Happy GM’s Day!
Whether you’re running a badass session in your current campaign, taking a day off from GMing or didn’t realize that today was a holiday at all, I’d like to invite you to pause for a moment and celebrate GM’s Day with TT.
As we March Fo(u)rth for GM’s Day, TT has several GMing goodies for you: two free PDFs, papercraft FUDGE dice and a bit of history about GM’s Day.
Free PDFs
Back in February, I launched the Wiki-to-PDF Project (WTP for short), a collaborative writing effort aimed at producing free, professional-quality PDFs for the GMing community.
The WTP was open to anyone who wanted to contribute to the two topics at hand, which were finding players and problem players — two things every GM will have to deal with at some point. I was supposed to have them converted to PDF form by the end of February — my apologies for missing that deadline!
The extra bit of time, however, did let me release these two PDFs for GM’s Day, and here they are (both direct links to PDF files): Ten Ways to Find Players & What to Do Next and Problem Players: A Guide.
“Ten Ways to Find Players” was written by John Arcadian, Brian Carl, Scott Martin, Martin Ralya, Kurt “Telas” Schneider and Scott Turnbull, and “Problem Players” was written by Scott Martin, Martin Ralya, Kurt “Telas” Schneider and Scott Turnbull. My thanks to everyone who contributed — these came out great.
Papercraft Dice
TT member shawnhcorey whipped up some nifty papercraft dice for GM’s Day.
They come in PDF form — all you need to do is print them out, glue them together (very lightly) and roll away: a jumbo blank d6 and a FUDGE die with smiley and frowney faces. Thanks, shawnhcorey!
History of GM’s Day
GM’s Day was started by EN Worlder spunkrat and Mark Clover of Creative Mountain Games back in 2002. The original EN World thread was entitled March Fourth for GM’s Day!!, which quickly turned into the official GM’s Day slogan: “March Fo(u)rth for GM’s Day!”
spunkrat described GM’s Day like this:
GM’s day is the day the gaming community would celebrate all the hard work our GM’s do for us.
Banners were created for GM’s Day 2004, and hosted by The Other Game Company, and GM’s Day has been gaining traction ever since.
The banner at the top of this post was creating by TT member Avlor, who also created last year’s GM’s Day banner for TT. Thanks, Avlor!
GM’s Day Sales
EN World has become the de facto headquarters for GM’s Day sales, and they do a bang-up job of listing the many, many publisher sales that are going on this weekend. You can find the whole (huge!) list on their main news page.
What are you doing to celebrate GM’s Day?
“What are you doing to celebrate GM’s Day?”
Post at once on my blog why that is dumbest thing I’ve ever read.
Ironically, we’re between GMs at the moment (the last campaign came to an end), so we’re all GMs today. Though soon we’ll start our next game…
(1of3) Post at once on my blog why that is dumbest thing I’ve ever read.
Ouch! Babelfish can’t offer a perfect translation, but German -> English came pretty close. Unfortunately, not close enough for me to tell what you were getting at. 😉
I gather you’re running or playing a lot of RPGs, though — was that the gist of it?
You’re right, that quote is pretty pretentious — thanks for highlighting it, 1of3.
Personally, I don’t get the self pity vibe from GM’s Day overall. I think it’s a fun, tongue in cheek pseudo-holiday, much like Talk Like a Pirate Day. I certainly don’t connect it with agony. 😉
And there’s a kernel of truth to the basic concept: appreciating the work GMs do. The average GM does a lot more work than the average player, which isn’t a dig against players — it’s just the nature of the beast. Even if everyone does the same amount of work at the table, the GM has quite a bit more to do between sessions.
Like most holidays, it’s historically just been an excuse for vendors to peddle their wares. Everyone smiles, offers 10% off their PDFs and pretends to care. But then, I’m a cynic. 🙂
I’ve certainly never received anything for GM’s Day. 🙁
As a publisher, I won’t deny that GM’s Day is an attractive excuse for a sale. (It usually draws some really good deals, though, even from companies that don’t often do sales.) However, Martin’s right – the basic concept is sound. GM’s do deserve a little special recognition once in a while – like mothers and various others who do more than most people realize. I think most publishers would agree with me that we hope players celebrate their GM a little, even if they give a pizza instead of a PDF. 🙂
(Abulia) Like most holidays, it’s historically just been an excuse for vendors to peddle their wares. Everyone smiles, offers 10% off their PDFs and pretends to care.
For last year’s post, I linked to all of those sales and held a sale on TT’s shirts — but the main event was the winning entry in our GMing Tools contest, which was posted the same day.
No one seemed to care about the sales links, and since they took a long time to compile without offering a substantial benefit over EN World’s list, they didn’t make the cut this year (I just linked to EN World instead).
Gone too was the sale on our shirts, since I’ve stopped advertising them entirely (and in last year’s post, they didn’t attract any interest either).
The timing was a happy accident — I missed the 2/28 deadline for the two PDFs — but this year’s post was all about giving things away. I wasn’t making a statement on GM’s Day being all about sales when I put this year’s post together, but I did like the fact that TT was giving away useful things for GMs — and seeing GM’s Day from your perspective, I like that aspect of this year’s celebration even more.
Something to consider for next year, in any case!