One of the most controversial questions in the tabletop RPG hobby is ‘What makes a good game’. Entire philosophies of play are built around the idea that you don’t need much in the way of mechanics, and entire other philosophies of play are built around the idea that those mechanics are essential to creating the desired experience in a session. The reality, of course, is messier than either of these. We’ve all heard that “Every game is good with a good GM”, but that doesn’t actually mean that every game system that makes its way to a group’s table is, well, good.

In order to fairly review a game you need to understand what the game brings to the table, yes, but you need to understand the same for your GM. Good GMs can run good games with bad systems by working around or even ignoring aspects of a game system, as well as supplementing the system with experience or house rules from other systems and campaigns. Similarly, bad GMs can create bad experiences with good games by interpreting rules too rigidly or loosely, failing to do the right amount of prep for the system, or using the mechanics for situations in which they weren’t intended to apply. While no game can fix a bad GM who is truly set in their ways, good games can, though good writing, help inexperienced GMs avoid the pitfalls I’ve mentioned.

You’ve prepped, plotted, and planned. You have character sheets from the players, printouts from the rulebook, and everyone found a spot on the calendar that works. Now, your players are sitting around the table, dice in hand, and are looking expectantly towards your end of the table. What do you do?

I wouldn’t go so far to say that running your game is easier than prepping for it, but it is a completely different set of skills. Many of those skills, like using the game’s rules and putting yourself in the headspace of a character, apply equally to all players, whether they’re the GM or not. Others, like taking notes and tracking what’s going on in the setting, look the same whether they’re happening during the session or in prep time before. There is one skill, though, that is both admired and dreaded in equal measure: improv.

Welcome back to How the Wonk GMs! Last time we had a bit of an introduction, framing the GMing experience by talking about campaigns and how one sets up for a campaign. Today, the discussion will be more specific, talking about how one gets ready to run a session. Later, I’m going to go into what I actually do in the GM’s chair, and what running a session looks like.

The one comment I got on the last post in this series was that it was vague, and I concede that. Here’s the thing, though: After you frame up what kind of campaign you want to run, what conceits and systems would be fun for you, you want to keep it vague. An RPG campaign is not a novel, and when you’re setting everything up prior to play you want to leave as many doors open as possible. It is now, when you’re looking to set up an actual session that your players are going to show up to, that you can start closing the doors and settling on what you actually want the game to look like.

I call this session prep, but in the real world with schedule breakdowns, cliffhangers, and everything taking just a bit longer than you’d expect, this might be more of an ‘adventure prep’ given that some of these ‘sessions’ will last two or three. For the most part, then, we’re going to be talking in units of plot rather than units of time. For each of these units of plot, you’re going to be figuring out a problem statement, a problem space, and then a problem resolution. When you’re prepping, though, you start with the problem resolution from last time, use that to write your new problem statement, and then use the new problem statement and your existing prep to define a problem space.