One final (?) GMing observation from this year’s GenCon took a few days to bubble up the surface: The best GMs I gamed with were confident, but not cocksure.
Confidence is the pink shirt of GMing, a key ingredient that will make any game you run better. Even knowing that (and having written that post), though, it was interesting to see it in action.
Observing that a lack of confidence hurt one of my group’s GMs wasn’t a surprise — lack of confidence is always going to lead to problems. She did pretty well despite not wearing her pink shirt, and hopefully she got a bit of a boost from running games at the con.
What was surprising, though, is that our one truly bad GM’s main slip-up was the he was cocksure — not just overconfident, but absolutely certain that he was running his event the right way. It’s the difference between “I know what I’m doing, and I’m not afraid to make mistakes” and “I know I’m right.”
If you don’t think you’re capable of making a GMing mistake — particularly one so fundamental as assuming your players like bedtime stories (one of the guys at our table actually fell asleep) — that’s a real problem.
Overconfidence/arrogance in a GM does more than ruin a game; it also makes for bad players. If I have a bad night, I’ll go home, have a beer, and bitch about it to the wife. (And never go back to that table, if it’s bad enough.)
But if my first campaign was with a control-freak or killer GM, I might keep playing, looking for “the fun”. I might learn that this is how the game works, and bring my paranoid and super-conservative play style to every table.
The same goes for the Monty Haulers out ther, too:
Stop screwing up my players!!
I think that arrogance is the first danger sign of “The Author” – a GM who takes storytelling to the extreme. They don’t want to run a game, they want to force their stories down your throat. It is a real pain for them to have a PC do the unexpected because it wasn’t in their script for the session. When I come across that kind of GM I just move on.
As for confidence it is definitely a critical element to have in your GM composure. You have to believe that you are capable of running a good game, and at the same time will make mistakes that you can recover from. Nothing goes as planned, but that is why you have GMs. They don’t run the session, the group does. But the GMs are the people who have the fortitude to say “I’m going to manage this chaos and make sure it is an enjoyable experience.” It takes confidence to pull that off.
I ran my first game at a con this weekend. It wasn’t actually on the schedule though. I just set up in open gaming. There was a lack of D&D at the con (my preferred system) and the games that I got into went from barely tolerable to downright miserable.
One of the GM’s lacked confidence. She didn’t have much control over the game or the group. There were numerous side conversations taking place that dragged out what could have been a 4 hour game to over 6 hours. It wasn’t a tactic she was using (a teacher waiting for the students to quiet down before beginning the lesson all while giving the mean look). She simply didn’t have the confidence to lead the session. She also allowed a rules lawyer to push the table around (one who happened be wrong about a lot of his info). I did stick it out to the end though.
I was really looking forward to the next game because it seemed to have a cool, yet fun story line. Also, the DM was providing Pre-gens, which meant I didn’t have to scramble to get a character together. Things got off to a promising start. The DM had made up some really cool character sheets with great artwork that really brought life to the pre-gens he provided. Just as we were finalizing our selections, someone asked about a character portrait that was off to the side. My heart sank when the DM announced that that was the DMPC he was going to run (which was of course one level higher than the other characters). He then proceeded to inform us that she was the leader of the party and he would need to run her so we could stick to his story. It quickly turned into an exercise in futility and frustration. I’m sure many of you know the scenario. We were led around by the nose with absolutely no free will. Any objections to questionable calls were overruled without discussion. In hopes that things would get better, I sat around for two hours while the DM basically had a conversation between himself and his DMPC. During a break, I apologized to the DM and other players and politely left the game.
About 15 minutes later, I ran into one of the players who had followed my lead to quit the game down in open gaming. I asked him if he would be interested in a good old fashioned dungeon crawl. He asked me to hold him a spot if I did. So I told him I would set one up in open gaming the following afternoon. I had something that would run about six hours that would be great for 4-6 players.
I spent some time with my adventure, marking off encounters that could easily be bypassed if we started getting close to the four hour make. I sorted out the minis for each encounter and jotted down the basics of stat blocks on post its. Then I made a couple of fliers to advertise my game.
I think the game ran great. Everyone seemed to be having a fun time (at least they said so, and everybody stayed until the end). I just kept things rolling along. Threw a variety of encounters. Made sure there were squishy things for the tank, undead for the cleric, flying opponents for the ranger, and plenty of traps for the rogue. I also made sure to throw some quirky things at them, to keep things fresh and fun.
I only really stumbled once. I wasn’t 100% sure how to rule a monster’s special ability, that could have potentially ended the game with about a third of the adventure remaining. I paused for a second and asked the players’ opinion, to which they all agreed was fairly broken. After about a 2 minute discussion, I made a simple ruling and asked if everyone was cool with it. Everyone was in agreement, and got the players back into the action so the game could continue. There were plenty of thanks and compliments around the table about my ruling. I just explained that I wanted to keep on playing too.
Once the game was over (about 11:30 at night), most of the players hung out while I was packing up my stuff to chat. Not necessarily about the game, or even the con, but just general conversation. That was a real boost to my own confidence. I figured if I hadn’t run an entertaining game, they would have split as soon as started reading the conclusion.
After that, I decided that I would try my hand at running an officially scheduled game when next years con season gets underway.
(Telas) Overconfidence/arrogance in a GM does more than ruin a game; it also makes for bad players.
True indeed. Dysfunctional play also creates bad GMs — although in both cases (whoever is doing the dysfunctional stuff) it’s entirely possible to change, toss the old habits and improve. Lord knows I’ve changed a host of bad GMing habits myself. 😉
(John Arcadian) I think that arrogance is the first danger sign of “The Author†– a GM who takes storytelling to the extreme.
That was definitely true for our CoC GM. I really hate that kind of GMing.
Frost: Wow — thanks for the detailed writeup! It sounds like you did a good job prepping on short notice, and staying fluid to run a good game.