What Makes the Perfect Gamemaster?
It is having fascinating world, scenarios and characters? Being able improvise, but not railroad? Perhaps if one lets players act whenever / however they like? I’m a big proponent for keeps things moving; is that it? Maybe a perfect gamemaster can handle a split party with perfectly equal spotlight time? Memorizes all the rules? Is fair to the players but not the NPCs? Yeah, you’ve probably heard this all before.
But How Do You Do It?
Well, the basics start with consistency and focus. These make your game familiar and yet lively. Surely pacing is an important part of this, but it doesn’t lend itself to consistency much, does it? If you want consistency, you have to know what you’re playing. You must understand the genre conventions involved….
…Or You can Just Fake It
Here’s a quick trick you can use. I use it all the time for improvising those tough spots. Make a game write-up; list off all the coolest bits of the games you want to run. These can be types of scenes (slogging through the sewers of an ancient city) or types of ‘natives’ (the toothless beggar who secretly knows everything that goes on) or maybe some of the tense relationships (if it turns out the princess isn’t a virgin, it’ll mean war). You can use still imaginings from any movie you liked (even outside the genre) or the overall structure from something else (the way that character quested to the big bad). Anything goes, just keep them really, really short.
The Game’s Character Sheet
Statistics
What I actually do is write up the game as though it were a character all its own. For ’stats’ I dwell on how I would rate things; like how bloody will it get (quick and clean like the old west or rough and messy like those boxing films). I might assign a number to ‘how magical things are’ (I use 1-10 because of my familiarity with ratings) or how ‘gritty’ things can get. The reason I start out with these is because it gets me to focus on two things.
First of all, consistency is what the numbers will remind me to keep to. Second, when I look at the whole list, I can see if the game is focused on mostly one area. If you write up your game’s ’stats’ and you see too many numbers in around the same value, you know there won’t be that much focus. This will also give you a chance to compare the things you would rate. For example, if you rate social class and you rate supernatural powers, is it possible that you could just look at wealth or high station as just another power? (Helps you focus on how you want to use the ’stats’.
Ads and Disads
Next, I think about the games ‘advantages and disadvantages’. This is where I put most of my ‘coolest bits’ from before. If I think getting the heroes into deathtraps is way cool, I make it a high disadvantage. Why a disadvantage? Because, it goes without saying that the first thing the players think of is automatically the way to escape it; that makes it harder for my game to shine and easier for the players to feel cool. If there is a ‘mountaintop lair’ that would be a advantage because the players will know they have to go there for the ‘final confrontation’.
One quick note about what I call ’storyola’. Watch the way you lay out your ads and disads; they will pretty much make it obvious if you want your game to start slow and build to some final climax. If you have that, make sure you watch your tension level at all times; make it a stat like hit points. You take away a point every time things get tenser or close to the climax; the most important thing to remember is after each step, never back down! When your tension stat reaches zero, it’s time for all the cards to be laid on the table. (Just a quick storyola shortcut, here.)
Skills
When you come to choosing your game’s ’skills’ what you’ll be doing is choosing predictable settings. The back alley, the CEO’s office, at the club, on the run, these are all setting for possible scenes. Treat each like a skill; rate them based on how often you want to be able to use them. Let your mind really wander here; you won’t regret it when it’s time to improvise.
Powers
Another section of the game sheet (you don’t need to do they in any particular order, just make sure you do all of them) is the ‘powers’. (Or spells and so on.) These are the things that give your game the ‘juice’ and the ‘punch’. What kinds of things do you want to repeatedly hit the players over the head with? Should they feel that they are up against great odds? Will there be a lot of backstabbing and betrayal?
This is where you pick up the parts of the motif of your genre shines with. You can also pick things like chromed cybernauts or gnomes underfoot. You could have things like everyone doing magic in the town by the wizard’s college or constantly running into the prime deity and his wife and concubines. Whatever really makes your game obviously ‘in genre’. This is also where you list your running gags. Perhaps, since there are televisions everywhere, you have a particular commercial on them that every quotes from.¹ Don’t forget! The powers must also work within the tone of the game or set the mood or reinforce the atmosphere, just the same way that a wizard or a superhero have a ‘theme’ to their spells and powers.
Whatever you choose, these ‘powers’ are what you keep bringing up to make play lively. (Make sure you have enough of them or flexible enough ones that they don’t get repetitive.) Whenever you can improvise a scene out of one of these, you’re going great guns. The difference between these and the ‘ads and disads’ is that you invoke the ‘powers’ and the ‘ads and disads’ pop up because of the turns of the game. (In fact, some of my groups know my ‘ads and disads’ so well, they will invoke them by themselves.)
Finishing Touches
When you have all this together, you can double check it by thinking through a few scenarios. Try to imagine what kind of background most, if not all, of your ’skills’ fit into. What kinds of interpersonal relationships are ‘ads and disads’ and which are ‘powers’? Your powers ought to make you imagine specific turns or twists of plot, if you wrote them right. Likewise the ‘ads and disads’ should apply to some of the player characters as well. How are they connected to the background? What relationships are the responsible to maintain or will suffer without? Do all of your ’skills’ have enough flexibility to not seem repetitive? Could the ‘back alley’ function as the metropolitan platform for underground transportation services? Do any of your ‘ads or disads’ lend themselves to genre-related props? Come on! Ya gotta have genre-related props.
Takin’ It to the Streets
Now, the first thing you do when you finish your game’s character sheet is share it with the players. You don’t have to simply turn it over to them, because you might have a few secrets laid out on it, but you darn well better regale them with the straight and narrow of it. This is essentially the game you’re going to run. The better they understand that, the better they will play in it. It also allows them a chance to go, “hey! I wanted to play a .” Either they change their characters, or you alter your game; this way no one waits around for the part they planned for and no one is disappointed.
Fang Langford
¹ Robocop’s “I’d buy that for a dollar!” springs to mind.
2 Responses to “What Makes the Perfect Gamemaster?”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
September 8th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
[...] Advice: Prepare a game/setting character sheet. [...]
March 4th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
[...] asks us, What Makes the Perfect Gamemaster?. It is having fascinating world, scenarios and characters? Being able improvise, but not railroad? [...]