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Walt C. emailed me about the most basic division of the GM’s roles. I thought this would be a good topic for discussion, and Walt gave me the thumbs-up on turning his email into a guest post. Thanks, Walt!
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While there are a number of ways to parse a GM’s job into “hats,” the two critical ones are Creator and Manager.
The Creator is an adventure/campaign/world designer. He writes his own material for each session and spends a lot of time between sessions developing the game world.
The Manager actually runs the session. She takes the adventure and makes it come alive during the session.
We often lump these two together as what a “GM” does, but that’s not necessarily accurate. On alternate Sundays, I run a Freeport/Bleeding Edge campaign. All of the material was written by Green Ronin’s stable. In essence, I only manage the games. For my Friday Witchcraft game, I wear both hats. I design and run the adventures.
In the past, I didn’t consider “manager-only” GMs to be true GMs. It was the mark of a lesser GM that needed to rely on published adventures and was no good at writing his own material.
I’ve learned since that it can be just as much or even more fun running through published materials than a GM’s homebrew. Also, from a GMing standpoint, it feels less personal if the players criticize an adventure that you didn’t script.
Thinking about this division, what I wonder is this: Do people still think of a good GM as someone that can handle both, or is the managing aspect enough to mark one as an excellent GM?
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(Other TT posts on the role of the GM include GM as Meeting Facilitator and The Game Master is the Leader of the Group.)
Excellent post! I’ll take a great manager GM who didn’t create his or her material over a great creator GM who can’t manage a session any day of the week. For me the management of the game session is when the best GMs step forward and get the job done regardless of what material is being used.
Might as well ask if a composer can’t reach the level of Mozart, does that make them a bad composer? Or a hack?
Can’t we admit that the highest level is someone who can run a fantastic game of their own devising, without thinking that it somehow disparages people who GM published material ( or some “lesser” mix )?
Not everyone can be the Greatest GM Everâ„¢. And they can still be awesome.
“In the past, I didn’t consider “manager-only†GMs to be true GMs.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima f’n culpa. I had that arrogant attitude as well, until I recently ran a few published adventures. It takes far more prep than I expected to run a published adventure well. Not quite as much as “rolling your own”, but you generally know all the major holes have been patched.
I recognize the difference, although I’ve never seen dissected so explicitly. I’m wondering if a “GM Fight Club” wouldn’t be a good idea, where everyone takes a turn GMing and then gets (and in turn gives) honest criticism about various aspects of the game.
Darelf,
The post is more about the division than the quality. To take your example, the question is not whether you can compose as well as Mozart, it’s whether you’d consider someone a great pianist if she never composed a song in her life.
To use a gaming example, suppose you’ve had a great time playing under a certain GM that has only run published adventures. If someone asks you if she’s a great GM, is your answer:
1. most definitely! We always have a great time when she runs!
or
2. I’m not sure. She’s great at running published adventures, but I really need to see her run something of her own before I call her a great GM.
That’s… kinda my point.
Can’t she be a great GM, while we acknowledge that creating and running adventures is a higher level of “GMsanship”? (GMosity? GMology?)
In the end, the answer has more to do with whether you are measuring subjectively ( We have a lot of fun! ) or objectively ( She achieves a 73 of 100 on the Darelf scale of GM Awesomeness ). [That last is just a bogus example]
I will say that I think someone who takes your number 2 there as their first answer probably is a douche. But if you were, for some unfathomable reason, trying to determine where this GM fits in the celestial GM hierarchy, then you might need to go with something more like 2.
Which is curious, is there some kind of GM rating system? I mean, there are objective facts about GMing that could be tested through game-play, aren’t there? ( Or are there? ) I mean, at cons they have “tournaments” and different people from players to GMs “win”….
Having been to a couple of “rated” game sessions where different groups of players would “advance”, I think it ruins the whole experience of gaming myself.
(more rambling is occurring in my head, but I will spare you)
I have not really ever used a published adventure. Its not for dislike or because I am better then they are…but I have never found one that “fit” me. I dont think someone who runs games ONLY by published adventure is less then me. They dont have NPC Dialog in front of them, or even in most cases an NPC answer to every Player question.
If I ever found an adventure I enjoyed I would probebly insert it into my grand arc and give it a shot. I think we all excell at different things. Perhaps the person who is not very good at making their own adventures is a master of the rules, while the guy who does is simply “so so”.
What happens then?
i’ve always considered a good GM to be first and foremost a good manager. being a good designer as well is kinda neat, but hardly the point.
Since we’re waxing philosophical:
Is a player a good player if he always plays well during the session, even though he always uses pregens or lets the GM stat out his character?
My GM question is more of a “when evaluating a GM, can we look solely to Manager as a criterion?”
Interesting how it doesn’t go the other way. A Creator that doesn’t manage (such as writing published adventures) won’t usually get called a “GM.”
Does a “great” GM also do part of the Designer/Creator stuff even when they are using published modules? Maybe we call it improv, or whatever, but don’t the so-called great GMs “own” the adventures they run? I mean things like dialog, action, description, etc.
Aren’t the great GMs the ones who can do the Designer/Creator stuff even when they following a published module?
Well, let’s all throw in our twopennorth…
Although, until recently, I subscribed to the view that to be a great GM you had to run homebrew stuff, I don’t agree with it any more at all.
The skills involved with being a great manager run far deeper than those required to write a great module/adventure. Acting, emotional intelligence, time management, pacing, empathy, consistency… all the time with 4-6 players staring at you. Compare this with prep… in the comfort of your own home, you can take as much time as you like over it, you generally know your players and their characters… I’d much rather be in front of a PC preparing what might happen than being sat in front of them deciding what will happen.
Besides, most of the really great campaigns I’ve played in have been based on published adventures.
But here’s my real point…
Now, writing an adventure knowing you won’t be managing it… like game designers do, I guess… that’s impressive… and managing a game without any prep… like crazy improv GMs do, I guess… that scares me. That would impress me.
Perhaps a great GM is a great manager who CAN run homebrew modules, or CAN run published modules, or CAN improv a session out of thin air… I know this is a big ask, but we’re talking ‘great’, which to me means aspirational.
I think GMing a session with someone else’s notes is too challenging. Sorry, but for me it’s just easier to make it up myself (and organize it myself) than to learn something someone made up.
If that makes me a hack, then I’m a hack.
I don’t think I’ve ever subscribed to the idea that a GM is only good if he uses home brewed stuff. Why publish any kind of world setting if that is the case? I think Walt C makes a great distinction though. Some GMs think that making a world is the important part. While I’m a fan of that, when you actually sit down at the table you are not there to keep building the world. You are there to Manage what happens to a group of people in it. Since you’ve got control over the world (created by you or someone else), why not modify it to fit the situation at hand? That is what I think a good Manager GM does. You manage the situation, not the world around it. I’ve always been a fan of player focused games, though. You can’t completely change stuff to suit player needs though. That would be completely unrealistic, so I think you have to play a bit of the Creator if you are going to be a good manager. Work out how big picture stuff will affect the situation you are managing. Generally I’ve found it is easier to get players to buy into this if they have a bit of an idea as to what they are facing. “Ok guys, the general theme of this session is: abandoned village, dungeon crawl, political manuevering.” etc.
My thought is that even “manager-only” GMs really do some Creation to fill in the blanks, change things that don’t fit with the world the adventure is being run in, tailoring things to the specific PCs, etc. It’s like Monte Cook said, “That’s why your the Dungeon MASTER, not the Dungeon READ-OUT-LOUD-ER.”
So, I have to reject that someone can be a good GM and not do any creation at all. It’s a form of bad GMing not to adapt at all what someone else has prepared for your group, but I would NOT say that good Managers are inferior to good Creators… both are good things and if you have a GM who can do both well you are very lucky indeed.
I’ve waited a few days to answer this one, because I think this may very well be the most important distinction ever drawn on this blog.
I would go so far as say that there is even a signficant different among the creators. That is, those who can design encounters and scenerios, use a different skill set than those who create worlds and settings.
That doesn’t mean a single individual can’t do both well, but it seems to me to require a different tool set. Settings creators utilize very macro thinking, whereas scenerio designers are involved in the mechanics at a micro level.
But art of the Game Mastering clearly falls into the “manager” category. As for the difference between the homebrew and the published guy, all I can say is it probably takes a great deal of imagination and innovation to take a published work, and “make it their own.”
Distilling published material and conveying it to players so they can be involved in an interesting and compelling encounter is a much under-appreciated skill.
Great discussion, everybody!
I just wanted to make one final point. When I parsed the terms, I never intended to imply that a Manager does no “creating.” Good managers adapt the materials to their group and PC decisions. This, however, is done on a far different scale than a creator.
I’ll have to muse on the “world-builder” Creator vs. the “adventure” Creator. That’s a very good distinction!
I agree that there’s room for sub-divisions, but what I like so much about Walt’s basic division is that it really cuts to the heart of an issue I’ve never seen or heard brought up anywhere else.
Trying to look at this split objectively, I’d say that a GM with both skillsets is categorically more experienced and versatile than a GM who lags in one area or the other.
Assuming you define the quality of a GM’s skills by how much everyone at the table has at her games, though, I don’t think either type is superior. I’ll always take a GM that delivers me a fun game in their strongest style over a GM that runs a bad game in a style they’re less comfortable with. And as a player, I don’t much care which style of game I’m playing in — my litmus test starts and ends with “Am I having fun? Is everyone else having fun?”
I’m in the same pool as someone who once looked down on designers/prepared notes, but eventually learned to appreciate both the material and the GMs who are good at using it.
I think that using other people’s materials is another key skill; we all do it by using someone else’s system, but you’ll see different levels of success. Different levels of making the game or the adventure their own.