![]() In some cases, of course, this morphing of reality is the result of poor communication: The GM forgot to mention the ogre that is now pounding in their skull when they unwittingly tried to run past it. There’s nothing more frustrating for a player (nor more guaranteed to shatter their engagement with the game) than watching the reality of the game world shift like a mirage in front of their metaphorical eyes. Player: What the hell happened to the other door?! Player: Shit! Okay, we run out the other door! But since I’m not looking to specifically call anybody out, I’ll be anonymizing the details. The examples I’ll be using here are primarily drawn from some of the bad experiences I had at Gencon. But now I’m going to spend a little time taking the opposite approach: I’m going to talk about the stuff that you should NOT be doing. I like to tell you about the nifty stuff that you could be doing or adding to your games. I’ve written a great deal of advice for GMs here on the Alexandrian, and most of it is positive in nature. As a result, I suspect that many (possibly most) GMs exist in a bubble, and this isolation limits their ability to recognize (and correct) their shortcomings. There are, of course, some groups where players will cycle through the GM’s chair, but this seems to largely be the exception rather than the rule. This caused me to reflect on the fact that GMing is one of those crafts where you very rarely get to see another practitioner’s work. In a few cases, this was the result of a bad scenario, but for the most part I was suffering from some truly atrocious GMing. Although there were a couple of really great games, for the most part I was mired in complete duds. (Which I’m referring to as Gen Con Twelfth Night now that it’s happened three times in a row.)īut I did run into something of a bad streak of luck this year when it came to actually playing games. All in all, I had a really great time, picked up a bunch of cool stuff, and then came home to find a stack of Kickstarter games on my front porch.
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