I have learned in almost 19 years of Aikido practice that awareness is really the key to getting better at just about anything. I see it in lower-ranked students the first time they catch themselves in bad posture and make the correction, rather than needing to be guided. I feel it in myself in the same way, even if the “mistakes” are usually more subtle. I catch those mistakes because of years of building awareness. My teacher, with 40+ years of practice, has still finer awareness than me.
It is amazing that there’s so much advice out in the world for Game Masters. A lot of it is really good advice. One must be open to new ideas for prepping, running, and even thinking about one’s game.
But there is just no substitute for practice, and I’ll add to that – awareness.
I think I’m a better GM than I’ve ever been. When I came back to gaming in 2014 I expressed my amazement to my friend William at just how great his D&D setting and game mastering was. He responded that he’s spent the last 10 years (or whatever number of years he said) immersed in gaming, taking in new ideas and playing and just really thinking about it.
Being part of a group of thoughtful gamers and game masters helps build awareness. Sometimes it feels insane how much thought I put into this hobby, but you don’t get better at things by dabbling in them. I took William’s comments to heart, and I’ve immersed myself in the hobby, and that has paid off.
I’m not saying I’m an amazing GM. I’m saying I’m better than I’ve ever been and I credit two things for that.
Practice. You can’t read, listen, or watch your way to improving as a GM. You have to actively GM
Putting real effort into learning, through association with other people who want to improve, which builds awareness of the little victories and mistakes
My friend Greg is creating some macros for use with Mongoose Traveller 2nd Edition on Roll20. He’s shown them to me and a few other players. They are very cool. He has some good reason for wanting to automate some of the functions in his games. My next statements recognize this, and are not a criticism of such efforts.
Online RPG gaming, especially using various Virtual Tabletop Systems like Roll20 (VTTs) is fantastic. It give players the ability to join games with enthusiasts all over the world, and it allowed our game to continue during the pandemic.
I’ve been fiddling around with macros in Roll20 the last few weeks. I feel like in my case they are a waste of my time, and I realized that on a personal level I am opposed to having too much automation in my online sessions.
If you automate everything, I think players will not learn the way the game actually works.
To me, part of the hobby is learning the game. You learn to roll up a character. You learn what your character can do. You learn which dice to roll, and when to roll them, and why. You learn how skills work. You learn how combat works. You learn to use the rules, as given in the rulebook, to figure out what your success rolls are.
As a game master, you learn to build a game using whatever system you are using. You gain a feel for the game by – reading - the - fucking - rules. You create scenarios. You learn to organize your materials in such a way that they work for you.
You play the game and you learn the rules to the point that you barely have to consult the rulebook, and you can play the game and have a great time with pencil, paper, and dice. All the rest becomes add-ons.
So my point?
I think one must be careful with the use of VTTs just like one must be careful with the use of hated AI. If you don’t watch out, all the helpful tools will have reduced your knowledge of the game, and you may become simple consumers of media rather than creative gamers.
Last night we played session 32 of our Classic Traveller Campaign, Into the Void. That’s the link to the session report. I also wrote up some Ref’s Notes for the last two sessions this morning.
I know I tend to go on and on about this, but Traveller and Cepheus Engine, with the 2d6 mechanic and simple but effective rules, make adventure creation and preparation amazingly easy.
Yesterday I needed to prepare the leader of a small Scout base, in case the team should go that way. I rolled some dice for the characteristics, decided to make her a 5-term scout, jotted down her skills and three personal traits, and I was done. No flipping through a massive rulebook for 20 minutes or logging into some online character generator. I knew what I needed for the game and it took me about 3 minutes to write out three or four lines that describe a fully developed NPC for my game.
Sometimes it is fun to really have high “mastery” of complex game systems. Some people really get off on that. It’s what they love. Decades ago I may well have been that person, but I’m not anymore. I want a system that has enough meat on its bones to get the job done, so we’re playing a game and not just “storytelling”, but otherwise gets out of my way.
I sometimes wonder if the complexity of other systems isn’t kind of a crutch for GMs and Players alike.
My other favorite system is GURPS. While you can make GURPS very complex, it need not be that way. I feel like if I ran GURPS more I could probably run it much like I do Traveller.
This is the NPC I created for my Classic Traveller game last session.
The PCs were looking for a hacker. I didn’t have one when they asked, but about 90 seconds later I did. This is the strength of Classic Traveller (and really the other forms of 2s6 RPGs derived from it) for fast and loose improvisational play. Did I roll this NPC up? No. I knew what I wanted, and I’m the GM, so I just wrote it out. Well, lemme think. I did, in fact, roll up his stats and then just decided on the rest. I rolled up six numbers and arranged them as I saw fit. I am the Referee - I can do that.
Tahm Slykk
755B95
Admin-1, Comp-4, Bribery-1, Streetwise-2, Grav-Vehicle-1
Carries a body pistol inside his leather overcoat. Tall, with a high shock of red hair, round lens glasses tinted green, carries a portable electronics kit and computer in a black metal briefcase, with all he needs to hack on-the-go. More gear in his home/shop - the entire floor above a grav-vehicle repair shop. Drives a beat-up looking grav bike that is more than it appears to be (MAY be called the Thunderbolt GreaseSlapper). Tahm is a hacker for hire. He speaks with nervous speed and energy. Older than he looks. There’s no such word as “fail” to Tahm Slykk.
I actually kinda love this character. This is the kind of self-centered but good-natured dirtbag I’d like to play.
I’m not sure, but I think if I was running Sword of Cepheus for a fantasy setting I could create a good NPC just about as quickly. Sure I might need to look up a few spells, but it would be simple.
This is a repost of something I wrote several years ago as I was returning to Traveller, the greatest RPG even created.
As I think back over my early days of gaming and GMing, the memories are flooding back. When I started in 1979, there weren’t hundreds of RPGs. Most of the time my friends and I played D&D, but one guy had the game Traveller, so we played that too. Eventually we all bought the game.
Traveller was great because it was about space, and was really flexible. The basic set came in a box and had 3 little black books of rules. They sold a lot of supplements. I don’t think there was a single illustration in the core set. Something about the books made you feel smart.
The game mechanics had rules for spaceship combat, interstellar commerce, and other cool stuff, but at 15 we mostly just blew stuff up. Get in the spaceship, go to a planet, get drunk, find a weapons dealer, buy some plasma rifles, and start killing. When the Law got on our asses we’d hop in our ship, the Hellfire, and take off, usually destroying more people and ships on the way out of the system. Mass murder and mayhem on a glorious scale.
It helped that our GM 1)just wanted his friends to be happy and 2)didn’t seem to have actually read any of the rules beyond character generation. His answer to any question of skill was “roll two dice”. We had no idea what we were rolling for, and neither most likely did he, but we all had fun and that’s all that mattered. Clearly, we never got bogged down in game mechanics…heh heh.
Our GM got into gaming really early. Every Wednesday night he went to this huge gaming meetup at Richland Junior College, here in Dallas. He was friends with lots of older gamers. One of them was a computer programmer. He gave our GM this gigantic hex map, with planets dotting it. Each planet had a number, and there was a computer printout on which the characteristics of each planet were given — randomly generated by a program this guy had written. Pretty cool. We were in awe.
As we got older, and better game systems were released, we tended to gravitate toward the new stuff. Hero Games’ Champions was a prime example. Flexible, great combat system, etc. Game Designer’s Workshop, the authors of Traveller, have continued to release new editions of the game, but we never played them. We stuck to the original when we wanted hot space action. There was something really cool about that little box, with the 3 original books, and maybe having a couple of the supplemental books and a bunch of dice crammed in there. It was stripped down roleplaying. It was all on you and the GM.
