Meta Gaming/Help for Starting Gamemasters
Template:Meta Gaming Articles Original article by Mike Cule
Well, it does help if you start GMing when you're too young and inexperienced to know how tricky it can be.
Some general rules:
- Take no shit. If people try rules-lawyering, bullying you into reversing unfavorable decisions, ignoring you or telling you how you've got to run your game then take a hardback edition of the system rules and smite them sternly on the head.
- Listen to your players and use their ideas. Let them weave the story too and never, ever force them down a particular path just because that's the way your plot says it must go. If they come up with good ideas then weave them into the story.
- If you find yourself stuck for which way the game is going to go then excuse yourself to go to the toilet. This gives you enough time to think through the possibilities and return to the game confident and cool.
- Prepare enough but not too much. The level of preparation varies with the individual GM but don't write so much that you find yourself throwing things away because they didn't go that way. (But if you do save it to reuse later.) If the game is to run for more than one session then write a general outline and then enough of the plot to last each evening session modifying it with the things the players do and the ideas that they throw at you.
- Take notes. You will have to create new characters, new situations and even new rules. The players look funny at you if you get too inconsistent.
- Sit at the table in a position so that you are not too far away from players so that they can't hear you and start side conversations. This means if you sit at a rectangular table sit in the middle not at one end.
- Know your players. Know what they can do and what they want to do. Make sure that everybody (even the group idiot) can do something.
- Be prepared to kill player characters. But try to make their deaths have some meaning.
- Be prepared to say: it's my world and that's the way it works. But if you do make a mistake be prepared to fix things.
- Enjoy yourself. If you don't enjoy it the players won't.
