Welcome to Gnome Stew’s Introduction to Game Mastering series. If you’re new to GMing, this series is for you — and even if you’re an old hand, you might pick up a trick or two.

In writing this series, I assume you have some familiarity with gaming terms and jargon. If you see a term you don’t know, just hit up Gnome Stew’s RPG Glossary.

Building Blocks

In the first Intro to Game Mastering article, we covered the golden rule — the foundation of all great GMing. But apart from knowing that rule, what do you actually need to become a game master?

You need these seven basic things:

• Creativity
• An RPG
• Players
• Rules Knowledge
• An Adventure
• A Bit of Planning
• Confidence

This article will cover the first four; Part 3 of the series will cover the other three.

Creativity

Roleplaying is fundamentally a creative hobby, and you’ll need every ounce of your creativity as a GM.

Creativity plays a role in writing adventures, dreaming up campaign and story arc plots, creating maps and other props, bringing to life memorable NPCs, and handling the many, many enjoyable curve balls your players will throw you during play.

You may not think of yourself as a creative person, but if you’re a gamer, you read Gnome Stew, and you’re considering GMing, you are a creative person — and you can become a GM.

An RPG

If you’re going to run a game, you need a game to run. The right game meets one or both of these criteria:

• You’re jazzed about the prospect of running it
• You’re already familiar with the rules

If either of those statements applies to the game you’re considering, it’s a good choice; if they both apply, it’s a great choice.

There’s also a third criteria that’s important, but slightly less so for your very first game:

• Your prospective players are excited about playing it

Once you have some GMing experience under your belt, the third factor — player excitement level — is the single most important consideration. (For more on that topic, check out Player Buy-In Trumps GM Interest.) But right now, it takes a backseat to the other two factors — provided your players aren’t actually opposed to your game choice, of course.

Chances are, you’ve got a game in mind already that sounds fun to run; if not, give some thought to what you’ve played, and what you enjoyed most. Games in that vein are likely to be worth considering. (If you’ve never played an RPG before, starting out as a GM is a challenging route, but certainly not impossible. You’re going to have to extrapolate from some of the tips in this article, though.)

Once you’ve picked a game, buy it. You need a copy of the rules to bone up on before the game, and to reference during play; borrowing a friend’s book won’t cut it for long. If any other books look useful for your first few sessions, buy them too — but don’t feel any obligation to read them all.

You’ll also need dice and a scratch pad; I recommend a watch (to keep tabs on pacing) and a reference tool of some sort — the inside of a GMing screen, a quickstart rules sheet, or even just a list of rules you put together in Excel.

Players

With any luck, you’re already part of a gaming group — but that’s not a given. If you are, then as long as your players aren’t dicks, they’ll be glad to have another potential GM in the group and will understand that your first foray into GMing isn’t going to be perfect.

You should feel comfortable GMing for your first group. If you don’t feel comfortable GMing with your current group, consider why that is; they might be receptive to talking through your concerns. (We’ll get to this in the Confidence section of the next article.)

If you don’t already have a group, welcome to a situation you will find yourself in many times throughout your GMing career. You do have a leg up on the average gamer, though: you want to GM, and it’s nearly always easier for a GM to find a group than it is for a player.

There are many ways to find players, but the three most common and successful are:

• Through a player-matching site like NearbyGamers (where my group found our most recent new player). I wrote a pretty comprehensive article about this topic a few years back: Ways to Find RPG Players; Googling “rpg find players” will turn up lots of options.
• On a major RPG messageboard. RPGnet and Wizards of the Coast (both of which my group has used successfully as well) are good starting points, as is EN World.
• At your local gaming store. Most gaming and hobby stores have a notice board for player matching, and while they’re hit-or-miss they’re also free and easily accessible.

Mention that you’re a first-time GM, but don’t present it as a downside (it’s not). Build your group based on social contact: meet in a public place and hang out for a little while (your gaming store works well if they have room), and make a point of talking about other topics as well as gaming.

Listen to your gut, and reject potential group members (or avoid joining an established group) based on social cues, not gaming preferences. Jerks in real life will also be jerks at the gaming table; people you’d enjoy spending time with outside of gaming are equally likely to be fun to game with.

Rules Knowledge

You don’t need to be a rules expert to be a great GM. That’s worth repeating: You don’t need to be an expert. Knowing the rules well will never hurt, but not knowing them inside out is absolutely not a barrier to trying out game mastering.

Rules knowledge is important, but not critical. If a game goes well, it usually won’t be because of how well you know the rules; if it goes poorly, there are generally several other reasons ahead of a lack of rules knowledge.

If you’re already familiar with the RPG you chose for your first GMing experience, you have most of the rules knowledge you need — but there are a couple of areas to pay special attention to: combat and PC abilities, as they will come up often and generally involve more mechanics than other aspects of the game. As a player, you may not have read the whole rulebook; as a GM, you should.

If you’re not familiar with the game rules you chose (having picked based on your excitement level alone), the same tip applies: read the whole book. Can you get by without doing this? Sure, but you’ll be better off for having read it all, even if you don’t remember every last rule.

Assuming you’re GMing for a good group, they’ll help you with the rules, rather than jumping down your throat if you miss something. If they jump down your throat, you’re GMing for the wrong group.

The key to rules knowledge is feeling comfortable with the game you’re about to run. That might mean taking notes on things you get stuck on the first time around, buying a GMing screen to have ready access to tables and other items, or running a mock combat by yourself to get a feel for that sub-system; it all depends on how you learn.

Next up: the back three — An Adventure, A Bit of Planning, and Confidence.