One has been a focus on story. Looking to emulate the storytellers on these shows, more and more GMs are looking to tell a grand tale as a focus of the campaign. Another change has been a shared experiential language--with shows that many gamers are watching, there are references and moments that will be seen and heard by millions of gamers who will go about their gaming with this new understanding. But the thing that strikes me as the biggest shift is an unfortunate one--GMs seem to want to emulate celebrity GMs.
On a certain level, I do understand it. What GMs like Matt Mercer and Aabria Iyengar and Brennan Lee Mulligan do at the table is indeed special, entertaining, and impressive. But none of their styles are quite the same, and none of them would be doing as good a job if they tried to GM like the others. What makes them so successful is in part that they are smart and quick-witted and charming and skilled at storytelling, but also that they're doing things in a way that's natural to them. And the thing is, you can learn tabletop game information, you can train yourself to improvise, you can learn to portray characters well, and you can grow as a storyteller. But you can never reach your full potential if you're trying to be like some other GM.
Let's get specific. There are a couple behaviors I've seen becoming pretty normal in gaming spaces that look to me like attempts to emulate celebrity GMs. One is a long, dramatic speech that ends in some kind of big payoff. This comes to us especially via Brennan Lee Mulligan, who has mastered the art. But that's the thing--Brennan Lee Mulligan's mind works in big long rants, and his go-to style for improv is to be the belabored person who's not crazy surrounded by crazy people, so those rants are right up his alley. But lots of gamers see the rants as funny and entertaining (which they are) and decide that that's what good GMing looks like.
But it's a trick of perspective. The rant is funny, but it's one way to be funny. What we're really responding to is the fact that Brennan is naturally gifted in this style, and he's practiced it, and he's deploying it at a time that it makes sense to do so, and all of those things together makes it very much something that is genuine to him. So to get the same effect--something that's funny or effective or interesting or whatever you're going for--we don't necessarily need to do a rant so much as we need to figure out what we can do that feels genuine to us that still does what we need it to do. Put another way--in your own style, how do you accomplish what the rant accomplishes?
Another celebrity GM behavior I've seen is quick escalation of things. What I mean by this is a radical response to player actions (often accompanied by "troublemaker" attitudes by the player in question) that more or less breaks the game for the sake of humor. This makes sense in the context of an actual play show because the goal is to entertain--breaking the game a little is understood as worth the laugh and also not a statement that the rules of reality are breaking down. But at everyday gaming tables, you are not playing for an audience. Breaking reality for the sake of a joke makes little sense in an average game--there's no audience to pander to, it erodes the sense of reality in the game, and it confuses what's happening in the story. And none of this even mentions that exploding escalation emphasizes the meaningless things they apply to, which downplays the actual story.
Instead, develop your own style. There will be down moments in a session. How you deal with them defines you as a GM. If you make things wild and unpredictable for a laugh, you're going to have a campaign that is constantly wild and unpredictable, which is often a hard thing as a player. But there are so many other options. You can grant players downplay to roleplay in which you step back from GMing. You can paint small vignettes of life in the campaign and scenic locations. You can add NPCs from earlier or introduce new ones or redirect the party back to the story or whatever your agenda dictates. You can do something different every time, letting the context decides what's best. You can do something different altogether. As long as it feels genuine to you, that's all that really matters.
One final celebrity GM "thing" which is really an element of entertainment that doesn't apply well to average tabletop game campaigns is the use of individual sessions as independent units of story. What I mean by that is having one episode that has some theme or twist followed by a new episode with a new theme or twist. This is good for professional storytellers who can blend genres and styles while telling a story and keep it tonally consistent. But this is a radically hard thing to do. And what does it accomplish in an average game? It adds some extra element of entertainment, but does it further the story or build up the characters or reveal something about the world? If it doesn't, a themed session generally isn't worth the trouble.
Instead, finding your style will allow you to invest in the basics and structure of your world and campaign, and that's where success starts. Adding extra themes on top of a campaign's sessions is icing on the cake, and most GMs need to practice baking before they worry about fancy icing. But not only that, with a style that's yours, you will feel confident enough to let your GMing speak for itself without gimmicks.
But some of you are thinking, "But those celebrities GMs are good! I want to be good. Why shouldn't I try to be like them?" And you're not wrong. They are talented, and there are things we can learn from them. Their storytelling, pacing, roleplaying, and improvisation are extremely impressive, and those are things we can all work at. The problem is that we cannot try to be entirely like celebrity GMs without giving up our own styles, and that's squandered treasure. (Oh, and I've noticed GMs increasing their vocabularies to match celebrity GMs. I like that. Keep doing that. Literacy is a good thing.)
Let me tell you about some phases I went through as a GM. First, I was eager to emulate my version of a celebrity GM--the DM who taught me D&D in high school. In my first sessions as a DM, I looked a lot like him: I was stern, challenging, quick to make a joke, tactical. I did as I knew. I ran games like this for about a year before moving on to another phase: grand story campaigns. I made it through maybe a quarter of a campaign before I was broken of that and moved to radical freedom for players. I've been in that phase for a long time now, tempering it with various experiments in what radical freedom looks like (in terms of story design, campaign design, and impact on my world, for instance).
Each campaign teaches you something. In order, my five major canon campaigns taught me:
- Never try to restrict the players in any way.
- Be intentional about everything.
- Don't bite off more than is possible to chew.
- Varying the style of story I tell can be very rewarding.
- With the experience to orchestrate a special campaign, you get to enjoy a special campaign.
Those lessons correspond to phases I went through. I GMed like my old GM and found it was not my style. I experimented, adding more focus on story. But I was basically railroading my party, and it blew up, and I started going towards radical freedom. Letting my players devise a massive network of personal stories was a lot, and I needed to learn to be more cautious. Then I ran a mystery campaign (perhaps the most cautious of stories to tell) and enjoyed the deviation from what I'd been doing for so long. So I set my sights high with something that combined all I knew, and it was incredible. The big picture here is that the closer I let myself get to my genuine style, the better my games got, and the happier I was with them.
And here's the thing: my early players way back when I was emulating my first GM had a great time. I still hear from some of those players more than fifteen years later about how much they enjoyed the game. My players who I restricted too much? They had a blast, and I still hear about that campaign, too. My later players who experienced freedom? They had a grand time. If you're a talented GM, you're going to give players a good time. And honestly, GMing like someone else might give the players a good time. But you, the GM, having a good time while your players have a good time? Emulating a celebrity GM will never give that. Only playing the game as yourself, really allowing your own style to shape the game, will let you enjoy the process as much as your players enjoy what you're doing.
One final way to put a fine point on all this. This will be 267th article on this site. I've covered nearly everything I can imagine related to tabletop games. How did I come by this knowledge? I played a lot of tabletop games, and I made a lot of mistakes that I took the time to learn from. The gathering and application of this knowledge took years. On the other hand, finding a style of GMing that feels good to me has taken my whole decade-and-a-half career as a GM. I want to compare my early games to my most recent campaign to illustrate.
Those early sessions happened cramped around the lower bed on a set of bunk beds in a college dorm room. We sat on the floor except for me in an office chair at the foot of the bed. The party was composed of whoever said they were interested in D&D. The sessions were improvised and flimsy. I was doing an impression of my old DM, still figuring out what some of his gestures had meant. It was messy, chaotic, and really was just happening because I missed D&D.
My most recent sessions were different. We sat comfortably on chairs and couches scattered across the country. Our pets surrounded us, demanding camera time on our video call. They party was my two best friends and my wife, all expert tabletop gamers. The sessions were a mixture of planning and improv informed by years of GMing. I was doing something I had never heard of being done but which felt natural to me. It was organic, beautiful, and happened because I wanted to elevate my art.
I was, in many ways, the same GM I was when I closed out Of Gods and Dragons, my most recent campaign, as I was when I sat at the foot of a bunk bed with near strangers who wanted to roll some dice. My love of tabletop games was present both times, as was my skill at storytelling, my strengths at improvisation, and my eagerness to make my players happy. I had happy players at the table both times. Sure, I've improved, but that doesn't account for the massive change in my satisfaction. I look at the dorm days with shame and Of Gods and Dragons with pride. Why such a difference?
The dorm days were not my style. I was running the kind of game that old school gamers played because that's what I'd seen before. But it wasn't me. I'm not a confrontational GM. I don't like building dungeons as much as I enjoy writing character backstories. Ultimately, I was doing something because it looked like success (it had made me happy), but not because I enjoyed it. And reader, the point of games is to have fun. My turn towards radically free storytelling was intellectually motivated--I believe wholeheartedly that tabletop games are at their most powerful when players get to control their characters in a meaningful way. But I found as I embraced that style that it was mine. It gave me ideas. It was exciting and new. It was fun. I had found a way to make my games fun for me, and that changed how I went about them.
That critical shift towards radical freedom for players opened a door, but there were more doors beyond it. I had to experiment with how that freedom would be expressed. I tried out-of-game methods. What if the players came up with the main stories? What if the players collaborated on the campaign as a whole? But these pose cumbersome issues for the GM, like taking a broad array of ideas and forcing them together. Of Gods and Dragons posed an in-game solution--make the players so powerful that nothing stands in their way (except the gods and dragons they had to talk into cooperating), so aside from powergaming the storyline, the players could do basically anything in the world. It was a simple solution to a complicated problem, and it resulted in my favorite gaming I've ever been involved in.
Of course, empowering the players like I did is a one-time solution (I can't realistically make every player character canonically one of the most powerful people in existence from the start), and that means I'll need a new approach to player freedom for my next campaign. And that's exciting. I'm thrilled to have to come up with something new. Because I have my style down. I know that I like to write emotional stories with complete NPCs and leave the players to finish those stories as they see fit. That means that as long as I stick to what I like and I use what I know as an experienced GM, my players and I will have a good time. Which, again, is the whole point.
So remember: the path to fun and pride in what you do as a GM is not in copying anyone, be it GMs you have played with or celebrity GMs. What they're doing is probably good and maybe even great. But you doing word for word the same campaign wouldn't feel the same way. You need to have ownership of it. And I mean it when I say that things start to get increasingly fun when you're playing within your style since it lets you experiment with new things to even further refine your skills and style. It's an intangible thing, but if you watch gaming carefully (even yourself when you play), you will learn that players and GMs alike are wordlessly pursuing something, and that pursuit reveals and informs a gamer's style. Keep an eye out, keep your mind open, and keep on gaming.
That's all for now. Coming soon: a pirate D&D one-shot, a guide to the planes, and what perfect GMing looks like. Until next time, happy gaming!
No comments:
Post a Comment