Poll: - Gm Style

[General Pain]

after reading this

http://chattydm.net/2007/11/22/mini-...-and-the-evil/

I wondered what kind of GMs my fellow players/posters have around the globe...

I'll make this poll "anonymous" so we don't have a lot of pissed of GMs he he

I must admit over the years I have experienced all 3 categories - possibly some others aswell.

with respect to all GMs

(if I find something similar for players I will post it)

- The General

[Targan]

I'm nearly always the GM but I do occassionally get to play in a Harnmaster campaign which has been run for the past, I dunno, 16 or more years by MajorPo (the poster, not the PC that he runs in my campaign heh heh). I think the Evil GM definition in the above link describes him quite well.

[Graebarde]

I guess I colud be thrown into the 'bad' catagory for lack of input, but I think my style is to try to tell the story and let the players fill in the gaps. When asked "what can we do?" I tell them what I tell folks in RL, "anything you want to as long as you're willing to pay the price." If you do something 'stupid' you're going to pay for it some way. I use a freelance type of game, where die rolls are never known to players, something I learned when I first started gaming. It keeps the mystery there.

ie: Joe shoots at a man 200 meters away. The man goes down, but.. was he hit, or did he take cover? Now if Joe rolled the die and KNEW it was a hit, he'd just notch his gun and continue as there was no threat. But is there? The unkown is what keeps people honest.

Rule player, roll player and role player. I prefer the role player.
Fred
The 'friendly and generous HoG'
The HoG giveth and the HoG taketh away.

[Grimace]

I am most certainly an "other".

I've gone through those other steps of GMing, but progressed beyond them.

[Mohoender]

Originally Posted by Grimace

I am most certainly an "other".

I've gone through those other steps of GMing, but progressed beyond them.

I couldn't say better.

[pmulcahy11b]

Originally Posted by Grimace

I am most certainly an "other".

I've gone through those other steps of GMing, but progressed beyond them.

So would you call that a black belt in Twilight-fu?

[natehale1971]

I've been told that I'm a pretty good GM when it comes to face-to-face games... My players said they really enjoyed how i described things, and they really enjoyed my NPCs. I really enjoy running and playing face-to-face RPGs, i've been looking for someone to game with for a while, but haven't found anyone around me for that so far.

[MajorPo]

I think the "Evil GM" should be renamed to the "Competent GM" cause I think he's the only one who's running the game right

[General Pain]

Originally Posted by MajorPo

I think the "Evil GM" should be renamed to the "Competent GM" cause I think he's the only one who's running the game right

You raise a valid point there Po...

24 hours to next session

[pmulcahy11b]

In my mind, the "Evil GM" is one who is actively trying to kill the players off, at any cost, usually with little or no fairness. I've run into those, from D&D to Gamma World to Boot Hill to Top Secret to T2K and others. A Competent GM is trying to advance a story without forcing it, and perhaps teach them a lesson while he's at it. His activities improve the players. The Evil GM is synonymous with Killer GM in my mind.

Oh, and don't forget the Monte Haul GM...

[kota1342000]

I had a good laugh over the chatty GM article and Id have to agree with Gen Pain, anyone whos RPed for more than a year has likely found all three of these types of GM. Paul's right too about the monty-haul GM, that can be a tad boring after the first game session...even when its you making the mistake.

I actually had to do some serious thinking overnight before responding to this one, I bounced between the killer and the monty-haul, with a middle ground of what I like to call the "mechanical GM." Someone who follows the rules laid down by the game and...well.....thats pretty much it. No real decent descriptions, no detail, no backgrounds, no real help for the PCs.

I did some thinking about what got me out of that rut, and came up with three experiences. The first was a AD&D game where we spent three hours with the GM and one of the players arguing over the fare for a coach ride to our first plot waypoint. Not just normal arguing, Im talking modifiers upon modifiers for the mood of the coach driver including the facts that he wasnt getting along with his wife, it was raining at the time, it had rained all last night, blah blah blah. And that was just one set of the modifiers involved before I finally lost interest in the game.

Second was a much more positive experience. Have you ever been in a RPG where the GM and Players decide to skip combat to keep the story going? That sounds really stupid until youve been in that place where the GM is doing such a great job playing the NPCs and everyone is gliding into the part...the story just keeps moving and everyone wants to find out what happens next. The more acting one person would do would feed to the rest of us. This one is hard to describe exactly, but suffice to say that the story and where we were taking it ruled the game.

Then there was a really wild experience I had. I found myself in a Rifts game with a GM with the perfect style of imagination for that kind of game world. In an attempt to summarize, anytime the GM began to see possible signs of boredom in us, or even if he began to bore, everything would start to blow apart, and we'd escape with our lives and perhaps a new friend or equipment if we were lucky and heroic. Then we'd start into somewhere else stumbing around like a blown up cartoon character looking for safety until a plot revealed itself, and we were off and running again. Repeat as necessary. I have ever since admired the kind of flexibility of thought that our GM needed to twist the plot line like that.

So I grabbed three lessons from the experiences above and came up with a fourth on my own from watching favorite movies.
First; if a rule slows the game, pitch it. Who cares. The rules lawyers will scream bloody murder but in that case tell them that first, the fudge is in their favor, and second, its slowing my story and your coming around the next corner of it. I know theres a lot of people who disdain fudging but I do it all the time. Ill come back to that one later.
Second, its the story stupid. Combat can be fun but whats the point if the only motivation for it is "they're the bad guys." This can be a major stumbling block for me on occasion, because T2K players love their combat so sometimes you have to go with what the players want too. Story is all on the wheel.
Third, be flexible and throw wrenches into the machinery of your players on a regular basis. And not just mortar fire from around the next bend. Have them find a 3 year old girl on a pressure release mine. Find out those Russians who have been making a masterful defense in depth against them are actually protecting a convent full of nuns, children and kittens from the effects of the war. And hell, while we're at it, throw another storyline across the one already in progress and see what happens.

Fourth is something I came up with watching some of my favorite movies, and this is in two parts. The first is I try to run combat as fast as possible. Remember the coach argument above? Had to put with that for combat as well? Hell yes you have if you've been playing for a while. 30 minutes of modifiers and adjustments and conditions until players want to scream "DID I HIT THE SOB OR NOT?!?"
Wrong. That's where and why most of my fudging occurs. I bang the table and tell my players "C'mon!! This is combat!! Roll quick and kill the bastard before he kills you!" And while we're on the subject of combat, Graebarde was right on the money with his example of combat. Sometimes you just don't know what happened until its over.

And the other part of this fourth bit is what many here would call "cheese." Well FIIIIIINE!! I LIKE CHEESE!
I got sick of the filler parts of roleplaying where it just seems like players have to make repetitve die rolls for random encounters, and I was having trouble making them interesting. So I started putting a quick montage together where I use a piece of movie soundtrack to go with scenes that I describe to the players. Describing this always makes me laugh a little because Team America-World Police always slips into my head for a moment; "You need a montaaaage...EVEN ROCKY HAD A MONTAAAAGEE"

Anyway, thats my take. I can post an example of the sountrack scenes when I figure out where and how to post files and link them here LMAO

[ChalkLine]

My games are exceptionally grim as this is a topic I refuse to sugar coat