![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
contrarianarchonHmm. Thinking about the last couple of RPG sessions I've run, and I think I can def see my skill as a gm improving. At my club, my gimmick is that I'm the "Improv" GM; the person who can throw together something that will be fun in five minutes and teach new systems as I go. So I end up doing that a lot. Combined with laziness, my ability to prep in advance has suffered. That's not the end of the world, since, well, I can improv, but it makes longer games much harder to run. This combo's with the club-nature of membership constantly in flux, so games rarely last anyway. This kinda behavior informs a lot of what I do.
The two markers I can see which I think are indicating that I'm becoming a better gm is that I'm much better at getting engagement; I'm a pretty open gm, I talk about assumptions, ask a lot of questions and generally don't keep that many secrets, except in as much as many games have lack of perfect tactical and strategic information as a core element. I can be bombastic and kinda pressing at times, I think, but I'm getting much better at making rants entertaining and inviting people to participate and have thoughts and contributions. This is esp needed to prevent the "Single person who has force of personality and a goal drives the whole plot" thing which many of these games suffer from. The other thing I'm getting much better at is answering the question "What happens next" on a session to session level as well as a moment to moment one. This really good for preventing games from dying after one session if one is flying by the seat of one's pants. I think it helps that both of the games I'm running now have pretty episodic natures; one, I have been describing literally in the terms of a television show at points.
What do I still need to work on:
Prep and plot is still a big deal; I could make scenes hang together, now I can make sessions, next I need to make proper plots do so. I also need to prep more stuff for the games I know I'm going to be running, so I'm not writing worldbuilding literally as the players explore
I need to work on getting more RP into these RPGs; currently they run very much like games, with characters existing as tools for interacting with the world and achieving campaign-defined goals first and as people who talk and feel second. This I think is in part due to a general discomfort speaking in character (as opposed to describing the content and gist of a conversation), which, having identified it literally just then I can maybe work on that.
Overall: My players are having fun and I'm not working myself to the bone doing it, so all is basically well. Still, I can always do better.
The two markers I can see which I think are indicating that I'm becoming a better gm is that I'm much better at getting engagement; I'm a pretty open gm, I talk about assumptions, ask a lot of questions and generally don't keep that many secrets, except in as much as many games have lack of perfect tactical and strategic information as a core element. I can be bombastic and kinda pressing at times, I think, but I'm getting much better at making rants entertaining and inviting people to participate and have thoughts and contributions. This is esp needed to prevent the "Single person who has force of personality and a goal drives the whole plot" thing which many of these games suffer from. The other thing I'm getting much better at is answering the question "What happens next" on a session to session level as well as a moment to moment one. This really good for preventing games from dying after one session if one is flying by the seat of one's pants. I think it helps that both of the games I'm running now have pretty episodic natures; one, I have been describing literally in the terms of a television show at points.
What do I still need to work on:
Prep and plot is still a big deal; I could make scenes hang together, now I can make sessions, next I need to make proper plots do so. I also need to prep more stuff for the games I know I'm going to be running, so I'm not writing worldbuilding literally as the players explore
I need to work on getting more RP into these RPGs; currently they run very much like games, with characters existing as tools for interacting with the world and achieving campaign-defined goals first and as people who talk and feel second. This I think is in part due to a general discomfort speaking in character (as opposed to describing the content and gist of a conversation), which, having identified it literally just then I can maybe work on that.
Overall: My players are having fun and I'm not working myself to the bone doing it, so all is basically well. Still, I can always do better.
