Quote from: Black Vulmea;955503Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate.

Sometime I feel like that when replying to you

Quote from: Black Vulmea;955503Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate.

* swoon * THUD!

Quote from: Black Vulmea;955503Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate.

I love it.

Myself, I only really have three things to say to new players:

- I (the GM) am not your adversary.
- Don't be a dick.
- No mobile phones at the table.

If I have to tell you more than 3 times to stop trying to constantly "defeat" the GM, being detrimental to anyone else's enjoyment of the game, or constantly texting or browsing social media, you won't be invited back.

Haven't had to worry much about ground rules...yet. The only "style" aspect I'd reveal is that I'll make almost all the rolls in the open (combat ones for sure). It's more about them than me, anyway, so I don't feel the need to drop much in the way of expectations, except to say that, if they wander in over their head, it is okay to run away (or to try to, anyway).

Quote from: estar;955560Sometime I feel like that when replying to you

Just remember I'm all bark, no bite.

I am Crom. I don't care. It's all on you, so come with a plan. Narrative logic does not apply.

Weaning players off the bad habits and expectations they have developed due to gaming with killer, or just plain bad DMs has been one of the most onerous and frustrating tasks as a DM I have had to deal with.

I lay out up front how I do things. What the setting is like and some ground rules for behavior. such as "Foul mouthery around kids and you are OUT." and in general things like dont min/max or try to game the system. Dont make a character thats somehow incapable of actually functioning as an adventurer.

Also what classes, races, skills, whatever are not available, or just really rare in the campaign. Such as no gnome PCs in BX or no Clerics and very few magic users in 2e Conan. Or even a setting where theres only haflings and magic using classes are not available. and so on.

I also usually explain some common knowledge things that the PCs will have of the start location and surrounding land. Such as kobolds are a major crafting race and trade extensively. Or that to the north is a vast forest formerly a mighty elven kingdom that fell to ruin. and so on.

Eh. If I'm spinning up a new group (fingers crossed that in the next month or two I'll be able to do just that!) then pretty much I just tell them that I'm there to react to them, not the other way 'round. I don't do mysterious dudes handing out free quests in the local tavern.

Mostly because if I DON"T tell them that, the first session or two is them painfully waiting for a mysterious dude in a tavern to give them a princess to rescue or some shit, and ignoring all the 'do it yourself' ideas I toss out like free candy.


For an established group then I pretty much just tell them my idea for teh campaign/setting/rules and find out what appeals and doesn't and run with that.  I got an uneven but fun two year Rogue Trader campaign out of that. Ended weakly, but was a fun ride all the same.

I tend to run tight, focused, short campaigns and I set up expectations up front.

Even if its as sandboxy as "a mysterious isle emerges from the mist, the king offers great bounty to explorers!" - I set the game in motion and then let them build off that in whatever direction they like. My Mazes & Minotaurs campaign has the conceit that Zeus was shot with Hades arrow and he's dying unless the PCs can discover a cure located somewhere in an archipelago of lost islands. A couple of the PCs don't even want Zeus to live and they're on the mission for their own gods.

I assume PC competency. Unless the situation requires rolling due to high chance of failure, I err on the side of the PC's skills. AKA, if you are Cleric of Hastur, you know all the basic Hastur lore, rituals, worship, history, etc without an INT roll.

I run high kill games. I do not fudge rolls. I am not out to slay PCs, but my monsters gotta eat and your PCs are on the menu.

I use morale for foes. Living things don't want to die. Consider flight as a possibility as well because I do not balance combats.

I encourage players to ask OOC questions. Your PCs know lots of stuff about the setting that you may not know. Feel free to ask me what your PC knows about XYZ. Again, remember I believe in PC competency. I believe informed players make better roleplayers and helps immersion.

If your cellphone rings and you're not a surgeon, you get punched in the junk.

If your spouse can somehow manage the baby while you are at work all week, they can do so during the 4 hour game.

Quote from: Baeraad;955467A commonly proposed solution to problems between GMs and players is "just tell players what to expect ahead of time." Which makes a lot of sense in theory. If you're going to commit to dozens of hours of play at the very least, you should know what you're getting yourself into. And it should reasonably cut down on later drama if there is an agreed-upon expectation for what a group is sitting down at the table to do in the first place.

I never really have this issue, as I either know the players beforehand or I am running vanilla D&D or some other game which may or may not use prefabs (like something Superheroic). If I were to warn them, then it would be to tell them to prepare for weird shit. My games can go full gonzo. Expect other worlds, alternate realities and time travel with no bloody fixed point nonsense. However, I rarely start this way unless of course the game is in Sigil, which it often is. I even ran a Mutants and Masterminds game there, with Eclavdra trying to seduce Spider-Man. Good times. More on this later.

Quote...you should give them a full account of your religious and political beliefs...

Say what now? Um how about no? The game table is not the place for that. Maybe during breaks, or when someone is having a smoke outside if you want to talk about that, but game time is game time and there's precious little of it to waste on shit talk. Now if they want to talk about in game politics and religion, well that's a completely different matter because that is world building as well as fleshing out the setting for players.

QuoteSo, as a GM, what do you tell prospective players about how you go about things? Do you have a list of what you consider vital information that you make sure to inform them of? And do you find that that does, in fact, work well to head off future unpleasantness?

Not really, though sometimes there is kind of an impromptu session zero, or I speak with them before hand. One group I sometimes DM for likes low magic games with trade and commerce. They have ambitions of having their own territory and building their own armies. So often I'll run a game in Thyatis or Karameikos where taking a mundane route is a perfectly fine way to go. Another group is perfectly fine with what I throw at them, so right now that's Sigil. If it's a completely new group then there has to be a reason we're all in the same place at the same time, so I assume I have already prepared something and worked out the details with them.

QuotePart of it may be that I try to match the intended playstyle of whatever game I'm intending to run. No one's surprised when most problems in a Savage Worlds campaign ultimately boil down to hitting mooks over the head. Likewise, if I propose a GURPS game, you don't need to be a genius to guess that thinking before you act is probably going to necessary, whereas if I suggest a Barbarians of Lemuria game, you can more or less assume that jumping in with both feet and a lot of splashing will usually be the way to go.

That's the best way to go. If I have a group of murderhoboes than you bet we be murderhoboing that night. Or if they want to treasure hunt, then there will be a dungeon and horde guarded by something, or a palace with a vault that boasts to be "impregnable". Sometimes they just want to sit in the tavern and yap away, which is fine especially if the campaign has been running for some time.

QuoteAnother thing that I suspect helps is that I try to examplify what I'm after. For instance, I put a lot of work into giving my NPCs distinct personalities, which I think sends a pretty strong signal to the players that this is a frou-frou True Roleplayer campaign and that they are not supposed to hack and slash everything in sight. I prefer to play by the rules as much as possible, so I reference what rules I use when I use them, and tell the players what their characters are capable of based on what their skills are. And so on. Show, don't tell, basically. It won't help with a player who genuinely came in wanting something completely different, but most players are a little more flexible than that and are willing to take some cues as they go along.

I recycle NPCs a lot. The world and tech may change, but I always have certain personas ready to bring in. Why not? If you use the same NPC (some of which started as PCs long ago) for decades, then they become handy tools for immersion. Sometimes for fun, I assign actors to NPCs. Sometimes this works, and well. An episode of Big Bang Theory where Howard is DMing comes to mind. Though I am sorry, but every Rakshasa NPC I have every used sounds like Shere Khan.

QuoteAnd conversely, I also take some cues from the players as to what they seem to want and what interests them. If some part of my initial plans really seem to be boring them, I'll start downplaying that part and focusing on what they seem to want to engage with. If, by some strange accident, I manage to pitch a game of courtly intrigue to a group of players who all want to do dungeon-crawling, then within a few sessions, once I have figured out that that is the case, it will likely turn out that dungeoneering is the current fad among the court and that the best way to win the ear of the King is to impress him with how much loot you've acquired recently. I aim to please, folks. :cool:

The hard part here is when you have characters with diverse interests and you have to try and encourage them to work together. Sometimes that requires some planning. In the worst case, the party gets split and you have to be good at time management to make sure each group has enough quality time. Most of the time through, there all there for one thing more or less and worse comes to worse I'll randomly generate a dungeon crawl, either using tables or just drawing whatever I feel like. Remember, nothing unites characters for a common cause better than the promise of loot. Loot is gaming's universal solvent. A player can have a lousy night, and one gumball sized ruby can turn that right around. The important thing is that if the player is trying to make a contribution, then whatever they are playing should be of some use to the overall success of the group. But if one player wants to be a merchant or something and do more trade than adventuring, that is fine too.

More than anything, if I player has certain goals they want to accomplish in the game I do outright tell them to let me know ahead of time. I WILL make adventures for specific characters, though yes everyone else gets to go too. Seriously though, do this BEFORE you start running the game. The players should know what they are playing. Though I suppose sometimes people do go along for the ride and might not even know what they want right away. If that's the case, I usually ask them about their favorite fiction. Knowing what someone geeks out on is quite helpful. If you find some players feel lost in a certain setting, it can still be salvaged. Put some dungeon crawl into that intrigue, and have players investigate the basement of a noble from a rival house, and then they stumble upon the catacombs underneath as well as the noble's dark secret. Whatever works.

My style of GMing tends to tune into the players: I give them the freedom to do what they want to do, and I assume that they will propose doing things that they will enjoying doing. My approach to rulings similarly defaults to a low threshold of information from the player before resolving an action, while also allowing them to flexibly focus more time and detail on the stuff that they want to focus on.

This means that I generally don't have problems. The rare exception is a player who keeps choosing to do stuff that makes them unhappy. This generally happens because of some other GM who has inflicted damage upon them. If I can identify the problem, I will attempt to address it specifically as necessary. (Experimenting with openly declaring "you can do whatever you want!" at the beginning of a session proved ineffective, because it turns out that the GMs who inflict this kind of damage on players habitually lie and say the same thing.)

What I will explain are any non-intuitive scenario structures we're using -- whether that's hexcrawls or Ars Magica covenants or Technoir's "ask your contacts".

Quote from: AsenRG;955485And if you expected to spend considerable time each week together, yes:).
You know, the way you introduce yourself to your co-workers the first time the manager introduces you...at least that's how it works in every office I've been in - I'm sure someone would tell me you don't do it this way in state X of the USA;).

I can only report that we don't do that in Sweden. When you start at a new office, you're pretty much expected to quietly feel out the local consensus and then politely agree with it...

... and I just realised this second that that's pretty much what I'm expecting my players to do, too. Huh. The culture you're raised in can sneak up on you like that... Well, like I said, that approach has in fact usually worked for me, even with players from all across the world.

Quote from: Krimson;955651Say what now? Um how about no? The game table is not the place for that. Maybe during breaks, or when someone is having a smoke outside if you want to talk about that, but game time is game time and there's precious little of it to waste on shit talk. Now if they want to talk about in game politics and religion, well that's a completely different matter because that is world building as well as fleshing out the setting for players.

I was being sarcastic! Of course you don't do that (well, except in Bulgaria, apparently...). It's just the sort of thing that nerds tend to propose, usually in a tone that suggests that they have solved human interaction through their peerless logical thinking!

Quote from: Baeraad;955467So, as a GM, what do you tell prospective players about how you go about things?

[video=youtube;V-OYKd8SVrI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-OYKd8SVrI&list=PLF84F7E8A02EBFD57&index=106[/youtube]

Quote from: Omega;955624Weaning players off the bad habits and expectations they have developed due to gaming with killer, or just plain bad DMs has been one of the most onerous and frustrating tasks as a DM I have had to deal with.

Guess things are different in your neck of the woods, but I tend to have the opposite problem these days:  Players who are so used to being handled with kid gloves that they instantly assume I'm a horrible, bloodthirsty killer GM as soon as I mention that PCs can die in my games.

For my latest campaign (4e) my pitch was:

It'll be in the Nentir Vale setting http://nentirvale.wikidot.com/setting starting in Fallcrest, and open/sandboxy so will follow player/PC interests rather than a single pre-written story (but I do have a bunch of adventures I can use). I'll mostly be using the standard rules but I want to use minions a lot for fast fights and make them seem 'real' so will be giving them 1/4 the hp of a standard monster. Re character creation, I think it would be a good idea to spend part of the first session on making characters together, unless you want to bring a pregenerated one.

I generally don't say much but I generally try to get over (a) that I seek to avoid railroading and I like proactive PCs (b) some mention of houserules so players don't expect RAW. (c) If using a published setting with metaplot I let them know I won't be sticking to canon. Generally the more I think I'm deviating from the game's default assumptions, the more I'll say.