I had "Resolution Specialist" on an old "Bullshit Bingo" card I had at a job I once endured. The new boss loved using phrases like that. Using "Resolution" was one of his favourites. I handed in my notice the day he stopped me mid sentence when I was trying to point out a problem with the computer network, and he explained, "We don't have PROBLEMS... we have RESOLUTION START POINTS". Another week in the same building as him would have led to me making the news in one of those "We never saw it coming... he always seemed so normal... " sort of reports.
This guy fucking gets it. Every time I try to get someone else in my group to gm, they think of it like a job where they have to spend days preparing or they try to run some linear story and then they fall apart when things don't go as planned. Even worse is that they forget to have fun as gm, you have to give up control, let shit happen but still obey the rules (and laws of how the world works). Seriously this is advice that even all those osr guys need to hear, it's so simple.. nice to know a channel with 10k subs actually knows what they're saying, so often the big channels give the most backwards regarded advice.
For sure.. I've seen dominant players with submissive players "me too"'ing along. I've seen players wholly dependent upon the GM to "tell the story". Definitely need all the players to be proactive - having ideas based in the good version of "it's what my character would do" (selfless, not selfish). Set each other up, like team sports, to "score". Feed each other, and play off each other.
The approach I take to GM'ing is actually inspired by Minecraft. In Minecraft, wherever you go is the right place to be but you can venture out and discover other... right places to be. I have to admit in the system I'm developing I was calling the GM a Director because I was inspired the Director AI from Left From Dead BUT after watching and agreeing with this vid, I'm going to change it. The words we use and the meanings they convey matter.
The forever dm is always said as a bad thing. I'm thrilled to dm and set up a game for my friends to play. I get energetic and reinvigorated at the table as I witness the events play out because of the players choices and die rolls. I do a lot of prep. It's not narrative, I'm not writing a novel. I read my notes and bullet points things that I might do and should do for the next game. I'll check my notes and be reminded that the players slighted a npc and they're back by the npc's shop, he'll definitely want to remind them of it. Stuff like that. I'll read up on spells and monsters, look at the area the gang is & bullet point some locations and people of interest. I'll look at their character sheets and see what their inventory is and give them reminders of items they've forgot about or see that one of them is just overly burdened with stuff and some "polite" people are definitely going to notice that pc and want to help relieve him of his burdens. It's never been work to me.
I've been itching to run a game putting the ideas you put forth to use, they are incredibly intuitive once you free yourself of all of these artifical notions that all the "advice" online tries to convince you is the "correct" way to play and just let the medium do what is most natural. I'm glad someone is actually verbalizing all of this because otherwise the only thing people have to go on is the same regurgitated ideas promoted by influencers and midwits.
As someone who's coming from a D&D background, I'm having a hard time shaking off all of the prepping. Sure, I can wing NPCs and situations, but creating an interesting puzzle or dungeon does take me some time. There may be some GMs out there that can improvise all that, but I'm not that good. That's why I'm looking forward to Vampires 5ed. I'm still prepping (creating the NPCs & relationships) but it just feels so easier than D&D. No grand finish, no main villain, no plot. Just create a city and let your players experience it. It's like you said in the video - I'm actually looking forward to our first session, bringing all of my creations to life and seeing how they do with the players.
100% agree - I stopped creating 'story arcs' a long time ago. My creative process is very, very different now: I essentially just make a sandbox of a world, drop my players in and react to what they do. Love the way you detailed how to play immersive villains - I have played my current major villain exactly as you describe, and I don't believe I've ever presented a character in a game that my players hate more. Every action they take is fuck over over my villain, they are so absolutely emotionally invested in the narrative that I don't have to write anything, their actions are more than enough material to play off of.
To each his own, my guy, there is no "one correct way" to GM. Personally, planning a narrative, thinking about "what is going to happen next", and trying to predict the PCs' actions, is how I get excited to run my games. I prefer this Narrative focused approach, because without some form of a pre-planned story, or even a vague conception of one, I just feel lost. The story gives me direction. It makes me care. It gives me context. And if things don't go the way I planned or expected, and the players really want to take things in a different direction, I am generally happy to change or completely rewrite my story to fit what they find interesting. You can say that I am wrong if you want, but if I enjoy preparing for my games, and my players enjoy playing in my games, then what's it to you? Also, the idea that focusing on creating NPCs as real/interesting characters is gonna help prevent burn-out is hilarious to me. Creating good NPCs with their own backstory, personality, and goals, can be just as tedious and time consuming and preparing a narrative. Especially if you are playing a WoD game, and have to create 50-100 characters, each with their own sheet, and then figure out the relationships between them, lol. That's an insane amount of work. Neither way is "wrong", each has its strengths and weaknesses, up to you which one you want to use.
Dude. Is it weird to think of those characters as though they were like my own children? I often can't help but write my antagonists as thoroughly disaffected idealists, as if they were the black-pilled mass shooters that I failed to prevent from turning to evil. If you think about it, what kind of shit drives people to do something like make a deal with the devil for extreme power? Why do people turn to the dark side? Sure, there are psychos out there, but it's usually just that people are tired of whatever pain they're experiencing, and they've got nobody there to help them through it, so they turn to things nobody should turn to. I couldn't imagine treating somebody like that as a prop. It would kill me.
When I shifted for low prep GM'ing like this I had a lot more fun and was just as surprised by what happened in the game as the players were, now I come up with a general table setting for the scenario, flesh out the most important NPC's in my head, and then lean on random tables and my players ideas for the rest because even when I was over prepping, I liked the ideas that I had at the table more than any I had during prep.
Gents, this just might be one of your magnum opuses. This video perfectly distills EVERYTHING I’ve felt about the hobby for the past year. Such good stuff. I’m gonna send this to my friends and plead with them to watch it.
As a Forever DM(and liking it). This is spot on! The less prep I am making, the more fun I am having. Let your players surprise you. Give them interesting situations, and let the characters decide what path they're taking. This removes the risk of burnout and the feeling of ''burden''. Prepping for hours encounters, maps and plot points is absolutely useless. You only need concepts, cool NPCs and situations.
Thank you so much for the advice. I used to stress heavily about my games. Now I'm pretty lax and love to just roll with whatever happens. This video helps put it into perspective so well. 😃
Great stuff guys! What I mainly struggle with now is just trying to figure out what the goals of all these npcs the players are interacting with actually are long-term and whether or not they can succeed or fail. Just because there are so many now!
0:41 Damned good question. Am I not also playing the game when I'm running the enemies in an encounter and throwing dice? 6:18 Yeah, just like I thought. 11:58 'Why won't the players follow up on my plot hook I gave them REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!' Yeah. Big true.
Great take gentlemen, great video as always. I'm guilty of being that Over-prepping GM who had to map out every little detail to feel comfortable at the table. I'm the GM that got burned out and let campaigns die because I wasn't excited about it anymore. I've been changing my way of GM'ing over the years towards something like this and I'm happy to see videos talking about this kind of stuff. It helps to hear others talking about something I've just been mulling over in my head. Keep up the great work, and congratulations on the kickstarter, I am your 601st backer. Cannot wait to see the finished product!
I feel ya on that. After running Lost Mines I wanted to turn into a hex crawl that kept the main arch available, but not required and used a lot of other 3rd party material to try and populate. Even that became too much. The one WotC adventure arch I ran, Avernus, I hated the most, lol. Now I'm attempting to create my own "world" and focusing in one area and will work out from there. I still have that need to build up societies and such to for my vision of the world, which still takes a lot of work. I think it is from getting into Rolemaster worldbuilding back in the late 80s and early 90s, lol. My biggest issue is that I can't find a system that does what I want it to do, so I'm also fiddling with the 5E rules to make it more what I want it to be. I do like rules heavy to start and then tweaking (or ignoring) those rules as we play, instead of making rules up at the table and not being able to arbitrate those rules consistently (and I see that issue across the board with the popular rules light systems now). Truthfully, I get more enjoyment out of tweaking the rules and system than actually playing sometimes, lol.
Right on the fucking money. I talked about this myself, the director/storyteller/player fluffer mindset is so corrosive to the hobby. Lynch clips are perfect. Great video as always!
Don't set up quests, don't plan out scenes. Create factions and NPC's. give them goals and tools. If you give them some complexity, not even you can guess how the NPC will react to your players and you get to slip into their shoes. Reactive players wait for something exciting to happen. Proactive players make something exciting happen.
100% agree, the only thing I would add is giving the player characters tools to (over time) build up a faction of their own if they want to do so. I don’t know of many games that even attempt this, so I have written my own rules for it. The reason for it is so that players are not stuck as individuals working against factions, but they can actually set long term goals to become just as powerful as the factions they are surrounded by and choose how they want to compete with those factions. Long term goals set by the players themselves and actionable by the players in the game world (as in supported by the game mechanics) makes the GMs life far easier as it takes the burden off them to come up with conflicts, plots, etc.
The thing is that you need proactive players for this to work. Sometimes you get a group that is just not proactive at all and waits for you to drop something in their lap. They're basically playing Bilbo and waiting for a bunch of dwarves and a wizard to physically drag them on an adventure.
Plans are useless, but planning is essential. There is nothing wrong with outlining a narrative, as long as you are willing to abandon it if/when the players go "off script", and start a outlining a new one. That said. I agree, with what you said about proactive players, however some players like being reactive - especially the heroic types. You can't save the world from the undead horde if the undead horde isn't coming. No, in that case, you need to become the undead horde, and not everyone is going to be into that.
Over the past weekend I'm taking a different approach to my game. I have my bullet points, however I just leave my players tell the story and I fit my bullet points around them as it unfolds. I like the mind set of a director looking through a lens and describing the PCs world l. I'm looking at it as Improv Directing. Just recently read the Mothership gm guide and that got me going approaching the planning with a simplistic nature.
Thats right BLG! I feel your on the money , full discretion i've only gm around 25 sessions, all of them in Past few years, but played in around 70+ sessions over the past 4 years, but yeah anyway in my few years of experience THATS RIGHT BLG!!!
While I do still enjoy the directing style of DMing to a degree, I will say I had one DM who did exactly what you talked about where he just created a world and threw us in there to do whatever we want and discover a story with us. It felt like a completely different game and was vastly more enjoyable
This desire to be more like film is the bane of interactives hobbies like role-playing games and video games. This pursuit of being more cinematic is such a misguided mindset that just turns the hobby into an inferior version of movies. The main strength of tabletop and video games is interactivity, but a lot of hacks miss that. Emergent gameplay is the best thing about TTRPGs and video games.
I whole-heartedly agree with you. I dont what a rollercoaster-ride . I want a real adventure , being in the action and interact everything that i wanna interact my own way and not be placed on certain Locations and have combat after combat after combat after combat. Not all hobbies and media should be passive . I wanna have activity to spice up and enjoy things with their consequences and wild results.
Agree on your points and this is what I teach new GMs or players who aspire to run their own games as GMs. Don't plot but make scenarios is what I say to them. Also, a good meme example of how a ttrpg session goes is the drawing of the horse wherein only the first part where the GM has full control of the narrative can be meticulous and well drawn but when you say "What do you want to do" is when the stick figure of the horse drawing happens
I like that you reference David Lynch so much. He's my favorite director. I like his explanation of Happy Accidents, that sometimes something just happens that no one was expecting and that takes the story in a whole new direction. RPGs allow for a lot more Happy Accidents than movies.
GMing is like Rick Sanchez running the store where he removes curses from the Devil's items that people get at the "Needful Things" store: half an hour in I just want to start pouring gasoline all over everything and saying, "Okay everybody out, I just got bored."
I refer to running a game as 'Interactive Pretend.' As the DM, I set the scene and run the NPCs and the players play their characters. I have an over-arching plotline but I have only the merest clue how the players will get there. I set a Point A and a probable endpoint, but the rest is more like guidelines. I have hard and fast rules (Level 2 Wizards can't cast Fireballs), but I also play fast and loose with a lot of things. I love good movies and I'd like my games to look like fun films. Your video hit this point very well...better than I think I've ever seen. Well done!
These videos of yours on the topic of being a gamemaster are so illuminating to me. I feel so stupid for all the time Ive wasted in that “director” mindset and never really going anywhere.
I'm playing with my friends, only one of them has played D&D and tabletop at all. The rest of us, have not. Always wanted to do it, ended up being a GM for a Cyberpunk campaign. An original one I made up, I am no writer, neither of us are. Simple objectives they are working to, but because of the nature of the setting, I am able to fill it with lots of criminal and seedy stuff for them to do in between jobs the fixer has for them. Sort of making it up as we go along. I have rough outlines that I am filling in, but because the players can make choices, choices I didn't account for.....I have to keep it loose, it's fun, as things happen that nobody necessarily knows what to expect.
@@blacklodgegames Yeah, we're all having fun. Things are working as you'd expect in that world, so I say it's going well. We all enjoy it when we play.
As much as you might want to blame Matthew Mercer or Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis, the blame lays with you and me. We are the ones that bought into this and enabled this bad idea for years.
to be honest, I don't know how to run game with pre-written dialogues or other stuff you mentioned. But reallu preping bad guys actions is the main thing? Becasue for me if I'm running fucking dungeon, I need to prepare fucking dungeon. This is the problem for me, bacasue I want it to be fresh, interesting and fun. Not another sewers with 2d6 cr1s and 1d4 cr2s. And yes, I can take some egsisting map or even whole thing - still need to make it my own. So, still preping is not the same as the players.
The best modules also follow this, giving you as a GM a bunch of NPCs and locations, and then a hook to pull your players in. I think a lot of modern GMs just don't read quality modules, or they would already know to do this.
Love it! Boiled down a lot of the problems with "prepping" by simply saying it is the wrong mentality and tools. I"m a big fan of "emergent story from gameplay" (play to find out) and immersion into the character, the setting, the experience. As a GM I've got that reactive style, being referee and person who puts up the appropriate conflict/content for the situation. One of my favorite lines regarding players and their characters is from Fate Core: "competent, capable people leading dramatic lives". The party are the stars of the show, and everything they do while interacting with the game world is where the story comes from. When the party is reactive, instead of proactive, is when they lose their power over the narrative and become interchangeable with any other random PC. - @Runeslinger has been doing an interesting series about immersion. It is very much related and well worth a look/listen!
its been nice seeing this channel grow. I think the tabletop space is having their Neo moment where so many on the farm are waking up to pull the throbbing proboscis of cooperate mainstream entertainment from their gullet. Its okay to disagree with super popular channels and mouthpieces. I am someone who learned a lot from Mercer, but appreciate that some channels are courageous enough to poke fun at the overly produced and artificially emotional session his group performs. Because healthy disagreement is actually VERY good for this space. Every great system came out of a disagreement. Thank you Ginger and Steve.
Big agree. I like linear video games as much as I like sandbox games, but holy shit I don't care about the 20 minute cutscene you are using to cover the loading time
For my second ever session as a GM, I've created a google doc with "Chapters" and a compact bullet point list of key things like the players home being attacked, a particular heist I'm going to try and get them into, etc. I'm not expecting everything to go exactly as I had planned, I just wanted to mark down what I believed was key to the story I want to tell, and then let the players approach it in whatever way they feel, even if that means fucking off to do something else. I really want to work off the philosophy of less is more in terms of prep work though, and even this doc is full of info despite trying to keep it to just a sentence per bullet point. Should I just ditch the doc and wing it?
There is nothing wrong with thinking of a good premise and considering how the world might react to player actions. As long as you treat it *as* a premise and not a railroad, then that's ok. Your players goals will shift over time and often during the session itself, so always be thinking in terms of those goals and the goals of your NPCs. There is nothing wrong with writing important info down, just don't treat it like a script
Also, use random encounters and generators. They are there to be a prod to your imagination in the moment and can add a LOT to a game. But those are also not gospel, and if you roll something that makes no sense, don't be bound to it.
As an absolute beginner GM I'd love to see a video about when and how to use random encounters and generators. And when not to use them or discard the results. Perhaps a small section in one of your streams?
@@egg465 From the most recent ruleslite systems I've been looking into, they use random dungeon encounters whenever the party is doing something other than combat or RP with an NPC. Basically, if they are rummaging through chests and bookcases or searching for traps is when you want to roll for a random encounter.
Every project comes with different objectives. They are multiple ways someone can game-master in order to fulfill certain functions adapted to specific projects. Take nothing someone says for granted, never be dogmatic about anything, just be aware of what you are doing, how you are doing it and why. Wanna be a tyrant, then own it. Wanna be a randomizing rule-addict dungeon master, then own it. Wanna be an art director, then own it. Wanna be an open world everything open ended improviser, then own it. As long as you are aware of your project and your players are in on it then there is a million ways to play. But to orient oneself one needs to understand what is PURE roleplay, what is unique to roleplay, what hinders it, what fosters it. Don't be idealistic and think that there is only this or that that matters. That stuff is maleable. You can hybridize to your fancy. You can purify to your fancy. Just know what's the PROJECT about.
I rarely prep anything, if at all. I have ideas and points of interest, then we just go. I build the GM stuff along the way. The players create and insert. The rules decide how it all shakes out. The most “directing” I perform is clarifying moments as a GM to players, in the case I may not have portrayed a tense moment clearly. For example, if the PCs are talking to a lord and they’re edging towards catastrophic trouble, I will ensure they know that if they continue, it will go badly, because the character knows this. If they push things towards catastrophe, it’s not a “game over”. They get to do what they want, but after the smoke clears, the narrative’s changed, hopefully with the PCs surviving. I love when the players bite on something that’s not a thread. I’ll often lean into it, improvising something for them. I love being challenged, painted into a corner, then seeing what results.
My DMing got so much better once I realized this about a year ago. Before, I really did try to run each session like a movie and plan out 3 act arcs and stuff. It was impossible and grueling. Now I actually have fun and run way more games and my players have way more fun too.
I have been a GM for almost 40 years. Millions of apps that create better maps, better scenes, better Journaling, etc. That is the problem. RPGs are becoming a videogame with animated tokens, special effects and absolutely no room for imagination. Modern rules are also more streamlined and many of them now focused on narrative and not rules themselves. Quicker pace. It is a nightmare.
Funny, I was just reminded about Kubrick his obsessive attention to detail. In the documentary A life in pictures, the actor Sydney Pollack, you showed at the beginning, and Tom Cruise tell how long it took to film one scene. It took Kubrick more than three weeks just to shoot a scene of just a few minutes.
My favorite part of GMing is when the player surprise me with something i didn't think about. I'm like a bad parent, I almost let them have what they want because the ride of following that thread delights me.
Alright, all well and good. How do I create an adventure using this style. Do I just make the main forces of the world and act like them along with locations that have a quest of their own ?
The video below is a great starting point: ruclips.net/video/Qjv3JZXduMM/видео.html Focus on building the factions and NPCs in your world. Give them conflicting motivations and goals. By helping or hindering any one of them, your players will get caught up in organic drama.
Take the PCs out of it. What are the other people in the world doing? Why are they doing it? How do others in the world feel about it? What actions do they take in response? Now add the PCs into the mix and let it play out.
To be honest, that is an easy mistake to make because a large corpus of the most popular rpg systems in the past decades implies that the role of GM must be approached as a storyteller or director, there are systems where the GM is called one of these, and the game uses story beats and scenes and chapters in its language and rules. I am just simply too lazy to prepare that much amd I realized some time ago that I only need to do is to build up a setting, characters, motivations, and a relationship network between these, and things will fall into places. But that also made me really frustrated when I am asked to gamemaster a prewritten campaign, because I always felt that advrnture modules and campaign books focus on the wtong things. A bunch of battle maps, statblocks, and descriptions make it look like content, but I would be more interested in deep character details, motivations, drives, personality traits and such. Instead these are usually the most neglected parts of the prewritten modules. I understand that the BBEG wants power, or destroy the world, but why? I am not saying they must be nuanced, but they need some base level character to work as a character in a classic sense.
I only started doing tabletop a few weeks ago. Before that I was making up maps for players to be in. Cyberpunk is what we are playing and while I know campaigns exist out there....I never once took a look at them. My first game and I made up a motivation for the players, and some smaller build ups towards it. There are the gangs, locations, the dodgy characters and all that. I have written nothing for them, not one line of dialogue. I thought about a "quest" list, but scrapped it. I have in my head the basics of what they would want but it's already happened that players and NPC's alike have failed and succeeded in their goals. In the last game I never once thought they would end up being car salesmen for a little bit, but they did. All they have are some objectives and all they have to do is get there, and when it comes to the side stuff with all the NPC's and whatnot, well, we all just have to deal with it. They are playing the game after all, it is up to them how they play it and what their characters do...well, aside from the dice rolls but even then they have to play that out when it all goes another way.
2:30 If I am not wrong, Stanley Kubrick also edited his films long time after their release. One anecdote I remember someone telling on RUclips (Indie Film Hustle, maybe?) or reading it online that Stanley Kubrick edited Dr. Strangelove years after the release to perfect it. He did it on a ship.
Great video differentiating the essence between a hobby and entertainment. If you're getting burnout from your RPG sessions, you're doing it wrong. I LOVE going into a session knowing there are multiple possible paths my players could go down and no idea which one (or ones) they'll choose.
I was finding myself disagreeing with you for the most part until you got to the sweet spot at 9:35 where you talked about NPC motivations. Then we started aligning more. Predetermined stories are a pain in the neck for both the players and the GM, prewritten dialogue feels like a complete waste of time, and even storyboarding can only take you so far as a GM until your players jump off the storyboard and you have to rework that process. I do agree that these sorts of efforts are especially likely to cause burnout, because they are focused on the wrong goals. However, there can still be a heck of a lot of work involved in preparation. I think it is all optional work and fun work depending on your style as a GM. The preparations that sandbox GMs do for each campaign are many, but often reusable across campaigns and sessions: - World building - places, peoples, and factions - Faction relationships and events - how NPCs are connected (allies, enemies or neutral onlookers) and the events that are happening outside of the scope of play. - Cosmos building - gods and planes of existence - Map building - just as aids for the players to visualize a place where roleplaying, exploration, and/or combat takes place (I admire people that enjoy creating 3D models of places, but it isn't for me as my campaigns usually aren't even 33% combat) - Character arc possibilities - identifying individual hooks for each player's character to either pull on or not, to explore their background and future more fully. These are tossed in when the opportunity arises, but again, are completely optional. I never script what the player characters do, because I prefer a sandbox style of campaign, where almost anything can happen. Most, if not all, of the above CAN BE foregone (especially if you purchase someone else's setting and/or modules), but your world will be much less immersive if you don't expend some effort in advance. For an experienced GM, the benefit of "letting go" is not completely avoiding preparation, but rather being able to focus on the important things, often just before they are needed. Great content! (even when I don't completely agree)
@@blacklodgegames Totally valid of course. One of the lessons I learned early on is to keep the details quite sparse in my early prep. For example, leaving space for another NPC of some importance in a faction can allow you to tie them into the background of one of the PC's, or have them interact based on the PC's actions. It gives you room to collaborate with the players even more. This was really helpful for me. But it's not necessary; you can also just rework one of the NPCs you've created to have different motivations and relationships.
Great vid. Question about one-shots: in your experience is it better to still let the players create their own PC goals, or because of the limited time is it better to give them a simple goal (e.g. via pre-gens) so they can get going? Thanks.
One-shots are absolutely a different thing. I run my campaigns by letting the players make the decisions. But for one-shots, you only have a few hours. I tell my players the basic premise and what kind of characters might fit into it. You can even go as far as telling them what they're going to try to do and why, and I don't have a problem with that because it's a one-shot. Now, you can have more open one-shots, but it's harder because of time constraints. In all cases, make sure you set expectations with the players.
@@TyboGames check out video about soap Opera structure from a month or two ago, it's much more explicit about what to prep. Make characters and factions with overlapping motivations and you'll have a much more organic and useful structure that can be used in the moment at the table ruclips.net/video/Qjv3JZXduMM/видео.html
Pacing is actually an important factor. If a game drags on, players can end up fatigued as well, especially when in stressful situations in-game. It's a form of catharsis going through another's conflict, but recently a player of mine was method acting a rather normal man picking up traumas, paranoia, and hatred in a war, and it ate away at him for far too long. If I'd paced the game faster, not dragged on with long roleplay and living life in the situation, he wouldn't have burned out so hard on the character, his own words. After 9 years in the hobby, I've only been in a full-send multi year dnd game a single time, and that was a snail's pace game where singular dungeons lasted longer out of character than in-character, counting long rests. Burnout can easily easily hit both sides of the aisle, especially in serious roleplay heavy games. As for writing and direction, the hobby's nothing if not infested by people running multiple modules a week for 30-40 dollars a player each session. As I try to get people further into the hobby or explore other game systems, it's mostly or ONLY paid GMs running modules. That's the ttrpg space nowadays lmao
@TheTerrainWizard I'd argue the opposite though for the GMs commodifying the hobby and running like 5 games a week. No investment save for wanting money, a homemade cooked meal turned into mcdonalds drive-through. Hanging out with friends as a form of relaxation turned into a transaction you've gotta stress over to make worthwhile while the GM just sits back and counts out green. When a disagreement happens, or serious game conflict happens, the transactional nature of the game similarly gets in the way. Will you try to convince the player who wants to bring his op dandwiki build or simply argues over simple rules, or will you consider the green and just let it slide for the detriment of the whole table. When the dice come down, or an 'are you sure you want to do that' is accepted and a character death is on the plate, will the paid GM really do what is natural or summon elven cavalry to save them at the last second because a player could leave on character death, or a party ($120 a week minus tax) could stop playing after a TPK? Not to mention ofc, people running multiple modules a week won't care enough about singular ones to deal with the kind of inventive thoughts and Immergent storytelling that comes from the players' involvement and just keep forcing them on the cookie cutter railroad, which for new or inexperienced players can be their ONLY impression on the hobby: Being put down for playing the game.
The pace lies in the players and not in the adventure itsself . In linear Videogames its actually needed , in movies too but not in TTRPGs that are about exploration and discovery . Pacing cant be set up on everything because not every concept is thought out to be timed from itsself and requires action to be progressed . Especially TTRPGs are more action-based-progression and not a narrative one or otherwise we got a musical with dice as decoration.
I never prepare my campaigns beyond the tokens, monster stat blocks and the maps. The rest is all improv. I have a beginning and a vague idea of what the end would be but what's between the two is all up to the players. I make up quests, npcs (most besides some key ones) and items on the spot. And honestly, me and my players are having so much fun
The disciplines of game design and literature and cinema are at their most useful to the GM when they're used _in the service_ of you being the Game Master, not when they hoodwink you into trying to be, literally, a director or writer. You can take very, _very_ valuable things from them but if you let them take over the game they will grind against the nature of play. You'll either come to hate the dice when they don't do what you want, or become a serial fudge-roller. It's a bad time either way.
More and more, I'm not even trying to anticipate what my players will do. All I'm focused on is fleshing out the setting and NPCs, generating some interesting curios for them to (potentially) stumble across, and assets (art of the monsters and NPCs, music, soundscapes.) I stopped handwaving overland travel and am now using a series of d100 encounter tables. If they're on a main road, low chance of monsters but high chance of NPCs. If they're in a dangerous, remote location, reverse it. Being free of needing to painstakingly account for every variable in an encounter is such a weight lifted; sometimes all you need is "swamp setting, moss sage riding giant toad" and you can really make some magic happen. I used to be Ginny Di, but now I am BLG 😁
I ran a FitD game, no prep, and still got burnt out. Not prepping is not a cure all for burn out and the responsibilities you have as a GM. Do many GMs need to loosen their hold on the narrative? Yes. Can a lot of prep be wasted time? Yes. But, depending on your game and choice of system, a certain amount of prep is neccesary. IS GMing a job? ... Yeah, it kinda is. It requires more effort than being a player, and you have willingly taken on a responsibility to the players of your game. (This IS a two-way street, and your players also have some responsibility to you, but with greater power comes greater responsibility. Even if all else were equal [it's not], if any player decided they didn't want to show up for a week, it would just mean a missing player. The game is dependant on the GM being there to continue). And if you are not getting the same amount of energy back from running the game than you are putting into running it, it doesn't matter what you are or are not doing, you are going to burn out. And that's nothing to be ashamed about. That's why it's ironic to me that you started with that Matt Mercer clip, because that's fundamentally what it's about, and respecting that. Basically, all this video seems to amount to is "Stop wasting effort prepping GMing, you and won't burn out." Which is false. Which I think is a shame, because you make some good points about leaning into the strengths of the medium, but it's lost in the grandstanding against a strawman "Director" (Which, there are plenty of people who want exactly what you are railing against. There's a reason Adventure modules sell). Not to mention, yeah, you are sort of a director. Sure, you aren't a movie director. But you are 100% the primary (a good RPG game is to much of a collaborative effort to say only) director of the game. You have the primary control over the tone of the world. How light or dark it is, how comedic, etc. It is typically the GM who decides when to move on from a scene, and establishes what the next scene is. It is the often GM, not the rules, who decides what those outcomes of those random dice mean (particularly outside combat). And many players WANT a more curated experience. TL;DR This video's got some good in it, but to me it feels lost in shaming GMs who aren't GMing the "right" way.
I really wish the Shucked Oyster wasn't a brothel (or even a casino) because my players have zero interest in that sort of thing. I hope next time you guys do a town or something.
It's understandable, we knew it wouldn't be to everyone's taste, but the brothel is mostly just a premise and jumping off point. It's not about sex or prurient interests outside of the comedic premise. Our next project is much more serious in tone, and the one after that will be a follow up to the Shucked Oyster, but focused on an evil faction/region to fight and get caught up in. The barrier of the brothel/casino aspect won't be there.
@@blacklodgegames I don't blame you for wanting to follow up on your ideas. You need to go where inspiration takes you, but I'm looking forward to something more conventional.
I just improvise. Whenever i make something i think is clever, they dismantle it. So i stopped preparing. I just roll down the hill like avalanche. I try to sweep them and bury them under the rocks named fun and dirt named immersion with power called creative bullshitting.
0:39 _"Why does being a GM feel like a job now?"_ Because Dungeon & Dragons 5th edition is a lazy and half-finished product. The worst edition on DMs, no wonder some dubbed it the "ANTI-DM edition". No matter what you do, no matter what other advise you get, no matter what "smart techniques" you use. Whatever insightful and wise advice the video says to you, none of it will change the fact you are working with an inherently lackluster product.
This video is very inspiring and I can see myself in some of the points. But I really need some more information to understand the concept. How do you prep? How are you going to run a session if you haven't spent any time detailing npcs, monsters, balance encounters, and select some items for the players to find? The concept presented sounds very appealing but I don't understand how to implement it
We have a video on this called "stop running sandboxes, start running soap operas". Developing a region in your setting by filling it with NPCs with conflicting motivations and goals goes a long way toward eliminating misdirected session prep. If playing a d&d like game, relying on random tables and game systems can go a long way to generating enough of a prod to the imagination to keep the game going without massive prep
GMs are writers and storytellers. Every week I write up descriptions. During play, I collaboratively tell a story with the players. But I do agree that GMs are not directors ordering the players what to do and how to do it, but they do provide everything in the world outside the players choices (set the scenes). Burnout does not only come from trying to 'movie' your game. It comes from running a game and not being able to come up with good content for your players (and you) to enjoy. The characters get tiresome and cliché. Higher level characters make challenging them very difficult. But mostly it comes from feeling unappreciated. Players argue and get frustrated, talk back, seem uninterested, but then say thanks for running the game when they leave. Things rarely go as planned. One thing I have noticed that when I DM, is that I am always engaged. No matter what is going on, I need to pay attention. All these add up and can really wear on you.
I understand the freedom of creativity as a DM as you said, but why using Matthew Mercer for the thumbnail? Is he an example of 'director' DM?, if he is then maybe i should take notes of what not and do from his play in Critical role.
Because of how CR is now a product, not a bunch of friends live streaming their home games, Matt has slowly turned more "director" with his GMing. It's honestly one of the criticisms of their current campaign.
@blade1hunter100 This is actually a fair critique/observation. I'm certain it wasn't Matt's intention, but he fell for the trap of each campaign having to be bigger and grander than the last. Campaign 2 really hit the DM sweet spot, so we know he has it in him.
In the previous podcast video about this topic there was a callout about a false dichotomy between making a story and having a pointless sandbox game. I think this video makes the exact same mistake in the opposite direction - assuming that because a game has an outlined plot means there is no player agency. In reality there is no pull between these - you can focus your prep on trying to drive a narrative while still giving the full narrative control to the players. The results might mean that you can’t hard prep for more than 1 week or 2 weeks ahead of time. It means that you will constantly reconsider your NPC and villains intentions, actions, and how the party might interact with them in the next session to still deliver a satisfying narrative flow. It’s not for everyone though, so I’ll avoid the same mistake that both sides of this argument always make, and not present it as some kind of golden mean.
I have done exactly what you describe here and find it less satisfying and more labor intensive. The bigger issue is that story is the wrong concept for thinking about the RPG experience. RPGs happen in the moment and are not subject to "narrative" if you respect the dice and player choices. Thinking of the GM as author/director etc. is a psychological cue to act against the medium itself.
@@blacklodgegames I’m sorry that was less satisfying for you. I agree it’s more labor intensive. For some, (myself included) that labor is enjoyable in itself and leads to a more satisfying game (I have also tried it both ways). I again think you’re stuck in a false dichotomy between “narrative” and “role playing”. The players constantly surprise me with their choices, and I’m constantly having to improvise for scenarios I did not explicitly plan for. Nothing about having a plan for where you want to story to go makes it so you have to take away player agency, just as nothing about giving player agency means you can’t prepare for what they might do. These things are not at odds - both are required to some extent, and it’s only if you leave either out entirely that you get into the “bad game” territory.
Inventing and knowing who are my NPCs is fun and achievable, unlike predicting what players will do. Isn't it the same as identity-driven life vs life of people who's trying to script it as if they control external world events and can account for any future? I'd rather delegate my god complex to the ambitious and probably evil NPC than overcommit to prep and burnout ever again ) are Lynch clips from behind the scenes of shooting Twin Peaks se3 taken from Twin Peaks: A Limited Event Series or some other bts?
I love Matt Mercer as a GM, but sometimes others get a shot, and some of them just don't have what it takes. They try to direct as you said, and it's just not fun to watch. The forced narrative robs the players of free will, and get no real say in all the story defining moments.
I tell my players, "I'm a Conflict Designer and you lot are Resolution Specialists."
When I last GMed, my player where the conflict designers and I the resolution specialist.
@@TARMHeLL that kinda shit will happen to a pimp from time to time
I tell them I'm an idiot rolling on random tables and they need to figure out what they wanna do each session
I had "Resolution Specialist" on an old "Bullshit Bingo" card I had at a job I once endured. The new boss loved using phrases like that.
Using "Resolution" was one of his favourites.
I handed in my notice the day he stopped me mid sentence when I was trying to point out a problem with the computer network, and he explained, "We don't have PROBLEMS... we have RESOLUTION START POINTS".
Another week in the same building as him would have led to me making the news in one of those "We never saw it coming... he always seemed so normal... " sort of reports.
@@andrewtomlinson5237 yeah it's an ironic holdover from an O&G job i used to have. Boss man loved that kinda crap
This guy fucking gets it. Every time I try to get someone else in my group to gm, they think of it like a job where they have to spend days preparing or they try to run some linear story and then they fall apart when things don't go as planned. Even worse is that they forget to have fun as gm, you have to give up control, let shit happen but still obey the rules (and laws of how the world works).
Seriously this is advice that even all those osr guys need to hear, it's so simple.. nice to know a channel with 10k subs actually knows what they're saying, so often the big channels give the most backwards regarded advice.
@@peanutbutter9687 thanks man, appreciate the kind words
A lot of players treat RPG Campaigns like it is a consumer product. Which is why its important to pick the right players
Choosing players generally makes or breaks a campaign.
You can retrain players, too. If they're willing.
I can't retrain my uncle... Dude's a menace lol
For sure.. I've seen dominant players with submissive players "me too"'ing along. I've seen players wholly dependent upon the GM to "tell the story". Definitely need all the players to be proactive - having ideas based in the good version of "it's what my character would do" (selfless, not selfish). Set each other up, like team sports, to "score". Feed each other, and play off each other.
"Shut up and sell our corporate modules for us, peon."
The approach I take to GM'ing is actually inspired by Minecraft. In Minecraft, wherever you go is the right place to be but you can venture out and discover other... right places to be. I have to admit in the system I'm developing I was calling the GM a Director because I was inspired the Director AI from Left From Dead BUT after watching and agreeing with this vid, I'm going to change it. The words we use and the meanings they convey matter.
Yeah it's the same thing with the white wolf games calling it "story teller". It's a psychological cue to move in the wrong direction
Tour Guide? Show them around the place hopefully give them a memorable experience...
The forever dm is always said as a bad thing. I'm thrilled to dm and set up a game for my friends to play. I get energetic and reinvigorated at the table as I witness the events play out because of the players choices and die rolls.
I do a lot of prep. It's not narrative, I'm not writing a novel. I read my notes and bullet points things that I might do and should do for the next game. I'll check my notes and be reminded that the players slighted a npc and they're back by the npc's shop, he'll definitely want to remind them of it. Stuff like that. I'll read up on spells and monsters, look at the area the gang is & bullet point some locations and people of interest. I'll look at their character sheets and see what their inventory is and give them reminders of items they've forgot about or see that one of them is just overly burdened with stuff and some "polite" people are definitely going to notice that pc and want to help relieve him of his burdens. It's never been work to me.
Yeah, knowing the world and what's in it is valuable time spent and part of the fun.
I've been itching to run a game putting the ideas you put forth to use, they are incredibly intuitive once you free yourself of all of these artifical notions that all the "advice" online tries to convince you is the "correct" way to play and just let the medium do what is most natural. I'm glad someone is actually verbalizing all of this because otherwise the only thing people have to go on is the same regurgitated ideas promoted by influencers and midwits.
As someone who's coming from a D&D background, I'm having a hard time shaking off all of the prepping. Sure, I can wing NPCs and situations, but creating an interesting puzzle or dungeon does take me some time. There may be some GMs out there that can improvise all that, but I'm not that good.
That's why I'm looking forward to Vampires 5ed. I'm still prepping (creating the NPCs & relationships) but it just feels so easier than D&D.
No grand finish, no main villain, no plot. Just create a city and let your players experience it.
It's like you said in the video - I'm actually looking forward to our first session, bringing all of my creations to life and seeing how they do with the players.
100% agree - I stopped creating 'story arcs' a long time ago. My creative process is very, very different now: I essentially just make a sandbox of a world, drop my players in and react to what they do. Love the way you detailed how to play immersive villains - I have played my current major villain exactly as you describe, and I don't believe I've ever presented a character in a game that my players hate more. Every action they take is fuck over over my villain, they are so absolutely emotionally invested in the narrative that I don't have to write anything, their actions are more than enough material to play off of.
this video is entirely correct, if you disagree with it you need to reconsider what you are doing at the table.
Or read the Oxford dictionary, lol
To each his own, my guy, there is no "one correct way" to GM.
Personally, planning a narrative, thinking about "what is going to happen next", and trying to predict the PCs' actions, is how I get excited to run my games.
I prefer this Narrative focused approach, because without some form of a pre-planned story, or even a vague conception of one, I just feel lost. The story gives me direction. It makes me care. It gives me context.
And if things don't go the way I planned or expected, and the players really want to take things in a different direction, I am generally happy to change or completely rewrite my story to fit what they find interesting.
You can say that I am wrong if you want, but if I enjoy preparing for my games, and my players enjoy playing in my games, then what's it to you?
Also, the idea that focusing on creating NPCs as real/interesting characters is gonna help prevent burn-out is hilarious to me. Creating good NPCs with their own backstory, personality, and goals, can be just as tedious and time consuming and preparing a narrative. Especially if you are playing a WoD game, and have to create 50-100 characters, each with their own sheet, and then figure out the relationships between them, lol. That's an insane amount of work.
Neither way is "wrong", each has its strengths and weaknesses, up to you which one you want to use.
I'm glad I've never watched critical roll. I usually treat my npcs and villains as if they were my own characters rather than props from a movie.
Dude. Is it weird to think of those characters as though they were like my own children? I often can't help but write my antagonists as thoroughly disaffected idealists, as if they were the black-pilled mass shooters that I failed to prevent from turning to evil. If you think about it, what kind of shit drives people to do something like make a deal with the devil for extreme power? Why do people turn to the dark side? Sure, there are psychos out there, but it's usually just that people are tired of whatever pain they're experiencing, and they've got nobody there to help them through it, so they turn to things nobody should turn to. I couldn't imagine treating somebody like that as a prop. It would kill me.
When I shifted for low prep GM'ing like this I had a lot more fun and was just as surprised by what happened in the game as the players were, now I come up with a general table setting for the scenario, flesh out the most important NPC's in my head, and then lean on random tables and my players ideas for the rest because even when I was over prepping, I liked the ideas that I had at the table more than any I had during prep.
Exactly! It's easier, more fun, *and* the ideas are *better*
The story afterward is always more interesting than what would have been planned
@@blacklodgegames And that is where the actual storytelling is, after the game!
Excellent video! Good game masters are fundamentally counterpunchers!
Gents, this just might be one of your magnum opuses. This video perfectly distills EVERYTHING I’ve felt about the hobby for the past year. Such good stuff. I’m gonna send this to my friends and plead with them to watch it.
Thank you!
As a Forever DM(and liking it). This is spot on! The less prep I am making, the more fun I am having. Let your players surprise you. Give them interesting situations, and let the characters decide what path they're taking. This removes the risk of burnout and the feeling of ''burden''. Prepping for hours encounters, maps and plot points is absolutely useless. You only need concepts, cool NPCs and situations.
FREEDOM! Learn it now...we know the way.
Well said Matt.
Thanks!
Thank you so much for the advice. I used to stress heavily about my games. Now I'm pretty lax and love to just roll with whatever happens. This video helps put it into perspective so well. 😃
Great stuff guys! What I mainly struggle with now is just trying to figure out what the goals of all these npcs the players are interacting with actually are long-term and whether or not they can succeed or fail. Just because there are so many now!
Work on 1 or 2 NPCs at a time, no worries. And if it comes down to it, you can always roll for it. Happy gaming, brother!
0:41 Damned good question. Am I not also playing the game when I'm running the enemies in an encounter and throwing dice?
6:18 Yeah, just like I thought.
11:58 'Why won't the players follow up on my plot hook I gave them REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!' Yeah. Big true.
You guys have been instrumental in my own framing of my creative process as a setting designer and game master.
Glad to hear it
Great take gentlemen, great video as always. I'm guilty of being that Over-prepping GM who had to map out every little detail to feel comfortable at the table. I'm the GM that got burned out and let campaigns die because I wasn't excited about it anymore.
I've been changing my way of GM'ing over the years towards something like this and I'm happy to see videos talking about this kind of stuff. It helps to hear others talking about something I've just been mulling over in my head.
Keep up the great work, and congratulations on the kickstarter, I am your 601st backer. Cannot wait to see the finished product!
@@Arclight84 thank you!
I feel ya on that. After running Lost Mines I wanted to turn into a hex crawl that kept the main arch available, but not required and used a lot of other 3rd party material to try and populate. Even that became too much. The one WotC adventure arch I ran, Avernus, I hated the most, lol.
Now I'm attempting to create my own "world" and focusing in one area and will work out from there. I still have that need to build up societies and such to for my vision of the world, which still takes a lot of work. I think it is from getting into Rolemaster worldbuilding back in the late 80s and early 90s, lol.
My biggest issue is that I can't find a system that does what I want it to do, so I'm also fiddling with the 5E rules to make it more what I want it to be. I do like rules heavy to start and then tweaking (or ignoring) those rules as we play, instead of making rules up at the table and not being able to arbitrate those rules consistently (and I see that issue across the board with the popular rules light systems now).
Truthfully, I get more enjoyment out of tweaking the rules and system than actually playing sometimes, lol.
Right on the fucking money. I talked about this myself, the director/storyteller/player fluffer mindset is so corrosive to the hobby. Lynch clips are perfect.
Great video as always!
Thanks trill!
I like that you didn't use the word "community".
He said fluffer, lol
Lynch is a director and storyteller...
100% Not knowing what is going to happen next, playing to discover along side the players and letting things unfold organically is the joy of DMing!
Shame only tiny minority of players will experience this.
Don't set up quests, don't plan out scenes. Create factions and NPC's. give them goals and tools. If you give them some complexity, not even you can guess how the NPC will react to your players and you get to slip into their shoes.
Reactive players wait for something exciting to happen. Proactive players make something exciting happen.
100% agree, the only thing I would add is giving the player characters tools to (over time) build up a faction of their own if they want to do so. I don’t know of many games that even attempt this, so I have written my own rules for it. The reason for it is so that players are not stuck as individuals working against factions, but they can actually set long term goals to become just as powerful as the factions they are surrounded by and choose how they want to compete with those factions.
Long term goals set by the players themselves and actionable by the players in the game world (as in supported by the game mechanics) makes the GMs life far easier as it takes the burden off them to come up with conflicts, plots, etc.
This is my favorite bit of advice. Make the setting interesting. Make the characters compelling. Let the players make the choice of who to pursue.
The thing is that you need proactive players for this to work. Sometimes you get a group that is just not proactive at all and waits for you to drop something in their lap. They're basically playing Bilbo and waiting for a bunch of dwarves and a wizard to physically drag them on an adventure.
Plans are useless, but planning is essential. There is nothing wrong with outlining a narrative, as long as you are willing to abandon it if/when the players go "off script", and start a outlining a new one.
That said. I agree, with what you said about proactive players, however some players like being reactive - especially the heroic types. You can't save the world from the undead horde if the undead horde isn't coming. No, in that case, you need to become the undead horde, and not everyone is going to be into that.
I made this same argument in a response to a RPG Storyteller tuber's video and he replied that it was just semantics, lol.
The last defense of somebody with no arguments
I actually like prepping. BUT I only prep week to week BASED ON WHAT MY PCs want to do - which changes from week to week.
Over the past weekend I'm taking a different approach to my game. I have my bullet points, however I just leave my players tell the story and I fit my bullet points around them as it unfolds. I like the mind set of a director looking through a lens and describing the PCs world l. I'm looking at it as Improv Directing. Just recently read the Mothership gm guide and that got me going approaching the planning with a simplistic nature.
As a GM of 30+ years of experience, this is hands down the most useful and important video I have ever seen.
Thank you so much for this video. I really appreciate your advise and your calrifications.
Thank you for watching!
Thats right BLG! I feel your on the money , full discretion i've only gm around 25 sessions, all of them in Past few years, but played in around 70+ sessions over the past 4 years, but yeah anyway in my few years of experience THATS RIGHT BLG!!!
8:35 "Let go of the future..." Such good advice here Matt. I completely agree. No more scripts, just roleplay.
srsly this is the best advice for GMs i've ever heard. "YOu get to play as the villians" >:D
While I do still enjoy the directing style of DMing to a degree, I will say I had one DM who did exactly what you talked about where he just created a world and threw us in there to do whatever we want and discover a story with us. It felt like a completely different game and was vastly more enjoyable
This desire to be more like film is the bane of interactives hobbies like role-playing games and video games. This pursuit of being more cinematic is such a misguided mindset that just turns the hobby into an inferior version of movies. The main strength of tabletop and video games is interactivity, but a lot of hacks miss that.
Emergent gameplay is the best thing about TTRPGs and video games.
I whole-heartedly agree with you.
I dont what a rollercoaster-ride . I want a real adventure , being in the action and interact everything that i wanna interact my own way and not be placed on certain Locations and have combat after combat after combat after combat.
Not all hobbies and media should be passive . I wanna have activity to spice up and enjoy things with their consequences and wild results.
Agree on your points and this is what I teach new GMs or players who aspire to run their own games as GMs. Don't plot but make scenarios is what I say to them.
Also, a good meme example of how a ttrpg session goes is the drawing of the horse wherein only the first part where the GM has full control of the narrative can be meticulous and well drawn but when you say "What do you want to do" is when the stick figure of the horse drawing happens
A great encapsulation of the topics of so many streams. Cheers!
I like that you reference David Lynch so much. He's my favorite director. I like his explanation of Happy Accidents, that sometimes something just happens that no one was expecting and that takes the story in a whole new direction. RPGs allow for a lot more Happy Accidents than movies.
THANK YOU! I am not a Storyteller, The players are.
GMing is like Rick Sanchez running the store where he removes curses from the Devil's items that people get at the "Needful Things" store: half an hour in I just want to start pouring gasoline all over everything and saying, "Okay everybody out, I just got bored."
I refer to running a game as 'Interactive Pretend.' As the DM, I set the scene and run the NPCs and the players play their characters. I have an over-arching plotline but I have only the merest clue how the players will get there. I set a Point A and a probable endpoint, but the rest is more like guidelines. I have hard and fast rules (Level 2 Wizards can't cast Fireballs), but I also play fast and loose with a lot of things. I love good movies and I'd like my games to look like fun films.
Your video hit this point very well...better than I think I've ever seen. Well done!
This is one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard for GMs of all experience levels. It feels like a bulb went off in my head.
These videos of yours on the topic of being a gamemaster are so illuminating to me. I feel so stupid for all the time Ive wasted in that “director” mindset and never really going anywhere.
I'm playing with my friends, only one of them has played D&D and tabletop at all. The rest of us, have not. Always wanted to do it, ended up being a GM for a Cyberpunk campaign. An original one I made up, I am no writer, neither of us are. Simple objectives they are working to, but because of the nature of the setting, I am able to fill it with lots of criminal and seedy stuff for them to do in between jobs the fixer has for them. Sort of making it up as we go along. I have rough outlines that I am filling in, but because the players can make choices, choices I didn't account for.....I have to keep it loose, it's fun, as things happen that nobody necessarily knows what to expect.
And it still makes sense and is coherent.
@@blacklodgegames Yeah, we're all having fun. Things are working as you'd expect in that world, so I say it's going well. We all enjoy it when we play.
As much as you might want to blame Matthew Mercer or Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis, the blame lays with you and me. We are the ones that bought into this and enabled this bad idea for years.
to be honest, I don't know how to run game with pre-written dialogues or other stuff you mentioned. But reallu preping bad guys actions is the main thing? Becasue for me if I'm running fucking dungeon, I need to prepare fucking dungeon. This is the problem for me, bacasue I want it to be fresh, interesting and fun. Not another sewers with 2d6 cr1s and 1d4 cr2s. And yes, I can take some egsisting map or even whole thing - still need to make it my own. So, still preping is not the same as the players.
The best modules also follow this, giving you as a GM a bunch of NPCs and locations, and then a hook to pull your players in. I think a lot of modern GMs just don't read quality modules, or they would already know to do this.
My prep is like 15 minutes lmao if i had to spend hours prepping I'd go play an MMO
That looks right, Feels like what i'm doing right now.
The GingerPocalypse is Upon Us! 😉🎉
Love it! Boiled down a lot of the problems with "prepping" by simply saying it is the wrong mentality and tools.
I"m a big fan of "emergent story from gameplay" (play to find out) and immersion into the character, the setting, the experience.
As a GM I've got that reactive style, being referee and person who puts up the appropriate conflict/content for the situation. One of my favorite lines regarding players and their characters is from Fate Core: "competent, capable people leading dramatic lives".
The party are the stars of the show, and everything they do while interacting with the game world is where the story comes from. When the party is reactive, instead of proactive, is when they lose their power over the narrative and become interchangeable with any other random PC.
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@Runeslinger has been doing an interesting series about immersion. It is very much related and well worth a look/listen!
its been nice seeing this channel grow. I think the tabletop space is having their Neo moment where so many on the farm are waking up to pull the throbbing proboscis of cooperate mainstream entertainment from their gullet. Its okay to disagree with super popular channels and mouthpieces. I am someone who learned a lot from Mercer, but appreciate that some channels are courageous enough to poke fun at the overly produced and artificially emotional session his group performs. Because healthy disagreement is actually VERY good for this space. Every great system came out of a disagreement.
Thank you Ginger and Steve.
I thought this was about game Dev's cause that's true for making video games
Big agree. I like linear video games as much as I like sandbox games, but holy shit I don't care about the 20 minute cutscene you are using to cover the loading time
For my second ever session as a GM, I've created a google doc with "Chapters" and a compact bullet point list of key things like the players home being attacked, a particular heist I'm going to try and get them into, etc. I'm not expecting everything to go exactly as I had planned, I just wanted to mark down what I believed was key to the story I want to tell, and then let the players approach it in whatever way they feel, even if that means fucking off to do something else.
I really want to work off the philosophy of less is more in terms of prep work though, and even this doc is full of info despite trying to keep it to just a sentence per bullet point. Should I just ditch the doc and wing it?
There is nothing wrong with thinking of a good premise and considering how the world might react to player actions. As long as you treat it *as* a premise and not a railroad, then that's ok. Your players goals will shift over time and often during the session itself, so always be thinking in terms of those goals and the goals of your NPCs.
There is nothing wrong with writing important info down, just don't treat it like a script
Also, use random encounters and generators. They are there to be a prod to your imagination in the moment and can add a LOT to a game.
But those are also not gospel, and if you roll something that makes no sense, don't be bound to it.
@@blacklodgegames Thanks 🙂
As an absolute beginner GM I'd love to see a video about when and how to use random encounters and generators. And when not to use them or discard the results. Perhaps a small section in one of your streams?
@@egg465 From the most recent ruleslite systems I've been looking into, they use random dungeon encounters whenever the party is doing something other than combat or RP with an NPC. Basically, if they are rummaging through chests and bookcases or searching for traps is when you want to roll for a random encounter.
Milestone leveling was one of the most odious results of the GM-as-storyteller mentality.
Every project comes with different objectives. They are multiple ways someone can game-master in order to fulfill certain functions adapted to specific projects. Take nothing someone says for granted, never be dogmatic about anything, just be aware of what you are doing, how you are doing it and why. Wanna be a tyrant, then own it. Wanna be a randomizing rule-addict dungeon master, then own it. Wanna be an art director, then own it. Wanna be an open world everything open ended improviser, then own it. As long as you are aware of your project and your players are in on it then there is a million ways to play. But to orient oneself one needs to understand what is PURE roleplay, what is unique to roleplay, what hinders it, what fosters it. Don't be idealistic and think that there is only this or that that matters. That stuff is maleable. You can hybridize to your fancy. You can purify to your fancy. Just know what's the PROJECT about.
I rarely prep anything, if at all. I have ideas and points of interest, then we just go. I build the GM stuff along the way. The players create and insert. The rules decide how it all shakes out.
The most “directing” I perform is clarifying moments as a GM to players, in the case I may not have portrayed a tense moment clearly. For example, if the PCs are talking to a lord and they’re edging towards catastrophic trouble, I will ensure they know that if they continue, it will go badly, because the character knows this. If they push things towards catastrophe, it’s not a “game over”. They get to do what they want, but after the smoke clears, the narrative’s changed, hopefully with the PCs surviving.
I love when the players bite on something that’s not a thread. I’ll often lean into it, improvising something for them. I love being challenged, painted into a corner, then seeing what results.
My DMing got so much better once I realized this about a year ago. Before, I really did try to run each session like a movie and plan out 3 act arcs and stuff. It was impossible and grueling. Now I actually have fun and run way more games and my players have way more fun too.
I have been a GM for almost 40 years. Millions of apps that create better maps, better scenes, better Journaling, etc. That is the problem. RPGs are becoming a videogame with animated tokens, special effects and absolutely no room for imagination. Modern rules are also more streamlined and many of them now focused on narrative and not rules themselves. Quicker pace. It is a nightmare.
Cameo by my queen Ginny thank you kings
Funny, I was just reminded about Kubrick his obsessive attention to detail. In the documentary A life in pictures, the actor Sydney Pollack, you showed at the beginning, and Tom Cruise tell how long it took to film one scene. It took Kubrick more than three weeks just to shoot a scene of just a few minutes.
My favorite part of GMing is when the player surprise me with something i didn't think about. I'm like a bad parent, I almost let them have what they want because the ride of following that thread delights me.
Alright, all well and good. How do I create an adventure using this style. Do I just make the main forces of the world and act like them along with locations that have a quest of their own ?
The video below is a great starting point:
ruclips.net/video/Qjv3JZXduMM/видео.html
Focus on building the factions and NPCs in your world. Give them conflicting motivations and goals. By helping or hindering any one of them, your players will get caught up in organic drama.
Take the PCs out of it. What are the other people in the world doing? Why are they doing it? How do others in the world feel about it? What actions do they take in response? Now add the PCs into the mix and let it play out.
To be honest, that is an easy mistake to make because a large corpus of the most popular rpg systems in the past decades implies that the role of GM must be approached as a storyteller or director, there are systems where the GM is called one of these, and the game uses story beats and scenes and chapters in its language and rules.
I am just simply too lazy to prepare that much amd I realized some time ago that I only need to do is to build up a setting, characters, motivations, and a relationship network between these, and things will fall into places.
But that also made me really frustrated when I am asked to gamemaster a prewritten campaign, because I always felt that advrnture modules and campaign books focus on the wtong things. A bunch of battle maps, statblocks, and descriptions make it look like content, but I would be more interested in deep character details, motivations, drives, personality traits and such. Instead these are usually the most neglected parts of the prewritten modules. I understand that the BBEG wants power, or destroy the world, but why? I am not saying they must be nuanced, but they need some base level character to work as a character in a classic sense.
I only started doing tabletop a few weeks ago. Before that I was making up maps for players to be in. Cyberpunk is what we are playing and while I know campaigns exist out there....I never once took a look at them. My first game and I made up a motivation for the players, and some smaller build ups towards it. There are the gangs, locations, the dodgy characters and all that. I have written nothing for them, not one line of dialogue. I thought about a "quest" list, but scrapped it. I have in my head the basics of what they would want but it's already happened that players and NPC's alike have failed and succeeded in their goals. In the last game I never once thought they would end up being car salesmen for a little bit, but they did.
All they have are some objectives and all they have to do is get there, and when it comes to the side stuff with all the NPC's and whatnot, well, we all just have to deal with it. They are playing the game after all, it is up to them how they play it and what their characters do...well, aside from the dice rolls but even then they have to play that out when it all goes another way.
10/10 comment. Games are designed around a bad philosophy and people wonder why they can't make it more than six sessions before it all falls apart.
@@XegethraHoly cow, I wish I were as based as you when I started out. I only started running games more open in my 3rd year.
2:30 If I am not wrong, Stanley Kubrick also edited his films long time after their release. One anecdote I remember someone telling on RUclips (Indie Film Hustle, maybe?) or reading it online that Stanley Kubrick edited Dr. Strangelove years after the release to perfect it. He did it on a ship.
Excellent
Great video differentiating the essence between a hobby and entertainment. If you're getting burnout from your RPG sessions, you're doing it wrong. I LOVE going into a session knowing there are multiple possible paths my players could go down and no idea which one (or ones) they'll choose.
I was finding myself disagreeing with you for the most part until you got to the sweet spot at 9:35 where you talked about NPC motivations. Then we started aligning more. Predetermined stories are a pain in the neck for both the players and the GM, prewritten dialogue feels like a complete waste of time, and even storyboarding can only take you so far as a GM until your players jump off the storyboard and you have to rework that process. I do agree that these sorts of efforts are especially likely to cause burnout, because they are focused on the wrong goals.
However, there can still be a heck of a lot of work involved in preparation. I think it is all optional work and fun work depending on your style as a GM. The preparations that sandbox GMs do for each campaign are many, but often reusable across campaigns and sessions:
- World building - places, peoples, and factions
- Faction relationships and events - how NPCs are connected (allies, enemies or neutral onlookers) and the events that are happening outside of the scope of play.
- Cosmos building - gods and planes of existence
- Map building - just as aids for the players to visualize a place where roleplaying, exploration, and/or combat takes place (I admire people that enjoy creating 3D models of places, but it isn't for me as my campaigns usually aren't even 33% combat)
- Character arc possibilities - identifying individual hooks for each player's character to either pull on or not, to explore their background and future more fully. These are tossed in when the opportunity arises, but again, are completely optional.
I never script what the player characters do, because I prefer a sandbox style of campaign, where almost anything can happen. Most, if not all, of the above CAN BE foregone (especially if you purchase someone else's setting and/or modules), but your world will be much less immersive if you don't expend some effort in advance. For an experienced GM, the benefit of "letting go" is not completely avoiding preparation, but rather being able to focus on the important things, often just before they are needed.
Great content! (even when I don't completely agree)
@@rickrogers8735 most campaign prep for me is done prior to play. Lots of thinking about the world and factions.
@@blacklodgegames Totally valid of course. One of the lessons I learned early on is to keep the details quite sparse in my early prep. For example, leaving space for another NPC of some importance in a faction can allow you to tie them into the background of one of the PC's, or have them interact based on the PC's actions. It gives you room to collaborate with the players even more. This was really helpful for me. But it's not necessary; you can also just rework one of the NPCs you've created to have different motivations and relationships.
Great vid.
Question about one-shots: in your experience is it better to still let the players create their own PC goals, or because of the limited time is it better to give them a simple goal (e.g. via pre-gens) so they can get going? Thanks.
One-shots are absolutely a different thing. I run my campaigns by letting the players make the decisions. But for one-shots, you only have a few hours.
I tell my players the basic premise and what kind of characters might fit into it. You can even go as far as telling them what they're going to try to do and why, and I don't have a problem with that because it's a one-shot.
Now, you can have more open one-shots, but it's harder because of time constraints. In all cases, make sure you set expectations with the players.
Great question, btw.
Nailed it.
I would love a follow-up on how to create and understand a world to be able to run a game like this.
@@TyboGames check out video about soap Opera structure from a month or two ago, it's much more explicit about what to prep. Make characters and factions with overlapping motivations and you'll have a much more organic and useful structure that can be used in the moment at the table
ruclips.net/video/Qjv3JZXduMM/видео.html
@@blacklodgegames Just watched it, amazing advice thank you
@@TyboGames you're welcome, and thank YOU for watching!
Pacing is actually an important factor. If a game drags on, players can end up fatigued as well, especially when in stressful situations in-game. It's a form of catharsis going through another's conflict, but recently a player of mine was method acting a rather normal man picking up traumas, paranoia, and hatred in a war, and it ate away at him for far too long. If I'd paced the game faster, not dragged on with long roleplay and living life in the situation, he wouldn't have burned out so hard on the character, his own words.
After 9 years in the hobby, I've only been in a full-send multi year dnd game a single time, and that was a snail's pace game where singular dungeons lasted longer out of character than in-character, counting long rests. Burnout can easily easily hit both sides of the aisle, especially in serious roleplay heavy games.
As for writing and direction, the hobby's nothing if not infested by people running multiple modules a week for 30-40 dollars a player each session. As I try to get people further into the hobby or explore other game systems, it's mostly or ONLY paid GMs running modules. That's the ttrpg space nowadays lmao
hahah based pfp
In my experience online, pay to play players are generally more invested and appreciative than the folks who play for free.
@TheTerrainWizard I'd argue the opposite though for the GMs commodifying the hobby and running like 5 games a week.
No investment save for wanting money, a homemade cooked meal turned into mcdonalds drive-through. Hanging out with friends as a form of relaxation turned into a transaction you've gotta stress over to make worthwhile while the GM just sits back and counts out green.
When a disagreement happens, or serious game conflict happens, the transactional nature of the game similarly gets in the way. Will you try to convince the player who wants to bring his op dandwiki build or simply argues over simple rules, or will you consider the green and just let it slide for the detriment of the whole table. When the dice come down, or an 'are you sure you want to do that' is accepted and a character death is on the plate, will the paid GM really do what is natural or summon elven cavalry to save them at the last second because a player could leave on character death, or a party ($120 a week minus tax) could stop playing after a TPK?
Not to mention ofc, people running multiple modules a week won't care enough about singular ones to deal with the kind of inventive thoughts and Immergent storytelling that comes from the players' involvement and just keep forcing them on the cookie cutter railroad, which for new or inexperienced players can be their ONLY impression on the hobby: Being put down for playing the game.
The pace lies in the players and not in the adventure itsself . In linear Videogames its actually needed , in movies too but not in TTRPGs that are about exploration and discovery .
Pacing cant be set up on everything because not every concept is thought out to be timed from itsself and requires action to be progressed . Especially TTRPGs are more action-based-progression and not a narrative one or otherwise we got a musical with dice as decoration.
I never prepare my campaigns beyond the tokens, monster stat blocks and the maps. The rest is all improv. I have a beginning and a vague idea of what the end would be but what's between the two is all up to the players. I make up quests, npcs (most besides some key ones) and items on the spot. And honestly, me and my players are having so much fun
Once again, you lads knock it out of the park.
Thank you! Let's talk Broken Empires soon!
My approach to GMing is the same. However, I'd hesitate to declare that it's the "right way" to GM and that other ways are "wrong".
Great stuff, gents.
The disciplines of game design and literature and cinema are at their most useful to the GM when they're used _in the service_ of you being the Game Master, not when they hoodwink you into trying to be, literally, a director or writer. You can take very, _very_ valuable things from them but if you let them take over the game they will grind against the nature of play. You'll either come to hate the dice when they don't do what you want, or become a serial fudge-roller. It's a bad time either way.
More and more, I'm not even trying to anticipate what my players will do. All I'm focused on is fleshing out the setting and NPCs, generating some interesting curios for them to (potentially) stumble across, and assets (art of the monsters and NPCs, music, soundscapes.) I stopped handwaving overland travel and am now using a series of d100 encounter tables. If they're on a main road, low chance of monsters but high chance of NPCs. If they're in a dangerous, remote location, reverse it. Being free of needing to painstakingly account for every variable in an encounter is such a weight lifted; sometimes all you need is "swamp setting, moss sage riding giant toad" and you can really make some magic happen. I used to be Ginny Di, but now I am BLG 😁
This is great content.
Unsurprisingly for those who know, I was like number 666.
Very clear presentation of the ideas, gents~
This is literally the only rpg channel worth following.
I ran a FitD game, no prep, and still got burnt out. Not prepping is not a cure all for burn out and the responsibilities you have as a GM. Do many GMs need to loosen their hold on the narrative? Yes. Can a lot of prep be wasted time? Yes. But, depending on your game and choice of system, a certain amount of prep is neccesary. IS GMing a job? ... Yeah, it kinda is. It requires more effort than being a player, and you have willingly taken on a responsibility to the players of your game. (This IS a two-way street, and your players also have some responsibility to you, but with greater power comes greater responsibility. Even if all else were equal [it's not], if any player decided they didn't want to show up for a week, it would just mean a missing player. The game is dependant on the GM being there to continue). And if you are not getting the same amount of energy back from running the game than you are putting into running it, it doesn't matter what you are or are not doing, you are going to burn out. And that's nothing to be ashamed about. That's why it's ironic to me that you started with that Matt Mercer clip, because that's fundamentally what it's about, and respecting that.
Basically, all this video seems to amount to is "Stop wasting effort prepping GMing, you and won't burn out." Which is false. Which I think is a shame, because you make some good points about leaning into the strengths of the medium, but it's lost in the grandstanding against a strawman "Director" (Which, there are plenty of people who want exactly what you are railing against. There's a reason Adventure modules sell). Not to mention, yeah, you are sort of a director. Sure, you aren't a movie director. But you are 100% the primary (a good RPG game is to much of a collaborative effort to say only) director of the game. You have the primary control over the tone of the world. How light or dark it is, how comedic, etc. It is typically the GM who decides when to move on from a scene, and establishes what the next scene is. It is the often GM, not the rules, who decides what those outcomes of those random dice mean (particularly outside combat). And many players WANT a more curated experience.
TL;DR This video's got some good in it, but to me it feels lost in shaming GMs who aren't GMing the "right" way.
I got burned out reading this comment
Great advice, thank you 🥰
I really wish the Shucked Oyster wasn't a brothel (or even a casino) because my players have zero interest in that sort of thing. I hope next time you guys do a town or something.
It's understandable, we knew it wouldn't be to everyone's taste, but the brothel is mostly just a premise and jumping off point. It's not about sex or prurient interests outside of the comedic premise.
Our next project is much more serious in tone, and the one after that will be a follow up to the Shucked Oyster, but focused on an evil faction/region to fight and get caught up in. The barrier of the brothel/casino aspect won't be there.
But we wanted to follow this idea to it's conclusion.
@@blacklodgegames I don't blame you for wanting to follow up on your ideas. You need to go where inspiration takes you, but I'm looking forward to something more conventional.
@@k9ine999 🫡🫡🫡
It doesn’t have to be a brothel. It can be anything you want. And with the miracle of AI, it’s easy as a few moments.
Critical roll and it’s consequences have been a disaster for RPGs.
Yes, 3-5x'ing the number of people interested in RPG is so much of a "disaster".
No shade on the two new guys, but what happened to the dude from the old videos?
He grew a beard and went bald.
@@blacklodgegames What happened to the childlike wonder in your eyes!? 😰
@@yukiminsan 🤣
@@yukiminsanMan-made horrors beyond your comprehension
I just improvise. Whenever i make something i think is clever, they dismantle it. So i stopped preparing. I just roll down the hill like avalanche. I try to sweep them and bury them under the rocks named fun and dirt named immersion with power called creative bullshitting.
0:39 _"Why does being a GM feel like a job now?"_
Because Dungeon & Dragons 5th edition is a lazy and half-finished product. The worst edition on DMs, no wonder some dubbed it the "ANTI-DM edition".
No matter what you do, no matter what other advise you get, no matter what "smart techniques" you use. Whatever insightful and wise advice the video says to you, none of it will change the fact you are working with an inherently lackluster product.
The whole group are the storytellers. The GM is just the lead and guide.
@@PatrickOMulligan wrong
@blacklodgegames how so?
Would you prefer the term storycreator?
This video is very inspiring and I can see myself in some of the points. But I really need some more information to understand the concept. How do you prep? How are you going to run a session if you haven't spent any time detailing npcs, monsters, balance encounters, and select some items for the players to find? The concept presented sounds very appealing but I don't understand how to implement it
We have a video on this called "stop running sandboxes, start running soap operas". Developing a region in your setting by filling it with NPCs with conflicting motivations and goals goes a long way toward eliminating misdirected session prep.
If playing a d&d like game, relying on random tables and game systems can go a long way to generating enough of a prod to the imagination to keep the game going without massive prep
GMs are writers and storytellers. Every week I write up descriptions. During play, I collaboratively tell a story with the players. But I do agree that GMs are not directors ordering the players what to do and how to do it, but they do provide everything in the world outside the players choices (set the scenes).
Burnout does not only come from trying to 'movie' your game. It comes from running a game and not being able to come up with good content for your players (and you) to enjoy. The characters get tiresome and cliché. Higher level characters make challenging them very difficult. But mostly it comes from feeling unappreciated. Players argue and get frustrated, talk back, seem uninterested, but then say thanks for running the game when they leave. Things rarely go as planned. One thing I have noticed that when I DM, is that I am always engaged. No matter what is going on, I need to pay attention. All these add up and can really wear on you.
Preach!
I understand the freedom of creativity as a DM as you said, but why using Matthew Mercer for the thumbnail? Is he an example of 'director' DM?, if he is then maybe i should take notes of what not and do from his play in Critical role.
He certainly fits the bill
Because of how CR is now a product, not a bunch of friends live streaming their home games, Matt has slowly turned more "director" with his GMing. It's honestly one of the criticisms of their current campaign.
@blade1hunter100 This is actually a fair critique/observation.
I'm certain it wasn't Matt's intention, but he fell for the trap of each campaign having to be bigger and grander than the last.
Campaign 2 really hit the DM sweet spot, so we know he has it in him.
This is the wheey
In the previous podcast video about this topic there was a callout about a false dichotomy between making a story and having a pointless sandbox game. I think this video makes the exact same mistake in the opposite direction - assuming that because a game has an outlined plot means there is no player agency.
In reality there is no pull between these - you can focus your prep on trying to drive a narrative while still giving the full narrative control to the players. The results might mean that you can’t hard prep for more than 1 week or 2 weeks ahead of time. It means that you will constantly reconsider your NPC and villains intentions, actions, and how the party might interact with them in the next session to still deliver a satisfying narrative flow.
It’s not for everyone though, so I’ll avoid the same mistake that both sides of this argument always make, and not present it as some kind of golden mean.
I have done exactly what you describe here and find it less satisfying and more labor intensive. The bigger issue is that story is the wrong concept for thinking about the RPG experience. RPGs happen in the moment and are not subject to "narrative" if you respect the dice and player choices.
Thinking of the GM as author/director etc. is a psychological cue to act against the medium itself.
@@blacklodgegames I’m sorry that was less satisfying for you. I agree it’s more labor intensive. For some, (myself included) that labor is enjoyable in itself and leads to a more satisfying game (I have also tried it both ways).
I again think you’re stuck in a false dichotomy between “narrative” and “role playing”. The players constantly surprise me with their choices, and I’m constantly having to improvise for scenarios I did not explicitly plan for. Nothing about having a plan for where you want to story to go makes it so you have to take away player agency, just as nothing about giving player agency means you can’t prepare for what they might do. These things are not at odds - both are required to some extent, and it’s only if you leave either out entirely that you get into the “bad game” territory.
Inventing and knowing who are my NPCs is fun and achievable, unlike predicting what players will do.
Isn't it the same as identity-driven life vs life of people who's trying to script it as if they control external world events and can account for any future?
I'd rather delegate my god complex to the ambitious and probably evil NPC than overcommit to prep and burnout ever again )
are Lynch clips from behind the scenes of shooting Twin Peaks se3 taken from Twin Peaks: A Limited Event Series or some other bts?
Valuable advice.
I love Matt Mercer as a GM, but sometimes others get a shot, and some of them just don't have what it takes. They try to direct as you said, and it's just not fun to watch. The forced narrative robs the players of free will, and get no real say in all the story defining moments.
Magnificent
Ty king
Great!
Mcdm will take this title personally.