First I Was Afraid: Experiences As A First-Time GM

It's all in your hands

Well, it's been a good few months since I finally sat down and ran my first role playing session as a GM. Despite this, I wanted to write a little something about how I prepared and how I thought it all went.

The post title says it all - I was petrified. It's a scary thing to think that the enjoyment of the players rests in your hands, and that if you don't do a good job everyone will just get bored. I think it's pretty natural to feel this way when coming into this kind of thing for the first time. Keeping everybody entertained is quite a bit of responsibility - and it all rests on you.

It turns out this was totally wrong.

Preparation
With the players in our role playing circle quite dispersed, it can be a long time between games (usually a few months). I knew I was going to be the next GM, running a Dark Heresy campaign, and I had a good amount of time to get prepared. I put it to good use, and it really paid off.

First off, I spent a lot of time browsing the web and reading everything I could find on the art of GMing. There are a lot of useful resources out there and they really helped give me a "behind the scenes" look on how best to go about creating a story and running a game. A lot of it was quite contradictory, but it was all useful for getting my mind into the right place. I also spoke to friends who'd run previous sessions about their GMing experiences which helped put my mind at ease.

Essentially I tried to absorb as much experience as I could from other GMs. This gave me confidence in what I was doing and what to expect, and made me almost feel like I'd done it all before. Of course, giving the rulebook a thorough read-through really helped a lot here too!

Writing The Story

Nodes

And so I sat down and started writing up my story. In my case, with Dark Heresy, I was already very familiar with the setting - The Grim Grimdark of the Far Future™. After having been involved in the hobby for some seventeen years, and reading a lot of Dan Abnett, it wasn't too hard to come up with a tall tale. I just had to put it to paper (well, Google Docs).

A lot of the stuff I had read suggested it wasn't worth writing things up in too much detail, since most of the time your players will end up trashing your carefully laid plans. Since this was my first time however, I decided to ignore this and get it all written down. Unsure as to how quickly the players would get through it though, I ended up actually writing three entire story arcs within the overall "grand scheme". This made sure I had plenty to go through should the play be faster than expected.

Since I'd read that "railroading" your players is no fun for anyone (being over-controlling and forcing your players down a pre defined route, hence removing their ability to choose what to do), I didn't want to be strict about the timeline. Instead, I wrote the stories more as a collection of "nodes" than a strict series of events. Each node was a particular encounter, event or character. I had a rough idea of how they would string together, but expected the players to make the decisions on how they got from one to the next. Based on what they chose to do, I could take the relevant encounter and characters involved and work from there.

The Game

Sweet, sweet polyhedra

During the session we didn't get very far through the story arcs - in fact we got only half way through the first one! That's not to say it wasn't totally worth writing it all up though. It acted as a crutch for my confidence, as I always knew I'd have something to fall back on should I need to. We didn't even touch on all the story nodes I'd written for that arc. But that's not a problem either - they can just be folded in to another story in the future. Also, it means I'm already prepared for more gaming sessions - the prep time has already been spent. Overall the "story node" system worked well as I nearly always had something ready as the characters progressed.

One of the things I was worried about was "winging it". Situations will always come up that you didn't prepare for, and you just have to make it up as you go along. As it turned out, this wasn't a big problem. The thing is, even as the GM, you're still a player in the game. You are involved in seeing the tale unfold as much as the players. As things progressed and the characters make their decisions in the context of the story, it was often fairly obvious what the result of those decisions would be. I didn't so much make things up as just take events to their logical conclusion.

I think the first session went pretty well all told. I found my preparation and notes meant I could keep things rolling nicely. It wasn't perfect by any means, however. Things could get a little slow at times, looking up rules or parts of the story. I'll be making sure my notes are better organised in future - I don't want to keep the players waiting. I had a bit of difficulty playing the parts of NPCs sometimes, though I think that was mostly down to my lack of experience - some things you just can't practice beforehand.

The story itself perhaps ramped up too slowly. I wanted to break us all in to the new game gradually (none of us had played Dark Heresy before), but it was probably a little too gradual. It's hard to gauge exactly how much you can throw at the players without killing them, but some experience should help here. Now I have a feel for things, I can start to pick up the pace a bit more in future games.

It Ain't So Bad

As I sat down at the head of the table and started off my story, a quiver in my voice, I thought of how it could all go wrong. Would people like the story? The characters? Would I even be able to sit in front of them and actually tell the tale? As things went on though, something became more and more obvious. It's the players that make the story, not the GM. Both sides of the equation react to each other to create the overall experience, but it's really the players that do all the "work". The GM is just there to regulate things and to shape the overall story.

In all, the time taken researching the GM's role and preparing for the session really paid off - especially for a newbie. Most of the worries I had turned out to be groundless and the experience I gained made the next session run much more smoothly. We all had a great time and I can't wait to finish off the story!

(Podcasts for the second session coming soon!)