FIRST TIME AS DUNGEON MASTER - BACKGROUND
In this series of three posts I'll be reflecting on my first experience as a Games Master
(GM), with three goals in mind; evaluating what went well, figuring out what I
could have done better, and attempting to provide advice and cautions to other first time
GMs.
Over the past three years I have been part of a regular role-playing group. While we were all students with fewer concerns and more time, we managed to meet every week for a four hour session. That campaign lasted two years, and I think it's safe that the final session of the campaign - which we played over a weekend - was so emotional, epic and bittersweet that it sits proudly alongside some of my most special real-life memories. So, although I only came to role playing games (RPGs) recently compared to many who play them, I feel fairly well versed. Our group primarily plays Warhammer Fantasy second edition, but I've dabbled with a handful of other settings since taking up the hobby.
Recently, and as regular readers may have noticed, I've become obsessed with Shadowrun - a futuristic cyberpunk fantasy RPG, which is just as awesome as that genre sounds. I've bought a bunch of Shadowrun source books, have been reading setting novels, and playing the video games, all with the goal in mind of running a game for my friends. It's pretty daunting though. Not only do I need to familiarise myself with the setting, but the rules are quite different to anything I have played before. I have also never been the person running our games before - I've always been a player.
About a month ago, our GM voiced the surprising fact that, although he has been running Warhammer Fantasy for years, he has never actually played it. "Excellent!" I thought, "A way to get some experience as a GM within a setting I am far more familiar with than Shadowrun." So I volunteered to do it, recruiting the assistance of one of our other players who does have GM experience. The other player - Sam - and I planned and executed the session together, so I suppose it wasn't my first truly independent GM experience, but it certainly felt nerve wracking enough to count.
My imagination reacted well to the opportunity to run a game. About an hour after I had volunteered us, an idea for the session occurred to me - I kept thinking about it, and more and more details and complications arose. Eager and excited, I jotted down an A4 page of character ideas and plot notes and let it brew in my mind. Soon after I spent an hour or so explaining my idea to my co-GM (Sam) - we got down to some particulars and started getting excited about the game. Our process of planning after that was quite unconventional. At the next available opportunity I sat at my computer and typed up a document detailing all the ideas we had so far. I shared it with Sam so we could both edit it at will. This was about a month before the session was planned to run.
Over the next three weeks, we did nothing. Sam contributed some character information to the document, and we both did a lot of thinking about how we would like to run the game, but no hard work was put into the planning during this time.
The week before the session was due to run Sam and I decided it was well past time for us to do some proper planning. The tough thing is two of our housemates were to be players in the game - so planning at home was hard. We decided to head to a tabletop gaming store, hoping that they would be okay with us spending a few hours there to plan. I knew the owners were RPG fans, and luckily they were very accommodating. Free from distractions and housemates, Sam and I sat down together to do our planning. This session lasted about 2-3 hours and was the time during which a lot of the technical planning was done. You would think that during the three weeks which had passed, our ideas would have changed quite a bit - luckily no! Sam and I had very similar ideas about each of the major characters, the direction we wanted the session to go, and the options we wanted to have available for the players. This meant we just had to nut out a lot of technical questions about how the players could solve each conflict we were setting up.
After that we both spent the next four days before the session continuing to plan different elements of the game - I fleshed out the plot and character descriptions while Sam created statistic blocks for the NPCs and worked on the design of the story.
By the time we were done, we had close to ten pages of planning and both felt pretty confident about the game. We were as prepared as we could be, but in my case I do not think there was anything I could do to stop feeling nervous.....
Thanks very much for reading part one! In part two of this series I will recount what actually happened during our adventure... stay tuned!
Over the past three years I have been part of a regular role-playing group. While we were all students with fewer concerns and more time, we managed to meet every week for a four hour session. That campaign lasted two years, and I think it's safe that the final session of the campaign - which we played over a weekend - was so emotional, epic and bittersweet that it sits proudly alongside some of my most special real-life memories. So, although I only came to role playing games (RPGs) recently compared to many who play them, I feel fairly well versed. Our group primarily plays Warhammer Fantasy second edition, but I've dabbled with a handful of other settings since taking up the hobby.
Recently, and as regular readers may have noticed, I've become obsessed with Shadowrun - a futuristic cyberpunk fantasy RPG, which is just as awesome as that genre sounds. I've bought a bunch of Shadowrun source books, have been reading setting novels, and playing the video games, all with the goal in mind of running a game for my friends. It's pretty daunting though. Not only do I need to familiarise myself with the setting, but the rules are quite different to anything I have played before. I have also never been the person running our games before - I've always been a player.
About a month ago, our GM voiced the surprising fact that, although he has been running Warhammer Fantasy for years, he has never actually played it. "Excellent!" I thought, "A way to get some experience as a GM within a setting I am far more familiar with than Shadowrun." So I volunteered to do it, recruiting the assistance of one of our other players who does have GM experience. The other player - Sam - and I planned and executed the session together, so I suppose it wasn't my first truly independent GM experience, but it certainly felt nerve wracking enough to count.
My imagination reacted well to the opportunity to run a game. About an hour after I had volunteered us, an idea for the session occurred to me - I kept thinking about it, and more and more details and complications arose. Eager and excited, I jotted down an A4 page of character ideas and plot notes and let it brew in my mind. Soon after I spent an hour or so explaining my idea to my co-GM (Sam) - we got down to some particulars and started getting excited about the game. Our process of planning after that was quite unconventional. At the next available opportunity I sat at my computer and typed up a document detailing all the ideas we had so far. I shared it with Sam so we could both edit it at will. This was about a month before the session was planned to run.
Over the next three weeks, we did nothing. Sam contributed some character information to the document, and we both did a lot of thinking about how we would like to run the game, but no hard work was put into the planning during this time.
The week before the session was due to run Sam and I decided it was well past time for us to do some proper planning. The tough thing is two of our housemates were to be players in the game - so planning at home was hard. We decided to head to a tabletop gaming store, hoping that they would be okay with us spending a few hours there to plan. I knew the owners were RPG fans, and luckily they were very accommodating. Free from distractions and housemates, Sam and I sat down together to do our planning. This session lasted about 2-3 hours and was the time during which a lot of the technical planning was done. You would think that during the three weeks which had passed, our ideas would have changed quite a bit - luckily no! Sam and I had very similar ideas about each of the major characters, the direction we wanted the session to go, and the options we wanted to have available for the players. This meant we just had to nut out a lot of technical questions about how the players could solve each conflict we were setting up.
After that we both spent the next four days before the session continuing to plan different elements of the game - I fleshed out the plot and character descriptions while Sam created statistic blocks for the NPCs and worked on the design of the story.
By the time we were done, we had close to ten pages of planning and both felt pretty confident about the game. We were as prepared as we could be, but in my case I do not think there was anything I could do to stop feeling nervous.....
Thanks very much for reading part one! In part two of this series I will recount what actually happened during our adventure... stay tuned!
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| My role-playing group... silly buggers. |
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