatic beats. I do have the vocabulary and handle on it to tell you how the bullet fired for you just missed at point blank range, or how you side stepped this rushing guard, and knocked him out with your spell on your turn. Could I get better at story and character work? Sure. Bit by bit I can incorporate more and more of it into games I run. But for now, I know what my framework is. And that gives me something to build off of.