This week’s chapter is meant to aid Game Masters with helpful tips and tricks to make running a game more manageable. We’ve taken ideas and information from multiple Game Masters, with decades worth of role-playing experience, and distilled them into one short, easy to read chapter. One blog post isn’t enough to cover all the advice they had to offer, but we will touch on a few of the essentials: storytelling, improvisation, and player engagement.
Beginning any good story can be hard. Players need to be reeled into your world and motivated to continue exploring it. Thankfully, the beginning of the story is also where the Game Master has the most control. Starting the Players out in the middle of a situation is usually a good way to get them involved in the action. Done well, this initial hook can also serve to establish the party’s bond to one another, and foreshadow events to come.
Once the story is set in motion, its flow and direction are largely in the hands of the players. They won’t always go the way you think they’ll go, or make the choices you think they’ll make. For this reason, it can help to build your story in modular blocks, rather than as one linear path, interjecting characters, story beats, and quests wherever the players wind up. This approach will prevent your game from coming to a halt if your players go left where you wanted them to go right.
Even taking a modular approach, players sometimes make choices that can alter the entire course of a story. Artifacts can be lost or destroyed, and villains can be killed. In these situations, it can help to have a few backup plans. If your BBEG (Big Bad Evil Guy) dies too early, for example, the story you had written about taking him down can be shifted to focus on the power vacuum created by his death.
Not even the most thorough GM in the world could prepare for every eventuality a party may throw at them, so being willing to improvise is a must. Players may fail their skill rolls at important moments, for example. Instead of allowing this to prevent the party from progressing or rendering the rolls invalid, find ways to "fail forward!" A good way to do this is to allow success with a cost. A player who fails a leap may catch themselves on a ledge, for example, but lose body points from the exertion. You could also offer players alternative solutions. If a player is unable to read a text, they may be able to decipher it at a library after hours of work, or pay an expert to translate it for the party. For larger derailments, the existence of multiple established factions can be a useful resource. For example, if the party has ruined their relationship with a person already established to have the artifact they need, another faction may use their connections to procure the item anyway, if the party can prove themselves useful.
Of course, none of this information means anything if the players aren’t engaged with the story. A role-playing game, like conversation, consists of both contribution and response. This is true on either side of the GM screen. Not only should players respond to the story, but the story should respond to them. It’s possible to begin engaging players even before the first session of the game. By taking players' intended characters into account, you can plan to incorporate factions that the player would likely interact with, or scenarios to further that character’s growth. As the story progresses, be on the lookout for player input about your story. Whether the input is communicated through role-play or out of character discussion, these thoughts and ideas are a sign that the players are investing themselves in your world. This is exactly what you want, but it’s also an opportunity to respond. Making these ideas into details of your world or tweaking ideas you already had, whenever reasonable, can go a long way towards making your players feel meaningful to the story.
We hope that you can put all of this advice to good use, but they’re only a few of the tips this chapter has to offer. Ideas for revealing secrets to players, knowing what to emphasize to get the party’s attention, and much more can be found in the Mortal Reins core rule book. We also know that no amount of pre-written advice can replace people to bounce ideas off of. For this reason, you can find a Game Master’s only channel on our discord server where you can seek input from experienced Game Masters, or offer your advice to others.
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