Quote from: Bren;858689I completely disagree.

Personal experience say otherwise.  Now, that was an extreme example, but my point was that if the players interests don't really align, then it doesn't matter how educated the crew is, it ain't going to go well.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;858693Personal experience say otherwise.  Now, that was an extreme example, but my point was that if the players interests don't really align, then it doesn't matter how educated the crew is, it ain't going to go well.

And my point is that you incorrectly identified successful gaming as solely a matter of preexisting congruence of interests and it's not. No one ever has complete alignment of interests. Therefore every successful interaction is a function of the ability of the participants to reach an acceptable level of congruence in their interests. And that is at least as much a matter of their flexibility and openness as it is their preexisting alignment of interests.

And given a choice between someone who is not already aligned with the setting but who is flexible and open and someone who has a preexisting alignment with the setting but who is rigid and closed to new ideas and experiences, I'll take the player who is flexible and open every single time. And my personal and professional experiences both bear that out as the better choice.

None of that is intended to imply that working to set out and to align expectations ahead of time is a bad thing – because it is not, only that it is not the most important thing for long term success of a campaign group. Whereas flexibility and openness are.

One might then wonder how this relates to my earlier comments regarding reading habits of good GMs. In my experience people who read widely and deeply are more able to make connections to the backgrounds of other people than are people who do not read much at all. This is important for the GM since the GM needs to find some way to connect to the players with descriptions, with tone, with the selection and presentation of adventure hooks, with the characterization of NPCs, with a whole host of things that come up as the GM. The GM needs to connect their knowledge and experiences to that of their players. So in that sense the more the GM knows the better the chance that they know something that either overlaps or that they can connect to something that the player also knows. In addition, the breadth of their reading is important, probably more important than depth of reading, because it aids in drawing connections, but also because it tends to correlate to openness to new ideas and experiences and it either correlates to or improves flexibility in thought.

Quote from: tenbones;858646...
Me - Alarmed. Holy shit. This place is a setup. It's a TRAP!...

...It wasn't until after I'd panicked the other players and they started slaughtering all of the innocents that the GM just gave up.

...

And I tell them - Go ahead and look. I guarantee you I can tell you what's in all two-hundred and fifty-three crates and they'll all be different. Go ahead. Look. I dare you.

...

You just completely cracked me up! Brings back a lot of memories of learning to GM, and some great players who pushed the limits and made us all better GMs, often in hilarious ways on both sides. I am going to point some of my olde players at this post!

Quote from: tenbones;858215So I was talking to some friends of mine back in LA. Things aren't going well. Their GM is a railroading combat-monkey that tries to tell the players how their PC's *should* be reacting to his self-circle-jerk world. The guy is a bit of a clod.

It got me thinking...

How much does one's reading habits matter for GMing? A few guys I know that I consider "great GM's" that are voracious readers of fiction and non-fiction.

I know a few GM's that I just consider "good" or "decent" - their reading habits are sporadic, but when they read anything, it's usually good material.

I know of *no* "good" GM's that don't read at all.

Is this anecdotal with the rest of you? Do your own reading habits inform what you consider good/great in your GMs? What about your playstyle?

I think a lot of GMs would benefit from reading less pop scifi/fantasy and more non-fiction. Especially history.

Quote from: RPGPundit;859482I think a lot of GMs would benefit from reading less pop scifi/fantasy and more non-fiction. Especially history.

In the past 30 years, I've had more come back to my tables when I've run (which has been mostly Fantasy games) than complain, and frankly, I'm barely knowledgeable in medieval weaponry.

I don't know, I'm thinking that it's less reading books and more reading people, and from that, able to figure out what your players want, then reaching a compromise between what you want and what they do.

I could, of course, be wrong.

Quote from: tenbones;858215So I was talking to some friends of mine back in LA. Things aren't going well. Their GM is a railroading combat-monkey that tries to tell the players how their PC's *should* be reacting to his self-circle-jerk world. The guy is a bit of a clod.

It got me thinking...

How much does one's reading habits matter for GMing? A few guys I know that I consider "great GM's" that are voracious readers of fiction and non-fiction.

I know a few GM's that I just consider "good" or "decent" - their reading habits are sporadic, but when they read anything, it's usually good material.

I know of *no* "good" GM's that don't read at all.

Is this anecdotal with the rest of you? Do your own reading habits inform what you consider good/great in your GMs? What about your playstyle?

My empirical experience matches with yours.
Which is rather unsurprising, really. Books require thinking over the material, unlike more visual mediums, and give you the time to try and guess possible developments, both of which are useful skills for any Referee!

Quote from: Skarg;858225I may be mis-interpreting, but it seems to me that over the last 25 years or so, both pop fiction and RPGs (and computer games) have taken a depressing dip in the direction of forced plots, exaggerated protagonist abilities with no reason, easy protagonist survival, things not needing to make sense, undeserved focus/significance on protagonist plots, etc., and I imagine that TV and Hollywood and Young Adult fiction have a lot to answer for. But maybe I'm just becoming a cantankerous old grump. ;-)

This is my opinion as well, for all it counts.

Quote from: Xavier Onassiss;858251Sometimes I think reading too much is a hindrance. (For me.) I'm a voracious reader of science fiction; I read the classics when I was younger, and now I'm hooked on modern SF, especially the new space opera.

But most of my players are TV/movie addicts, and that leads to a lot of disconnects when I'm running a game. They're completely lost when I explain to them which authors inspired my game; I usually get a chorus of variations on "Never heard of them" in response.

It's hard to run a good SF RPG when you can't find players who've read Iain Banks, Stephen Baxter, and Alastair Reynolds. But they've all heard of "The Fifth Element."  :banghead:

That's the players' problem, IMOE. If they aren't willing to learn, throw them in a science fiction sandbox with the plots of a few books running in the background.

Quote from: Bren;858264For anything beyond a very surface level of knowledge one will get from TV and film, I think you do need to read. Even the long documentaries like Ken Burns' Civil War are still only at a surface level of knowledge and in my experience, those are the exceptions not the norms for documentaries.

I agree completely:).

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;858268Some GMs are great at research and enhance their campaigns with it. Others take a lot of surface level knowledge and turn it into an exciting adventure. I certainly won't dispute you are probably going to learn more by reading books about the civil war than by watching documentaries (though reading the right books is just as important as how much you read). But I don't think GMing requires that kind of smarts. Again, I am not knocking being well read. I like to read a lot myself. And above all I like to read history books. But I have never really seen level of reading reflect quality in GMing in the groups I've been in. What seems to matter is that the person have sources of inspiration.

I think it does, unfortunately.

Quote from: nDervish;858303I haven't read fiction in years, although I do listen regularly to a handful of short-fiction podcasts, which may or may not count.  I do read a fair bit of non-fiction and (obviously) discussion forums, but I assume that's not the kind of "reading" you're talking about.

I also get the impression that the people I've played with consider me a good GM and enjoy my games.  And, in recent years, I've only been playing with strangers (moving halfway across the world tends to do that), so it's not just old friends humoring me to be nice.  There have been a few who have left because they wanted different things in their RPGs than what I was offering, but that's to be expected any time you're bringing new players in.

Perhaps relevant, though, is that I specifically aim for campaigns which feel like they could be taking place in the (or at least a) real world rather than a feeling of being in a story, which seems like it would be a good fit with my reality-heavy/fiction-light reading habits.

Yes, that's a good point. If you're going for a "being in a story" campaign, what you need is to have read lots of stories of this kind.
But-read, again. For reasons specified in my previous post. If you want to run an anime game, read manga. Or watch anime and read about anime.

Quote from: tenbones;858359This is exactly what crystallized the question for me. Do you agree that it's certainly possible to have a non-reading/consuming GM do a "good" game. But what about those really *great* campaigns? I guess this is an informal poll of sorts... has anyone had a truly WTF-awesome campaign from a GM that wasn't an avid reader (or whatever passes for that these days)?

Never had that happen;).

Quote from: Bren;858689I completely disagree. This depends far more on how much of an annoying pedant the GM is and how interested and willing to learn something new the Medievalists are.

The experiences of people who enjoy playing in and learning about Tekumel or Glorantha provide excellent counterexamples of your point. MAR Barker clearly was an expert on Tekumel, but from everything I've read and heard he was many things, but an annoying pedant was not one of them. Also players like Chirine and Gronan (and me) were happy to learn something new about Tekumel even though our expertises lie in other areas, just like my players (and players in many other games) have been happy over the years to learn about Glorantha.

That's my experience as well.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;858693Personal experience say otherwise.  Now, that was an extreme example, but my point was that if the players interests don't really align, then it doesn't matter how educated the crew is, it ain't going to go well.

Interests never coincide completely, even among voarcious readers. Everyone has to learn a bit, every time.
The GM just have to present it in a format where the reading can be done in smaller installments.

Quote from: RPGPundit;859482I think a lot of GMs would benefit from reading less pop scifi/fantasy and more non-fiction. Especially history.

Well, I obviously agree:D!

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;858381Our expectations as players may be different as well. What I've found is the guy who watches Kung Fu movies all day long can put together just as fun and exciting a campaign for me as the guy who does nothing but read books on Chinese history and culture. Those are going to likely be two very different campaigns, but they can both be just as fun and exciting (and informed in their own way). In reality though of course, few people are that extreme on either end. But I've definitely met folks who just don't read that much that can still run and manage a highly entertaining campaign.

yep this is extream but a good example

Quote from: Christopher Brady;859513In the past 30 years, I've had more come back to my tables when I've run (which has been mostly Fantasy games) than complain, and frankly, I'm barely knowledgeable in medieval weaponry.

I don't know, I'm thinking that it's less reading books and more reading people, and from that, able to figure out what your players want, then reaching a compromise between what you want and what they do.

I could, of course, be wrong.

as some one who has spent time reading on weaponry it can greatly help in the way you use them in a much more believable manner a good example is fire arms  and the rather rampant misrepresentation of there ability's in Media and im not talking about artistic license or game play concessions  
more when a show or book is trying to be the "real world" and uses a gun or round that simply could not do what the writers what it to cuz they used the wrong one

Quote from: kosmos1214;859641yep this is extream but a good example



as some one who has spent time reading on weaponry it can greatly help in the way you use them in a much more believable manner a good example is fire arms  and the rather rampant misrepresentation of there ability's in Media and im not talking about artistic license or game play concessions  
more when a show or book is trying to be the "real world" and uses a gun or round that simply could not do what the writers what it to cuz they used the wrong one

The problem is in my experience most players want something closer to Hollywood firearms. It is going to depend on the game of course but if the GM tailors treatment of firearms to the one guy in the group who wants detail and realism with firearms, you can lose the interest of the other four or five people. In the right group, that kind of realism could be handy. In practice I find most groups don't have that sort of expectation around firearms.

I also find this when I a player: sometimes you know more about a subject than the GM, when that happens you can choose to allow it to affect your suspension of disbelief or you can embrace the world the GM is presenting and choose not to have it impact your suspension of disbelief. If you find you still can't mentally adapt in that way, and your broken from your disbelief involuntarily, you still have the choice of whether you ruin things for the rest of the group or not. If it is just a bad GM and everyone is unhappy, that is different. If you are just the smartest guy in the room at that moment and want others to know it, the problem might be you if you disrupt the game to complain or point out an issue no one else is picking up on or cares about. Again, sometimes it is just the GM is bad. That is a different scenario. I am talking about when the GM is pleasing most of the players at the table, the game is going great, and that one guy has to lecture everyone on the rum trade in Colonial New England.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;859679I am talking about when the GM is pleasing most of the players at the table, the game is going great, and that one guy has to lecture everyone on the rum trade in Colonial New England.

Not everyone wants to know about the rum trade? I am shocked. Shocked I tell you.

EDIT: I may be biased since I've already used the precursor of the rum trade--the Dutch triangle trade route.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;859679The problem is in my experience most players want something closer to Hollywood firearms.

I find that this is a divide which applies to much more than firearms. You will not get your typical action movie if I apply normal police procedure, even if the rules support Hollywood firearms, unless the players take precautions that do not figure in most movies.
Thus, it must be stated clearly and unambiguously before the campaign begins where the game is going to lay. You might be defaulting to reality for one thing and to movies for another, but you must be clear.
You must also be clear on your sources, because if you're thinking "Fist of the North Star" or "Naruto" and I'm thinking "Chinese Hercules", "Killzone" and "Bourne identity" when talking about "dangerous martial artists", we're still going to have a clash of expectations despite both of us referring to fictional characters.

And if you agreed to refer to reality, the guy who tells you about the rum trade is doing you a favour, just like the Star Wars nut who's giving you a lecture on the history of the extended universe is right when we agree to refer to the Star Wars canon.

Quote from: AsenRG;859721And if you agreed to refer to reality, the guy who tells you about the rum trade is doing you a favour, just like the Star Wars nut who's giving you a lecture on the history of the extended universe is right when we agree to refer to the Star Wars canon.

I think reading the room is important here though. If people are open to the lecture and its going to improve the game for everyone, then sure. But I've seen gamers agree to refer to reality, then it becomes clear during play their notion of reality is not gritty super realistic firearms. In that situation, where it is clear people are content and not interested in what might have to say, giving the lecture isn't doing anyone any favors, it is just disrupting the game session. I only bring it up because in my experience, nine times out of ten, the guy giving such a lecture is the only one interested (and I've been that guy myself).

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;859749I think reading the room is important here though. If people are open to the lecture and its going to improve the game for everyone, then sure. But I've seen gamers agree to refer to reality, then it becomes clear during play their notion of reality is not gritty super realistic firearms. In that situation, where it is clear people are content and not interested in what might have to say, giving the lecture isn't doing anyone any favors, it is just disrupting the game session. I only bring it up because in my experience, nine times out of ten, the guy giving such a lecture is the only one interested (and I've been that guy myself).

Again, that depends:). Even if you weren't looking for a lecture, if you had agreed to refer to an area where this guy is more knowledgeable, he's still doing you a favour by sharing his expertise.
That's why I often try to make games that are covered by someone else's expertise, this way people have to ask someone else about the setting:D!

Quote from: AsenRG;859834Again, that depends:). Even if you weren't looking for a lecture, if you had agreed to refer to an area where this guy is more knowledgeable, he's still doing you a favour by sharing his expertise.
That's why I often try to make games that are covered by someone else's expertise, this way people have to ask someone else about the setting:D!

Again though it is about reading the room. That is the key. If people are clearly interested in the lecture, if people clearly want that in their game, then yes. But it doesn't matter what people agreed to or said at the start of the campaign if they are not really interested in it. People might say at the start they want realism, then the game starts and you realize they want something more like 24 or James Bond. They might also say "realism" and mean something completely different than what you think it means. You are not doing anyone a favor by giving them a lecture they have no interest in. That is my point. If you start talking and its clear from body language and other cues that folks really don't care, there is no point in going on about it. Again I only mention it because I've seen that guy in any number of games and most of the time he is bringing things to a halt, not helping. And like I said, I've even been that guy myself (which is one reason I am aware of the issue). When you have something to add to a campaign like that, first ask whether you are sharing it because people truly want it and would benefit, or if is just to show off your knowledge or have a chance to finally talk about something you've been studying forever.

There is also flow to consider. Let's say people want that kind of stuff in the game, but you have more knowledge than them and you notice something no one else picks up on. Do you stop the GM and say "Actually that shouldn't happen because of X" or do you let people enjoy the flow of the game and maybe bring it up with the GM after the session? I would say if no one else noticed and everyone is having fun, your better off waiting until after the game or until things slow down enough to bring it up because you are breaking everyone else's immersion if you stop things mid fight or at a particularly exciting moment.

Again, I only bring it up because I've seen the expert in the room bring things to a crashing halt too often.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;859837Again though it is about reading the room. That is the key. If people are clearly interested in the lecture, if people clearly want that in their game, then yes. But it doesn't matter what people agreed to or said at the start of the campaign if they are not really interested in it. People might say at the start they want realism, then the game starts and you realize they want something more like 24 or James Bond. They might also say "realism" and mean something completely different than what you think it means. You are not doing anyone a favor by giving them a lecture they have no interest in. That is my point. If you start talking and its clear from body language and other cues that folks really don't care, there is no point in going on about it. Again I only mention it because I've seen that guy in any number of games and most of the time he is bringing things to a halt, not helping. And like I said, I've even been that guy myself (which is one reason I am aware of the issue). When you have something to add to a campaign like that, first ask whether you are sharing it because people truly want it and would benefit, or if is just to show off your knowledge or have a chance to finally talk about something you've been studying forever.

There is also flow to consider. Let's say people want that kind of stuff in the game, but you have more knowledge than them and you notice something no one else picks up on. Do you stop the GM and say "Actually that shouldn't happen because of X" or do you let people enjoy the flow of the game and maybe bring it up with the GM after the session? I would say if no one else noticed and everyone is having fun, your better off waiting until after the game or until things slow down enough to bring it up because you are breaking everyone else's immersion if you stop things mid fight or at a particularly exciting moment.

Again, I only bring it up because I've seen the expert in the room bring things to a crashing halt too often.

I agree with all of this; it matches my experience as well.