Every GM has hit that wall one night. Half the players bail last-minute for crap reasons, players are falling asleep at the table, some people are in bad moods. Individually, all of these things are manageable. But sometimes all the minor roleplaying irritants roll a critical and land on you table for max damage.
What do you do? Do you cancel the game, diverting to some other activity? Or do you go on and try to work through it? Early in my GMing “career” I chose the former answer, but these days, much to my chagrin, I choose the later.
Why do I do that to myself? Something I’ve learned in my life is that the working through these moments makes you better at whatever it is you’re doing. Gamemastering when the group is involved and active and present is pretty easy; If the players are invested in the world, you’re mostly just feeding them obstacles and challenges, and describing the consequences of their actions. Gamemastering when energy is low and key parts of the game and group are missing…now there’s a challenge.
These times are when you get to practice generating and maintaining energy levels. You get a chance to ply techniques for getting players into the flow, and juggling group dynamics. Knowing your world and your ruleset doesn’t mean a lot if the energy of the group is out of sync. Players will often judge the fun of the game not by what they did, but how they felt while doing it. You can run a session with no combat or a session with all combat; You can kill the whole party; You can have an NPC talk for a half-hour or sit back and let the PCs free-form amongst themselves. You can do anything as long as the players are having a good time. The biggest factor in the good time is going to be that energy level. When it’s flagging, you need to change course somehow and find something to pick it up. If it’s high, you have to maintain it.
Again, a normal session should see the players with sufficient energy and enthusiasm that you have plenty to start with then maintain. But when it’s low to start, it’s tough. What do you do to get players into the game?
This is going to be a whole series of articles. I have a set of issues I’d like to discuss, but let me know if there are any issues that you might want advice/help on and I’ll make sure to cover those in-depth.
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- GMing, Ritual, and You: Preparing the Game, Preparing Yourself.
A Jack of All Trades ,or if you prefer, an extreme example of multi-classing, Gamefiend, a.k.a Quinn Murphy has been discussing, playing and designing games straight out of the womb. He is the owner and Editor-in-Chief of this site in addition to being an aspiring game designer. As you would assume, he is a huge fan of 4e.
By day he is a technologist.
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Heh, this is funny cause I was just doing some soul searching about starting to DM again.
Tryign to think how to phrase… How do you deal with the transition from “We’re just arriving and starting to socialize” to “Okay, we’re gaming, stop with the tangents.”? That’s something that always plagued my games…
My players aren’t too bad. The toughest part is the first hour, people get into their characters at different rates, all I can do is present problems to encourage them to do it faster. I find that rolling dice isn’t the way to get people into character, you have to get them to identify with something that involves them thinking along the same lines as their character. Bribery sometimes works too.
Welcome to the blog guys!
@justaguy: GMing is one of the best things to do in gaming. Search deep and jump in! I’ll have something to address your question tomorrow.
@RipperX: The post tomorrow may have some answers for you as well.