The Art of GMing
GameMastery Guide, page 27
As a Game Master, you already know what’s expected. You have some players, you’ve designed an adventure full of cunning threats, wild terrain, and a big clever twist, and you’re ready to entertain. That should do it, right? Yet the best-laid plans of every storyteller sometimes go awry. There’s a range of reasons, but while the Pathfinder RPG is a form of group entertainment, it still depends on you as the GM in order to succeed. You are the scriptwriter and director for this production, but you’re also the chief performer. How you choose to approach the role makes a huge difference.
It’s not that players aren’t important; on the contrary, they’re both your audience and your fellow performers, and in many ways everything you do is for them. But they also have less control over the world, and play more limited parts. You lead the band. If you bring gusto to the adventure, your players will respond in kind. If you show up unprepared and harried, they may not invest much effort either. Delivering the best possible performance as a GM depends on how you see yourself when you game, how well you prepare, and what tricks and techniques you use to keep your campaign moving smoothly.
In this section
- Making It Happen With great power sometimes comes a sense that maybe your players don’t appreciate your efforts enough.
- GM as Actor As both performer and director, a good GM needs some of the skills of the stage, from use of accents to scene management.
- Presentation Presentation, as they say, is everything, and some GMs go that extra mile to make their game immersive with a cool handout, perfect soundtrack, or premade maps of every dungeon room.
- Narrative Techniques As the GM, you are the one and only conduit for the players to learn about their situation in the game. If you forget to describe something, the players quite rightly feel cheated.
- Cheating Though it’s considered more polite to call it “fudging,” cheating happens—sometimes a GM will be tempted to alter a die roll to make the story go a certain way, or to save a player character from a blow that would kill…