"Running Games" - an excerpt from the upcoming Lurking Fear GM's Guide
The following is an except from The Lurking Fear GM's Guide, an upcoming companion to my game The Lurking Fear. The final text may change before the guide is published, but I think it's decent advice in its current form:
I’ve written this section to give specific, actionable advice, based on my experience running and playing in a wide variety of RPGs with numerous groups of other players. That means it’s entirely subjective. There are absolutely other ways to GM a game and still have a good time. The most important thing is always to see what works in practice at your table and what does not. The willingness to reflect on your games and learn from experience is all you really need to be a good GM.
That said, I’ve found that the games I run always go better when I keep in mind three principles: Pacing, Focus, and Agency.
Pacing
“Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.” -Alfred Hitchcock
Your players have set aside two to six – maybe even more – precious hours of their lives to play your game. Make those hours count.
Scenes in a game will almost always take longer than you expected, sometimes much longer. Maybe one time in ten the opposite will happen, and players will find a way to resolve a scene much faster than you expected, or skip more than you predicted. You can prepare for fast players by planning for a longer adventure than you think you’ll have time for. You can prepare for slow players by identifying what you think the most rewarding scenes for them will be, and being ready to cut anything else as needed. When you’re running the game, keep an eye on the clock, and make sure you’re on pace to reach the most enjoyable scenes by the end of the session. If you start running out of time, leave out complications that haven’t been introduced or emphasized yet. Summarize longer scenes with a couple sentences and a single roll of the dice. There’s always more than one place where a story can be ended – end your game somewhere that will provide a satisfying story for your players, even if you had prepared for a longer story.
If you’re running a one-shot or a convention game, you only have a single session. Cut without mercy and be ready to improvise wildly different endings. In a longer campaign, you have the luxury of more time, but it’s still worth trying to use your time well.
Avoid red herrings, which spend time without narrative reward. If players do have to tell the difference between useful and false clues, and they make the wrong decision, skip ahead to the consequences of their lost time instead of playing through it. When players commit to a course of action that you can tell will be a frustrating dead end, try to signpost in and out of character that it might not be worthwhile. If that fails, either skip ahead quickly or find a way to bring it back around to something of interest.
Move the spotlight between players characters often. If they’re in different scenes, switch between scenes at least every 10-15 minutes. If they’re in the same scene, try to rotate who PCs speak to and who first encounters interesting things, within reason. If you can’t think of anything to throw towards a character, you can always something like, “and is your character planning anything?” or, “and how does your character feel about all this?” Rotating the spotlight often gives players a chance to plan out their next set of actions, but brings the story back to them before they start to disengage. Players who are skilled at collective storytelling will rotate the spotlight themselves as long as they’re in the same scene, which makes GMing easier. Try to avoid putting anything in the fiction that takes a player character out of the story for too long, like a long hospital stay or long-distance solo travel. Even if it’s realistic for the character, it takes the player out of the game; save that kind of thing for when a player can’t make a session. When in doubt, it’s better to have too many things happen in a session than too few. Having a fast-paced and event-filled story is the easiest way to make sure your players have fun and feel that they’re playing in a rich, living world. It’s possible to run an enjoyable campaign that has a slow pace, but it’s much more difficult. Assuming you play weekly or less often, most atmosphere built in one session fades by the next, and information from more than 1-2 sessions ago will be hard for your players to remember unless it was revealed dramatically or frequently reinforced. The early sessions of a good slow-burn campaign still need to have memorable scenes and a satisfying story that leaves your players eager to return. At a minimum, no matter what style of game you are running, make sure that every scene either advances the plot, establishes something new about the setting, or establishes something new about a character.
Focus
“Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Focus is the amount of emphasis you place on each part of your game. The things you give the most focus are the things your players will remember. They’re what your game is really about. Make a short list of the two or three most important things you want to focus on before you run your game. They could be anything - themes, moods, specific settings, interesting dilemmas, goals, challenges. You can change it up in play – you can always change up anything in play – but you should go into the game with some intent. Without intentional effort, most groups of players will focus either on comedy, problem-solving, or character advancement. There’s nothing wrong with those, as long as everyone at the table will be satisfied with them.
An easy way to find out what everyone at the table wants to focus on is to ask them. Some groups will hold a “session zero” before a game to collectively decide on what they want to focus on and don’t want to focus on. If you already have a clear vision for the game you want to run, just make sure you’ve given your players a clear pitch for what your game is about and they’re all onboard with it. Make sure you’re onboard, too. It's not worth running a game that doesn’t interest you just because players have asked for it. Sooner or later your lack of interest will show.
The simplest way to add focus to something is to spend more time on it. Another simple way is to speak with more intensity when touching on elements you want to emphasize. These are both true for other kinds of fiction as well. TTRPGS are unique in that you can also add focus by using game mechanics. Any time you engage game mechanics, you boil down the assumptions each player has brought into objective rules or values that define some aspect of the situation. It provides a signpost that something is significant - that this is the part of the game worth keeping score for. This is true on the system level – an RPG will generally have more detailed rules for the topics it’s concerned with. It’s also true minute-by-minute in the game. In The Lurking Fear, you can resolve a situation, in order of increasing complexity, by GM fiat, with a single roll, with an opposed roll, with several rolls, as a dangerous situation, or with a clock (see page XX).
For example, let’s say a player has asked to start a new business in the middle of a campaign. You decide how much focus this should have, based on what will be the best for everyone at the table. If you decide not to give it any focus, then you handle it quickly and by GM fiat. The player’s character is now spending their days setting up the new business instead of their previous day job; in three month’s time, they’ll have a new business up and running, where they presumably spend plenty of time offscreen. If you’d like to give it a little focus, you can have them roll a relevant skill. On a failure, the business is a sink of time and money; on a success, it’s doing well and may even have earned them some welcome reputation or profits. If you decide to put some focus on it but don’t have a lot of time to spare, bring in extra mechanics – tell them the market is crowded, and they need to do an opposed test against a competitor in order to succeed. A tense roll-off against a tangible opponent will make the business memorable in only a couple minutes. If you’d like to put a lot of focus onto the business, then you can use a clock to create an escalating challenge that involves multiple rolls, with opportunities to roleplay brief scenes for every action that advances the clock. The clock will save time over roleplaying out the minutiae of starting a new business, while still requiring the players to think creatively and either take risks or pay a price.
Agency
"If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading." — Apocryphal
The sense of agency is the unique draw of TTRPGs. The sense of agency is not the same as the reality of agency. Human beings often feel that they are making the only possible decision, or have no decision at all, no matter how many options they might have. This happens all the time in roleplaying games. Making players feel that they have agency takes intentional effort from the GM. Actually giving them agency can help with this, but it’s not required and it’s not enough alone.
When players are making important decisions, remind them of their most obvious options and any tradeoffs that would be immediately apparent to their characters. Doing it out of character is fine, but NPCs doing it in character is also fun. Whenever you do this, also find ways to remind them that there could be other choices as well if they’re creative, and that they will never have perfect information.
Be generous when reminding players of information that their characters would reasonably know but that the players may not know or might have forgotten, like basic setting information or information from a book their characters have been reading. This is especially true if the information is critical to a plan the players have spent some time working on. It’s engaging when a plan fails because of a bad roll at a tense moment or an unknown secret. It’s comical but less engaging when a plan fails because the players overlooked a small piece of information that their characters would have known.
Find ways to highlight the backgrounds and abilities of their characters. Be generous with handing out mechanical modifiers for being particularly familiar with a specific person, place, or task. Even a character with poor social skills probably gets along well with their longtime friends. Show players the consequences of their actions in both large and small ways. Point out when their previous acts have made things easier or more difficult for them. If their characters do notable deeds, then word should spread, and people they talk to will mention their reputation.
Never be bound by trying to keep an adventure “on track” or consistent with real or fictional history. As long as you can find a way to keep it an interesting story, run with the consequences of their actions rather than finding ways to minimize them and return them to a planned narrative. That’s only as long as you can keep things engaging - when the players are taking the story somewhere that you can tell won’t be a good time, don’t hesitate to step in and steer things in a better direction.
It's often fastest and easiest to do this steering out of character. Asking, “Are you sure?” is often enough. The GM’s “Are you sure?” is a widely understood signal amongst roleplayers that a GM is telling players they may not like what comes next if they go ahead with an action. For particularly wild or poorly thought out actions, it can help to explain to the player how you’ve perceived their request. For instance, “You would like to try doing a complicated trick in this airplane, under dangerous conditions, even though you have no training and are flying by guesswork. Are you sure?” Sometimes it’s a legitimate misunderstanding that can now be cleared up, and other times the player comes to their senses after a moment of reflection. It’s okay to reveal broad narrative information as long as you avoid specific details. For instance, you might ask players, “If your characters flee this city now, then this is how the story ends – your characters flee to safety, but the events you’ve been investigating are either never resolved or are solved by someone else. Would you like to end the game here, or stay in the city and keep investigating?” It doesn’t spoil much for the players to know that the story could have an ending where they walk away, and it doesn’t reveal anything about what happens if they don’t.
Sometimes you want to be more subtle. Maybe the players are choosing between one set of actions that will lead to a passable scene and another set of actions that will lead to a very fun scene. You want the better scene! Give them some gentle nudges with the ways you describe things, spending more time on describing the things you want them to take interest. If they’re prone to debate and coming up with a complicated plan, let them keep discussing when they’re talking through options you know are less than ideal. When they get to an option that you know will be rewarding, remind everyone of the time, or ask something like, “So is that the plan you’d like to go with?”
As with pacing, you can always change any information that hasn’t been introduced to the players yet. New or more relaxed players can often be tricked into thinking they’ve been provided a meaningful choice by being presented a decision without meaningful information about their options. A classic example is picking which door in a dungeon to open. If the players don’t have any clues to the difference in the rooms behind the doors, it’s not a true choice – the GM can put anything they want behind any door. More experienced or attentive players realize this, and no longer feel agency when presented with uninformed decisions.
One of the easiest ways to create a sense of agency is to give players a limited resource to shepherd, like money, time, fuel, ammunition, uses of a magic item, or wishes from a genie. This simplifies the barter economy of bespoke decisions into a single currency of agency – pay a resource to change the story now, or save it to change the story later. It’s rewarding to players, because they feel they have been given something tangible, and it makes the game easier to run, because the choice of how to spend that resource creates tension and narrative without much effort from the GM.
Asking players to spend a limited resource is one version of a very powerful tool - and that tool is cost.
Cost
Cost creates both focus and a sense of agency. When PCs want to do something meaningful, rather than saying yes or no, offer a cost. When you are making things worse for the PCs, require that they pay a cost. This makes the players feel that they’ve earned their victories and had a chance to avoid their defeats. Cost comes in many forms. Here are some common costs:
•Taking a risk, like a dice roll, with a consequence for failure.
•Taking a risk, like a dice roll, with no consequence for failure but no chance to roll again.
•Spending a tangible limited resource like time, money, or fuel.
•Spending a mechanical resource described by the game system, such as fate points, experience, or hit points.
•Coming up with an effective plan that required exceptional creativity or effort on the part of the player.
•Doing something that reinforces the focus of the game in an interesting way.
•Committing to an action that precludes other actions.
•Suffering an unwanted narrative consequence within the fiction of the game.
The majority of TTRPGs have some form of cost built into their core mechanics. When you’re new to a particular TTRPG, it’s helpful to start by figuring out what ways the designers intended characters to pay costs. Once you understand a game, you can always add additional forms of cost to your adventures to keep things interesting. When you’re having difficulty figuring out what happens next in a game, ask yourself what the PCs want, and present some costs for them to contend with while trying to achieve their goals. Do not attach cost to anything that absolutely needs to happen in an adventure – there’s always a chance a character can not or will not pay it.