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NichG
2014-01-04, 09:42 PM
I've often thought that in order to really be a good GM, you have to experience really good games that other people have run. If you've always had GMs who aren't very good at it, or never played, then that seems like a difficult obstacle to overcome.

I'm curious about people's experiences with this. Does anyone have anecdotes about cases where one of their GMs became much better after playing in a really good game, or things like that (or even when it went the other way around, and playing in a really good game made them a worse GM...)

MonochromeTiger
2014-01-04, 09:52 PM
personally I can see where it could happen but it depends on both the players' and the DM's interpretation of "good". the DM for my usual group got into a different group as a player for a little while and was impressed, when he tried to bring over some of what he saw there...well it fell flat, it just didn't fit our playstyle and felt rather forced.

valadil
2014-01-04, 09:54 PM
My own gaming improved dramatically when I went to college and tried theater style LARPing. At the time I thought it's because it changed what I liked to see in a game, but I think it had as much to do with me coming out of my shell socially.

Dimers
2014-01-07, 06:45 PM
It's possible to simply stumble across the elements that make a game good without having experienced them or heard of them; it's possible to consider a mechanic and recognize it as good or bad in certain foreseeable ways. I've done so on a few occasions. It's just a lot less likely, and it's ... mmm, "wheel reinvention". The evolutionary advantage of humans over other real-world critters is that we can share knowledge. And both practically and philosophically, we really ought to do so.

One of the reasons I frequent this forum is to learn about good and bad game mechanics without having to experience them all myself. I've taken advice -- most notably, about JaronK's tier system for D&D 3.5 -- and used it to improve my tabletop games.

I guess that's kinda in between "DM plays in good game and learns from it" and "DM has never played in a good game".

CarpeGuitarrem
2014-01-07, 06:50 PM
It's a given that people learn from their experiences. If they're intelligent enough, they can learn good things from bad experience, but they can just as easily learn bad things from bad experience. This is one of the reasons skilled professions require instruction from someone who's done it well for a while.

That said, you can always "figure things out", but then the only things helping you are the play advice in the book and the collective cleverness of you and your group.

Jay R
2014-01-07, 10:22 PM
I've often thought that in order to really be a good GM, you have to experience really good games that other people have run.

Your basic idea is sound. But it clearly isn't true as written, or nobody could ever have become the first really good DM.

All statements of the form "In order to be a good DM, you have to do X" are false, for any value of X. (Leaving aside the trivial examples like "have people play the game", or "roll dice".)

But statements of the form "It can be really difficult to be a DM without X" are quite often true.

NichG
2014-01-08, 05:38 AM
Yeah, I'm not trying to present this as a 'strict' condition. What I'm curious about is how strong the effect is.

I know in my own case, my GMing style changed very abruptly after I participated in a particular year and a half long campaign. I think it gave me a better feel for how to 'actively engage the players' as it were - essentially, crafting a game designed to specifically make each player have something that makes them really want to come back and keep playing - mechanical subsystems, certain kinds of plots, things for the players to think about between games, ways to encourage proactivity, etc.

Another campaign before that helped me identify those elements of the game that I myself enjoyed (before that, I didn't really realize how important 'discovery' was to me) - and that element became a strong characteristic of my own campaigns, even if its not a universal factor in a 'good campaign'.

Mastikator
2014-01-08, 05:50 AM
A wise DM can learn from the mistakes of other bad DMs and become a slightly better DM than he would've been if he had started from scratch, by avoiding the common pitfalls and skipping ahead to stumbling over only the good elements that are left.

That being said, I think any DM would benefit from learning from an experienced DM and understanding RNG.

AMFV
2014-01-08, 06:18 AM
Yeah, I'm not trying to present this as a 'strict' condition. What I'm curious about is how strong the effect is.

I know in my own case, my GMing style changed very abruptly after I participated in a particular year and a half long campaign. I think it gave me a better feel for how to 'actively engage the players' as it were - essentially, crafting a game designed to specifically make each player have something that makes them really want to come back and keep playing - mechanical subsystems, certain kinds of plots, things for the players to think about between games, ways to encourage proactivity, etc.

Another campaign before that helped me identify those elements of the game that I myself enjoyed (before that, I didn't really realize how important 'discovery' was to me) - and that element became a strong characteristic of my own campaigns, even if its not a universal factor in a 'good campaign'.

I think that you can learn just as much from a terrible gaming experience though, it can show you things that suck the fun out of gaming, so I think that bad gaming can also improve your own DMing and gaming ability.

NichG
2014-01-08, 07:36 AM
Bad gaming is an interesting case, because I think in general you're going to notice things that put you off and figure out how to avoid them, but that doesn't necessarily mean you know how to put something particularly compelling into your games.

I've been in campaigns that were really good and bad at the same time. There'd be something that makes you really want to stay and keep playing - a great plotline, an interesting premise, really good NPC interactions, etc, but the DM has some particular 'thing' that is also off-putting - maybe they like domination effects too much, or they set the difficulty to high or whatever.

I would say that avoiding all the bad things is not actually sufficient to produce what I would call a 'good' game, and often in a 'good' game I'm willing to tolerate more of those bad things because the rest of the game makes it worth it.

Actually this is kind of what brought on the idea for the thread; I sort of thought, if you haven't experienced a game like that - something that made you want to keep playing 'despite' any dislikes - you might not even know that gaming could be like that.

AMFV
2014-01-08, 07:40 AM
Bad gaming is an interesting case, because I think in general you're going to notice things that put you off and figure out how to avoid them, but that doesn't necessarily mean you know how to put something particularly compelling into your games.

I've been in campaigns that were really good and bad at the same time. There'd be something that makes you really want to stay and keep playing - a great plotline, an interesting premise, really good NPC interactions, etc, but the DM has some particular 'thing' that is also off-putting - maybe they like domination effects too much, or they set the difficulty to high or whatever.

I would say that avoiding all the bad things is not actually sufficient to produce what I would call a 'good' game, and often in a 'good' game I'm willing to tolerate more of those bad things because the rest of the game makes it worth it.

Actually this is kind of what brought on the idea for the thread; I sort of thought, if you haven't experienced a game like that - something that made you want to keep playing 'despite' any dislikes - you might not even know that gaming could be like that.

Well think a lot of this depends on how willing to experiment you are, if you're willing to try things, then you may eventually stumble on a group of good things, possibly a group of "best" things. If you tend to be averse to experimentation then it's not going to be something that you'll be able to develop on your own.

It really varies greatly depending on DM style, also not all good things are going to be as easy for each person to implement or liked equally by everybody. I think reasonable development and experimentation is better than simply trusting to learning by experience, since after all even the "good" games may not have had the best qualities possible.

Mastikator
2014-01-08, 08:33 AM
How good of a DM is good enough for a group of players that haven't the experience to teach the DM to be better?

Obviously some time in the past someone had to have started from scratch with absolutely no help, and over time the tradition has been improved.

Airk
2014-01-08, 09:51 AM
Well think a lot of this depends on how willing to experiment you are, if you're willing to try things, then you may eventually stumble on a group of good things, possibly a group of "best" things. If you tend to be averse to experimentation then it's not going to be something that you'll be able to develop on your own.

It kindof does and it kindof doesn't. Yes, if you run into a terrible game, you get a list of how not to do things, but it doesn't necessarily ACCELERATE your ability to find GOOD ways to do those things, except by crossing a few (sometimes painfully obvious) bad ways off the list of things to try.

I would argue that, really, being in a bad game is not much more valuable than just running a game of any quality.



It really varies greatly depending on DM style, also not all good things are going to be as easy for each person to implement or liked equally by everybody. I think reasonable development and experimentation is better than simply trusting to learning by experience, since after all even the "good" games may not have had the best qualities possible.

This is also true, but the advantage of GOOD examples is that if you can't think of a way to do it better, you still have a good way.

If you have a list of 100 ways to approach each of several GMing problems, it's more useful to know that, say, idea X on list Y is in the top 15%, than it is to know that idea Z is awful and needs to be at the bottom of the list. ;)

AMFV
2014-01-08, 09:59 AM
It kindof does and it kindof doesn't. Yes, if you run into a terrible game, you get a list of how not to do things, but it doesn't necessarily ACCELERATE your ability to find GOOD ways to do those things, except by crossing a few (sometimes painfully obvious) bad ways off the list of things to try.

I would argue that, really, being in a bad game is not much more valuable than just running a game of any quality.

I would disagree, I learn much more from watching failures than successes, although it could be a personal difference in learning style, also the things that make a game a bad game, are not always painful obvious.

For example, in one D&D game I had the DM stopped giving XP, which seemed like a fine idea to me, I've even tried it. But it felt like I had lost agency over my character, the leveling was completely arbitrary, and I stopped enjoying the game, with that as at least one part.

It's something that I have done, and thought was a completely good idea, but playing under it, convinced me otherwise, that's something you can't get just from good gaming. If you watch somebody run a good game and copy them exactly it'd work, but I'm not comfortable doing that, I don't enjoy it as a DM.




This is also true, but the advantage of GOOD examples is that if you can't think of a way to do it better, you still have a good way.

If you have a list of 100 ways to approach each of several GMing problems, it's more useful to know that, say, idea X on list Y is in the top 15%, than it is to know that idea Z is awful and needs to be at the bottom of the list. ;)

I disagree, I believe that it's often the opposite, since the things that are bad are not necessarily readily obvious to an outside observer, at least in my experience. I would suggest that you can learn equally from both experiences, and also you can learn the most from your own trial and error, since things that work for others may not necessarily work for you.

CarpeGuitarrem
2014-01-08, 10:11 AM
I've been in campaigns that were really good and bad at the same time. There'd be something that makes you really want to stay and keep playing - a great plotline, an interesting premise, really good NPC interactions, etc, but the DM has some particular 'thing' that is also off-putting - maybe they like domination effects too much, or they set the difficulty to high or whatever.

Great follow-up to this: people tend to misdiagnose. So if you do notice that your game experience is bad, you're likely to blame the wrong things, which just makes finding the actual problems harder. This tends to lead to a gamer becoming entrenched in the wrong habits, and by that point? They're not willing to see anything else.

So maybe the better idea is that "various gaming creates good gaming". Mix up how you run things. Run a drastically different RPG. Put yourself in different positions. Play in different lengths and types of games. (And don't blame your new circumstances for any bad gaming that results. :smallwink: )

AMFV
2014-01-08, 10:20 AM
Great follow-up to this: people tend to misdiagnose. So if you do notice that your game experience is bad, you're likely to blame the wrong things, which just makes finding the actual problems harder. This tends to lead to a gamer becoming entrenched in the wrong habits, and by that point? They're not willing to see anything else.

So maybe the better idea is that "various gaming creates good gaming". Mix up how you run things. Run a drastically different RPG. Put yourself in different positions. Play in different lengths and types of games. (And don't blame your new circumstances for any bad gaming that results. :smallwink: )

Indeed, although I think running different gaming systems isn't necessarily the best way to go since they often require different skill sets to run effectively. Although running more games in general does cause a natural improvement.

Edit: Note I'm not saying that running other systems is bad, just that playing nWoD probably won't improve your ability to DM D&D in the same way that running D&D might.

Jay R
2014-01-08, 10:43 AM
Playing in good games gives you experience that, used well, can help you become a good DM.

Playing in bad games gives you experience that, used well, can help you become a good DM.

Playing more than one set of rules gives you experience that, used well, can help you become a good DM.

Watching adventure movies gives you experience that, used well, can help you become a good DM.

Reading adventure books gives you experience that, used well, can help you become a good DM.

Playing in LARPs gives you experience that, used well, can help you become a good DM.

Performing on stage gives you experience that, used well, can help you become a good DM.

Playing old-style wargames gives you experience that, used well, can help you become a good DM. (This is where most of the first great DMs came from.)

A well-rounded education gives you experience that, used well, can help you become a good DM.

Studying probability gives you experience that, used well, can help you become a good DM.

Hiking through the wilderness gives you experience that, used well, can help you become a good DM.

I'm quite sure that there are many other experiences that could complete that sentence, which I don't know because I haven't experienced them.

Airk
2014-01-08, 10:43 AM
I disagree, I believe that it's often the opposite, since the things that are bad are not necessarily readily obvious to an outside observer, at least in my experience.

I'm the opposite; It's super easy for me to spot problems. Finding smart solutions to them is MUCH harder.



Indeed, although I think running different gaming systems isn't necessarily the best way to go since they often require different skill sets to run effectively.

This is sort of the POINT; If you run lots of different game systems, you build different skills, and then you can use all those skills. Because there are no game systems that don't benefit to some degree from just about everything.



Edit: Note I'm not saying that running other systems is bad, just that playing nWoD probably won't improve your ability to DM D&D in the same way that running D&D might.

I disagree; Running lots of D&D will probably just result in you settling into habits and you'll end up running your games mostly the same with a little bit of tweaking. Running a different game system teaches you to think outside the box.

AMFV
2014-01-08, 10:49 AM
I'm the opposite; It's super easy for me to spot problems. Finding smart solutions to them is MUCH harder.
[/Quote[

This is true. Finding solutions is easy, what I was saying is that the things that you might intuitively suspect are problems, may not be problems, or the reverse, unless you see it in play.

[QUOTE=Airk;16749225]
This is sort of the POINT; If you run lots of different game systems, you build different skills, and then you can use all those skills. Because there are no game systems that don't benefit to some degree from just about everything.

This is true, as I edited, I'm not sure if you saw the post. All DMing will improve as your DMing in general does, but it does require a different skill set to run different kinds of games, so improving one skill set may not lead to improvement in the other skill set.



I disagree; Running lots of D&D will probably just result in you settling into habits and you'll end up running your games mostly the same with a little bit of tweaking. Running a different game system teaches you to think outside the box.

Not anymore than running D&D differently would, yes if you get into a rut and do things the same way there will be no improvement, but that naturally follows, if you're always striving to improve then you won't get as much stagnation as you're suspecting.

SiuiS
2014-01-08, 10:52 AM
Exposure to good gaming promotes good gaming. Actual plays, campaign logs and discussion with avid GMs is sufficient if you put yourself to the task.

Conversely, all the exposure in the world won't help by osmosis if you don't allow for the possibility of growth. So.

NichG
2014-01-08, 11:08 AM
Skill is an important thing, but actually skill on its own isn't really enough to make a good game. Someone who is very skilled at DMing will be able to make their mental image of how the game should be come true with a high degree of success. The thing is though, what is that mental image like?

I think skills can be developed in all sorts of ways - you don't necessarily gain that much more from experiencing a good game or a bad game than other things, as Jay R pointed out. But I do think that the 'vision' that the GM tries to create with those skills is less about practice and more about a sort of expanded viewpoint - something that could come from a moment of inspiration in isolation or through exposure to something non-game-related, but would seemingly be brought out much more readily by direct exposure.

There's certainly signs of things with the structure of artistic movements in the gaming culture - wargaming, old-school dungeon-crawling, the idea of a narrative focus, the idea of a sandbox, etc. It takes awhile for the first guy to figure a new thing out, but once the new idea becomes fairly common the new ideas tend to explode outwards very quickly - at least thats how it seems to me.

I guess maybe the way to rephrase the thread question would be, have you experienced moments in your gaming career where what you actually held as the 'ideal' of a campaign underwent a significant shift? And if so, what brought on those shifts?

CarpeGuitarrem
2014-01-08, 11:19 AM
I guess maybe the way to rephrase the thread question would be, have you experienced moments in your gaming career where what you actually held as the 'ideal' of a campaign underwent a significant shift? And if so, what brought on those shifts?
Definitely playing and running Burning Wheel and Fiasco. Reading and then playing both games totally recalibrated my expectations of "what happens in a campaign" and "what it means to have a satisfying RPG experience".

Fiasco showed me that A: you could have a completely self-contained single session with multiple plot threads (and player characters in separate locales) and B: you could have a great time sending characters to a miserable fate. I can't pin this down to any one experience I had, just because they've all been immensely successful and varied.

Burning Wheel (besides reminding me what was so immensely cool about roleplaying) showed me how you could spark a session around the motivations and ethics of characters, and that you could very easily run a game where the players weren't all united against a common threat. It showed me that the game didn't have to feature a continuous build-up to a fight against a climactic enemy, and that the drama could come from much smaller sources. This definitely became evident when I ran a short-arc game for a few friends, letting the story come out of their conflicting-but-related ambitions. By the end of things, the story came to a close as one of them lay dead at the hands of the rest of them, and an ancient malevolent spirit rushed out into the world again. (Not that the characters cared; they were off to get riches and such. :smallbiggrin: )

That substantially shaped my idea of what you could do with a campaign story.

Airk
2014-01-08, 11:30 AM
This is true. Finding solutions is easy, what I was saying is that the things that you might intuitively suspect are problems, may not be problems, or the reverse, unless you see it in play.

This is possible, but hasn't really happened to me.



This is true, as I edited, I'm not sure if you saw the post. All DMing will improve as your DMing in general does, but it does require a different skill set to run different kinds of games, so improving one skill set may not lead to improvement in the other skill set.

I basically disagree; There are few to no skillsets that don't cross games in some capacity.



Not anymore than running D&D differently would, yes if you get into a rut and do things the same way there will be no improvement, but that naturally follows, if you're always striving to improve then you won't get as much stagnation as you're suspecting.

It's all very well to SAY that, but from a practical perspective, most people can't DO that. And I would argue that, no, it's still MORE effective to have a game that DEMANDS you do things differently than it is for you to just say "Oh, I'm going to try to mix things up this game."

AMFV
2014-01-08, 12:36 PM
This is possible, but hasn't really happened to me.

Well it's happened to me as per my anecdote. So now we have anecdote conflict, since they're both equally valid... that means that it is happening somewhere.



I basically disagree; There are few to no skillsets that don't cross games in some capacity.

Theme and tone, assessing the proper challenges for a party, length of session, the amount of help that people will need building characters, trouble powers or abilities you need to watch out for, general rules knowledge, ability to arbitrate rules while keeping to the spirit of the original rules, knowing the amount of time that you will need to prepare, knowing what characteristics need to be fleshed out on a given NPC, knowledge about the setting itself and how it's applied.

Are those enough for you, or is that still few to none?




It's all very well to SAY that, but from a practical perspective, most people can't DO that. And I would argue that, no, it's still MORE effective to have a game that DEMANDS you do things differently than it is for you to just say "Oh, I'm going to try to mix things up this game."

I do it, ergo some people can. Out of the DMs I've played with more than half have done exactly that. So I my data, while hardly a conclusive sample, would suggest that "most people" can completely do that.


Skill is an important thing, but actually skill on its own isn't really enough to make a good game. Someone who is very skilled at DMing will be able to make their mental image of how the game should be come true with a high degree of success. The thing is though, what is that mental image like?

I think skills can be developed in all sorts of ways - you don't necessarily gain that much more from experiencing a good game or a bad game than other things, as Jay R pointed out. But I do think that the 'vision' that the GM tries to create with those skills is less about practice and more about a sort of expanded viewpoint - something that could come from a moment of inspiration in isolation or through exposure to something non-game-related, but would seemingly be brought out much more readily by direct exposure.

There's certainly signs of things with the structure of artistic movements in the gaming culture - wargaming, old-school dungeon-crawling, the idea of a narrative focus, the idea of a sandbox, etc. It takes awhile for the first guy to figure a new thing out, but once the new idea becomes fairly common the new ideas tend to explode outwards very quickly - at least thats how it seems to me.

I guess maybe the way to rephrase the thread question would be, have you experienced moments in your gaming career where what you actually held as the 'ideal' of a campaign underwent a significant shift? And if so, what brought on those shifts?


In answer to your revised question. It varies heavily depending on system and the overall tone of game exactly what an ideal campaign will be. If yours is fluctuating, I suggest playing around with some new systems. Also these ideals will vary quite a bit through different groups.

Airk
2014-01-08, 01:20 PM
Well it's happened to me as per my anecdote. So now we have anecdote conflict, since they're both equally valid... that means that it is happening somewhere.

Yes, but not to everyone. :)



Theme and tone,

Nope. Theme and tone are not skills. Establishing theme and tone is, and that crosses game boundaries tremendously.


assessing the proper challenges for a party

This is system mastery; While you could argue this is a 'GMing skill' of sorts, I tend to consider this to be "knowing the rules".


length of session,

How is this a "skill"? Or do you mean "figuring out when the game has gone on too long"? In which case, this is absolutely shared across games.


the amount of help that people will need building characters, trouble powers or abilities you need to watch out for, general rules knowledge,

System mastery again. Not the same thing at all.



ability to arbitrate rules while keeping to the spirit of the original rules,

Absolutely shared across games.



knowing the amount of time that you will need to prepare, knowing what characteristics need to be fleshed out on a given NPC, knowledge about the setting itself and how it's applied.

Again, I don't consider "knowing the rules" to be a "GMing skill". And it's certainly not one that you can learn from positive or negative examples.



Are those enough for you, or is that still few to none?

Still few to no valid ones. :)

AMFV
2014-01-08, 02:39 PM
Nope. Theme and tone are not skills. Establishing theme and tone is, and that crosses game boundaries tremendously.

But the theme and tone varies dramatically across different systems.



This is system mastery; While you could argue this is a 'GMing skill' of sorts, I tend to consider this to be "knowing the rules".


An arbitrary distinction, one which you did not make before.



How is this a "skill"? Or do you mean "figuring out when the game has gone on too long"? In which case, this is absolutely shared across games.


Different games have different ideal lengths.



System mastery again. Not the same thing at all.


Yep, if you make an arbitrary distinction to prove your point, it turns out that it does...



Absolutely shared across games.


The basic concept of it is, but it's so different as to not applicable to other systems.



Again, I don't consider "knowing the rules" to be a "GMing skill". And it's certainly not one that you can learn from positive or negative examples.


Prep time is different for different games, are you claiming that prep time isn't a DM skill?

Still few to no valid ones. :)[/QUOTE]

They're completely valid if you don't create an arbitrary distinction between "System Mastery" and DMing. Which is truly a ridiculous an arbitrary distinction.

So yes, if you make an arbitary rulng so that only those skills that are cross system work, I concede the point. But that's an arbitrary distinction and one you've made to prove your point, what you consider "system mastery" many would consider DM skills.

kaminiwa
2014-01-08, 03:25 PM
For what it's worth, until recently, I was pretty much always the GM. I got my start GMing games with my brother when we went on family vacations, slowly found other people closer to my age for gaming, and fairly routinely got kicked out of any group I tried to play in for being a munchkin (I think my record was a 3 session stretch of Werewolf: The Apocolypse)

Fortunately I'm a voracious reader, so I'd read the GMing advice section from AD&D, D&D 3.0, GURPS, and a few others. They're really quite good. By the time I was running a game with more than two players, I'd also discovered a couple of "GMing advice" websites that helped me spice stuff up.

(I found the GM Advice session was good from a module design and mechanical standpoint, while the GMing Advice websites helped me improve my descriptions, narration, and social encounters.)

Given that I've run something like four year+ campaigns with various different groups, I have to assume I'm doing a pretty good job at keeping my players interested :)

kaminiwa
2014-01-08, 03:48 PM
I basically disagree; There are few to no skillsets that don't cross games in some capacity.

I'll assert this simply: One can be a great GM in one system, and a horrible GM in another, simply because of the way that mechanics shapes plot.

Or, in other words, a campaign that works in D&D probably fails horribly in GURPS, and vice-versa, because one takes you from "Joe Average" to "Basically God" and the other takes you from "Joe Average" to "Joe Average, PhD".

I'd also assert that one can be a great player in both systems, and still fail horribly at GMing just one of them, so clearly some of this is GM-specific skills, not just "system mastery."

In particular, I absolutely suck at running White Wolf games. My GMing style completely clashes with the narrative style of those games. I've played in them a few times, and I've had first-time GMs outshine anything I ever ran in those systems. I've even had the luck to play with one of the writers as GM, and it still didn't rub off :)

Kalmageddon
2014-01-08, 04:00 PM
I've been inspired to become a DM thanks to my first DM ever who was absolutely dreadful. I said to myself "I can do better then this!" and so I did.
So no, I don't think experiencing good games is necessary.

ElenionAncalima
2014-01-08, 04:03 PM
I think that a mixture of good and bad dms helps. The important factor is being able to figure out what worked, what didn't and why. A good dm can give you great ideas, but could lead to one of the following problems:

1. Feeling intimidated and like you won't be able to do it like they do.
or
2. Taking their skill for granted and assuming that its easy to make things run that smoothly.

Before I wanted to try DMing, I experience four different DMs. Only one out of the four was truly terrible, but I still learned from the mistakes of all three.

-My main/first DM was always really prepared and good and improvising. He was also great at scheduling everyone. However, he ran the game in an us vs. him way, in which he held all the cards. As a result we would get some really memorable scenarios, but the campaigns would always descend into Crapsack Worlds and we would get demotivated.

-My second DM was terrible. He was totally obsessed with his DMPC, introduced a slew of house rules, couldn't balance encounters and had difficulty finding a consistent time to meet.

-My third DM was very easygoing, fair and really invested in keeping his players happy. However, he had difficulty saying no to people and severly overwealthed us. He also has a tendancy to be disorganized with his NPC and monsters.

-The last DM was a decent balance between being stern, but fair. However, he had a tendancy for being overly cryptic, particularly with his puzzles. Also, he wasn't totally in sync with his players. He wanted to run a puzzle dungeon with a group of melee builds.

I learned a lot from all four of these people. If they had all been perfect DMs, I don't think I would have learned as much.

The Oni
2014-01-08, 05:35 PM
Like others in this thread, I would argue that the opposite may be true. I have experienced very, VERY bad games, and used these games as a checklist of what NOT to do when I GM.

That said, a mix of good and ill experiences may help, but really, I feel that the most important part is to know what your players want and listen to them whenever possible (tempered with common sense, obviously.)

CarpeGuitarrem
2014-01-08, 05:45 PM
Come to think of it, I can think of times when I played a game and learned "Nope, this is not how I should run games".

Black Jester
2014-01-09, 06:36 AM
Being an active part of a good game (and making the game good is not only the responsibility or skill of the Gamemaster, every player can and should contribute and needs to develop according player skills) you need to do pretty much the same things for RPGs as you do for prety much everything: You need to put some effort and dedication to the game and you have to practice. Practicing is easy - just play - but it doesn't help you too much without reflectation of the events (including feedback from your fellow players. One thing common among good gaming groups is that you can talk about the game with the others and that you can expect honest critique from them) and, to be critical of oneself. This is particularly important. Complacency brings you nowhere. So, when participating in a truly bad session, the first questions should always consider yourself and your actions; what did you do, to make it a bad gaming event? How could you have improved on it? What are you going to do to make sure that the next session will be not as disappointing?

The other thing is, good gaming requires work. Yes, actually work, effort and a bit of time. To be a good player (and much more so to be an even adequate gamemaster) you need to put some work into your game. You need to prepare for the game. Rules mastery to a degree that you can run your own character smoothly without looking p anything you might want to doat least sometimes is obligatory. Pretty much all good players I know keep session logs or small diaries for the characters. Again, for a gamemaster (especially when running any campaign), this should be considered as the bare minimum. A good rule of thumb is about one hour per session each for preparation and session wrap-up (for a player, that is. As a gamemaster, the preparation time for a session is ideally as long as the planned session).

AMFV
2014-01-09, 06:48 AM
Being an active part of a good game (and making the game good is not only the responsibility or skill of the Gamemaster, every player can and should contribute and needs to develop according player skills) you need to do pretty much the same things for RPGs as you do for prety much everything: You need to put some effort and dedication to the game and you have to practice. Practicing is easy - just play - but it doesn't help you too much without reflectation of the events (including feedback from your fellow players. One thing common among good gaming groups is that you can talk about the game with the others and that you can expect honest critique from them) and, to be critical of oneself. This is particularly important. Complacency brings you nowhere. So, when participating in a truly bad session, the first questions should always consider yourself and your actions; what did you do, to make it a bad gaming event? How could you have improved on it? What are you going to do to make sure that the next session will be not as disappointing?

The other thing is, good gaming requires work. Yes, actually work, effort and a bit of time. To be a good player (and much more so to be an even adequate gamemaster) you need to put some work into your game. You need to prepare for the game. Rules mastery to a degree that you can run your own character smoothly without looking p anything you might want to doat least sometimes is obligatory. Pretty much all good players I know keep session logs or small diaries for the characters. Again, for a gamemaster (especially when running any campaign), this should be considered as the bare minimum. A good rule of thumb is about one hour per session each for preparation and session wrap-up (for a player, that is. As a gamemaster, the preparation time for a session is ideally as long as the planned session).

I've been called a good gamemaster, and I've never spent five or six hours in a week preparing for a session. It varies too much on the individual and how much they improvise how effective their improvisation is. Some people might prepare at a 2:1 ratio, which is I think about what I spend if I'm seriously pouring effort into something. I'm not disagreeing with approach, only pointing out that "the rule of thumb" might not be the same for everybody, it's why it's a good idea to develop your own rule of thumb, also it s really different for different systems, the less system mastery you have generally the more prep time is needed, in my experience, the more meaty and story oriented games, typically require less prep time since your players won't always cut through things as quickly. This has been my experience with it, and while it's not gospel, I think that it's pretty reliable.

Lorsa
2014-01-09, 07:39 AM
Good gaming can create good gaming. However, not all people can learn to become good GMs, no matter how many great games they participate in as players. Furthermore, some GMs (most in fact) learns from their own msitakes and grows to be excellent GMs without hardly having played at all.

I would say that having played with different groups and different people have broaded my general gaming horizon more than a friend of mine who's only ever played in games I've been a part of.

I've also learnt thigns from people that in general were much worse GMs than I was but did that one thing really good which got me thinking I should do that too. A game can be very bad but you can still take home that one tidbit of good that you hadn't thought of doing yourself. Oh, and you can definitely learn what not to do as well.

It sometimes surprises me how some GMs can run games in a way that they as a player wouldn't have liked at all. It would be a great idea as long as their actual players enjoyed it, but that doesn't have to be true either. The discrepancy between what like as players (which may be what the rest of the group likes too) and what they do as GMs can be astonishing sometimes. Why this happens I don't really understand.