Many people frequently tell new GMs that everyone totally sucks at first and that you can only get better at the job by doing it over and over and learning from your mistakes. While actual experience is indispensible, I wouldn’t go nearly as far. There are numerous pieces of advice that you can understand even if you don’t have any practical experience yet, though you might come to realize their full impact only at a later point. In another way, simply keeping to do something poorly doesn’t make you any better by itself. You need to understand what actually went wrong and what parts of your GMing performance you want to improve. And while it’s usually not a problem to observe other players to get the hang out of playing the game, it’s not uncommon for GMs to be the only GM they ever get to see in action.
Over the last couple of months and recent years, I’ve found a number of very helpful hints that helped me a lot in understanding why my own performance did not end up entirely satisfying to me (though from what I can tell, my players are having a blast every time). Now the only thing I need to do is actually following my own advice, but I think these are some tips that could be immensly helpful to any new GM, or GMs wanting to improve their current work.
Continue reading “My personal rules for GMing (that I still keep forgetting all the time)”