Awhile back, I saw a thread on EN World called DM personal training — and although it faded out pretty quickly, the idea really grabbed me.
Many hobbies have pretty obvious metrics by which you can track your improvement — but not GMing. If you’re into mountain biking, for example, it’s easy to tell when you’re doing better: If you’re going further, faster, on tougher trails, you’re getting better at it.
Not so with GMing — the best GMs can do is try to gauge their players’ enjoyment of their games, along with their own level of enjoyment, and ask for feedback from time to time (which can be problematic in its own right).
But are GM workouts a viable idea? And if so, what would a GM workout look like?
Some useful suggestions cropped up in the EN World thread, before it got sidetracked — my favorite is this one, by Django:
One thing you could try is videotaping yourself for a session. I guarantee you’ll find the result both illuminating and disturbing.
It’s not a workout per se, but I can see how watching yourself run a session would provide you with some concrete examples of your strengths and weaknesses as a GM (and provide great fuel for your naughty list). In fact, I’d love to give this one a try sometime.
In response to the idea of trying to up the number of, say, puzzles that you included in your games each time (which sounds a bit problematic), Kid Charlemagne said that he did something similar:
I would take a rule, and find a way to implement it in that week’s game.
When you’re running a game for the first time, or GMing one with some fiddly rules (grappling in d20, anyone?), this sounds like a pretty solid way to set benchmarks by which you can track your progress. This would be helped along by the fact that you have a definable goal, one where doing more “reps” could apply — rather than a soft goal, like “have more fun at this session than we did at the last one.”
There’s nothing wrong with that goal — it’s one of the most important goals you can have as a GM! — but it doesn’t lend itself to easy tracking. And that seems like the main problem with the whole concept of GM workouts: Meaningful goals, like becoming a better GM, are easy to come up with, but it’s hard to track your progress towards meeting those goals.
So how about it: Are GM workouts a viable concept? If so, how would you implement them?
Roleplaying isn’t a sport of achievement, really.
It’s like, how do you tell if you’re a better interviewer?
How do you tell if you’re a better accompanist?
How do you tell if you’re a better software quality assurance tester?
These are not reliably benchmarkable pursuits.
That being said, if you want to try to stretch your abilities, here are some things you might do:
1> Invite difficult people to your games.
2> Implement problematic and confusing rules
3> Take on the burden of narrating not only your NPC’s actions, but those of the PC’s as well
Of course, you’d ruin the game if you did that.
A ballet dancer might learn to jump higher by performing with lead weights on her ankles, but ballet isn’t about who can jump higher.
It’s like, how do you tell if you’re a better…
By producing better results. As a long-time musician, I can tell you that there are good and bad accompanists, and ways to improve.
A ballet dancer might learn to jump higher by performing with lead weights on her ankles, but ballet isn’t about who can jump higher.
But it is about extensive training and practice, and there are good and bad ballet dancers.
The issue is simply that judging “soft skills” is more subjective. That doesn’t mean one cannot assess and improve.
Oh, certainly. But you can’t reliably benchmark such things. I’m not saying that there aren’t usually ways to improve. I’m just saying that measuring that improvement, and setting goals for that improvement, are highly problematic, for the same reason that measuring and goalsetting for being an accompanist are problematic.
I mean, how do you tell who’s a better gymnast?
You see how well he impresses the judges. They have scores they tally up and calculate, but in the end, you’re just trying to “please” them… and pleasure is something that’s very problematic to benchmark. Just ask folks who are in the gymnastics community about shifting standards in judging, and how hard it can be, sometimes, to know what it will take to get that lat .05 out of a judge that makes you a medalist.
Perhaps what the gaming world needs is a solid, well-attended, well-publicised, well-judged GMing competition.
One of the best judges of whether you are a good GM, is if your players stick around and want to play with you again. You may not be the best GM in an absolute sense, but you are the best GM for those players and how they like to play. If people you think are good gamers continually drift away, you may have problems.
I’ve been GMing with some of the same players since college in 1989. While I don’t claim to be a good GM, I have many flaws and I make mistakes, I certainly run a game well-enough that some people will stick around for 16 years.
My wife has had to point out to me how much certain people in the group value the game and the group of people that we play with – she’s much better at reading emotions and motivations than I am.
Her viewpoint and those of new people in the group are often the best. They are unfettered by years of bad habits and the close familiarity that forms in a game that makes you ignore certain behaviors and tendencies. New gamers, especially women, are the best at telling you your flaws. Women are more open and communicative about what they like and dislike and see no problem in discussing “personal issues”.
When I wanted to learn D&D 3, I just started to run a session, and like the one commenter, I tried new rules and spells all the time. I would try to break the system and find its limits – try things I was used to doing in other systems and see if it would work.
This improves the mechanical aspects of being a GM, and it has the side benefit of often causing rules discussions and disagreements which help to improve the “cat herding” skills of the GM.
As far as video-taping yourself, that’s an interesting idea, uncomfortable, but interesting.
I have always tried to figure out how to, for lack of a better phase, “up my game”. For me two areas where I try to expand my abilities, are in describing a scene, and NPC dialog.
In a previous topic, you asked what were some of our GM shortcomings, one of mine is that when I get excited, I do not describe the setting as richly as I think I should. So I try to leave little visual reminders in my notes to slow down and describe what the players are seeing.
To practice that, I do what I call verbal portraits, where I pick an object that I have seen or am looking at, and start describing it in as much detail as possible. I do this out loud, and try to listen for things that make an object stand out, or sound more real. One can describe a truck in winter, making some notes about the snow on the roof, but what about that chuck of ice in the wheel well, that falls off on the ground when the car is parked?
Also, after years of playing (almost 25) I cringe when I do a stereotypic Nobel voice, or start speaking in one of those Ren-Fair English accents. So I try, and often when I am alone in the car, driving to or from work, to practice some other voices and speech patters. I will also listen carefully to movie dialog and try to take mental notes of interesting speech patterns or phrases that people use.
So those are both areas where as a GM I think you can do a bit of a workout, and not even need to be at the table.
> the cards you sometimes fill out for your convention GMs — do you know the ones I mean?
A friend passes a comment book around starting the last half hour or so each session. Idle players start filling it out, and then the rest do it during pack-up. It’s done every session, so group members quickly learn to make mental notes for their content. We all enjoy reading all the comments, so there’s accountability and friendly competition to be observant. 🙂
That’s a good idea, Johnn — much better than just using comment cards, I suspect.
I think the “comment notebook” idea is particularly interesting, and may be worth trying with my players. All of them are young (aged 10-14), and some of them really don’t like to write: it’s real work to write legibly at that age, especially when you know your peers will get a chance to read what you wrote! I do worry that those most pained by setting pencil to paper will be those who don’t bother. Making it a hard and fast requirement would not work with this group, but the motivation to improve their own enjoyment of the game may overcome some of that.
Fred, I’d wager that the kids in your group are probably more comfortable typing than writing by hand. That’s based on no scientific research whatsoever, of course. 😉
If your main concern isn’t getting them to pick up their pens, pass around a laptop at the end of the session instead — and then print out the results to share.
I mean, how do you tell who’s a better gymnast?
You see how well he impresses the judges. They have scores they tally up and calculate, but in the end, you’re just trying to “please†them… and pleasure is something that’s very problematic to benchmark.
Judges do not simply vote on how impressed they are. Any gymnastic routine involves technical elements that judges can objectively assess. Figure skating, e.g., works the same way. A huge part of any routine is performing specific moves that are assessed using a point system.
Again, there are “soft” elements that enter into it, but that doesn’t make the pocess 100% subjective. IMO, there are some basic GM’ing skills that can be assessed before moving on to issues of style and feel.
At GenCon Indy this year, I walked out on an event; I’ve never done this before. It wasn’t just becasue I had a gut feeling about the GM. It was becasue the GM was making some fundamental mistakes that were making participation in the event pointless, and thus a waste of my time. These mistakes could be easily pointed out (and hopefully corrected) before even touching on whether I liked how he did accents or whatever.