How to Keep Players Returning for a Thousand Hours

As noted elsewhere, I've run a lot of long campaigns. (I don't currently have an ongoing game that has lasted less than three years. My longest campaigns lasted eleven and eight years, respectively; one of my current ongoing games has continued for six-and-a-half years.)

Bearing that in mind, one of the most common complaints I see on the internet is about Game Masters attempting to wrangle players and force them to enjoy the GM's nonsense. To answer those complaints, here's a short list of advice, in many ways a coda and distillation of the advice I gave at the bottom of this post. Enjoy!

1. Don't cancel. If the players have to cancel, that's one thing. But in my experience, if the GM habitually cancels, everyone assumes the game isn't a priority and their attention wanes. Stay home if you're sick or there's an emergency, but otherwise, do your best to make the game a priority and your players will do the same.
• If you have to cancel, give as much notice if you can. Otherwise, even if you're feeling unprepared, this might be a great opportunity for a breather session.
• If you can establish a regular schedule, that's even better. Don't break it unless you absolutely must.
2. Listen to the players and make their choices matter. Table-top role-playing games have two big selling features: players can try anything they want (as long as they're willing to live with the consequences), and it's the only activity in this cyberpunk hellscape where a participant is guaranteed an actual living human's individual attention (as a reward rather than a punishment). So give it to them: let them try whatever they want and live with the consequences as long as you telegraph the consequences in advance.
• You don't have to tell them exactly what will happen, but "if you fail this jump you'll fall" and "you don't know what will happen if you mix those potions together" are good starts.
• Also, let consequences echo throughout the campaign. Players love it when a dangling plot thread from a year ago makes its triumphant return.
• You can do this even if the characters aren't "important." The cashier at the corner store notices that you haven't been around in a couple of weeks; that establishes the character's place in the world and suggests that someone cares about what they're doing.
3. Establish real stakes. A series of 300 scripted fights might be fun as a tabletop combat sport, but it makes for a boring longform campaign. Dig into why the characters are doing what they do, and play antagonists as intelligent characters in their own right. Everybody wants something, and has stuff they're willing to do to get it. What does that mean for the NPCs? What does that mean for the PCs? Even if the players are no-backstory dungeoneering chumps engaging in 1974-style fantasy adventuring to get gold to gain XP to build a domain, that's a plot detail that should probably come up before Level 9, right?
• On a smaller scale, not every encounter with hostile forces should lead to combat, and those that do should feature creative use of equipment, terrain, traps, tactics, and even more ephemeral things like positioning and time limits. A fight even against weaker opponents is more interesting if they have hostages, while C1: The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan increases the difficulty by giving the players a time limit while delving the dungeon.
• Even if events become world-shaking, always bring the game back to the player characters' scale. They're not saving the world, They're saving the people in it. They probably even know and like some of them!

That's basically it. You should show your players all the courtesy you want a friend to show you, and they'll keep coming back to find out what happens next.

You Should GM: DM Roundtable

A couple of weeks ago, Wizards of the Coast posted a video offering Dungeon Master advice from DMs around their office.  It's all stuff with which long-term GMs are familiar, but it might be worth a look for anybody just starting out.  And if you have a spare 77 minutes lying around.

Dare to Fail Gloriously

Scott the Angry DM made a cool post on Google+ back on Tuesday.  Meant as a rallying cry for GMs, the main thrust is that, as a GM, you should always run the game you want to run so as to avoid burnout, and that you are special for being a GM.

Perhaps this was particularly poignant as I was stocking a dungeon while reading it.

Whatever the case, "An Open Letter to Game Masters" is worth a read.

You Should GM: A Good Article of Game Mastering and Setting the Tone

Check out On DMing over at Monsters and Manuals.  Make sure also to read the companion articles he mentions in the text: My Campaign World Is Tear-And-Share Size, What About Yours? over at D&D With Porn Stars, and On Ressurecting the Quantum Ogre and Having Him Over for Tea over at Hack & Slash.

Good analyses on what one might want out of a game.  Also, I should probably accumulate all my posts I'd recommend to new GMs, as I think this is appropriate.  Though that threatens to be as arbitrary as all my other tags.

Ah well, as one judge said to the other, "Be just, and if you can't be just, be arbitrary."

You Should GM: Addendum

Last time, I wrote a little post about first-time Game Masters.  I thought of something else, as I'm sure I will do often, so I'm putting it here.  Maybe I'll organize a new label or something eventually.  Who knows?

Anyway:

• Acting isn't important.  Nobody cares if you can act or not.  Even if you just describe what's happening and have no actual "roleplaying" per se, a fun game is a fun game.  Jumping into character is frequently part of that fun, but don't feel constrained by it.  Also...

• Don't feel stupid.  You're gathered around a table, pretending to be fantasy people while engaging in what appears to be gambling.  Nobody will think you're stupid for making a silly voice, or doing something weird, or even making a mistake.  Put yourself out there and the game will pretty much always be memorable.

You Should GM

"You should run something!"

It's basically my watchword to anybody who roleplays.  I'm not sure if everyone should be a Game Master, but I certainly think everyone should give it a try.  My general recommendation is to try it once, and then try it again if you didn't like it the first time (maybe you had a bad day or a bad player or even a bad group).

But it occurs to me that I rarely give advice.  I'll say a couple of words of encouragement, but going from zero to running the beautiful anarchy of a roleplaying game is tough — a lot of these blogs give tools for running a game, but few of them give new GMs tools for running a game.

So, a couple of recommendations.

• Read this: http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2011/01/dungeon-mistress-mandy.html.  Zak's girlfriend talks about running her first game, and it has some good stuff in it.  Especially about winging it when you're a n00b.

• Run for friends.  Friends don't care if you mess up; a poorly-planned game just turns into an excuse to hang out and drink anyway.  And you're probably better at it than you think you are.

• Figure out what you want to run.  This is obvious, but there are a lot of choices.  Will it be funny or horrific?  Do you want to use an established setting or make up your own?  What system do you want to use?

• Determine your stance on those choices.  If you write a horror game, but everybody's having fun while making it goofy, maybe you want to let it go.  Established settings and rulesets are trickier: determine whether you're accepting advice or not.  "That's not how the rules work," or "That's not how that would happen in Synnabar."  You can accept that advice if you'd like, but you're better off saying, "That's not how it works in my game."

• Go with what you know.  Make sure it's a game you want to run.  Don't get pressured into running something.  If you don't know the game that well, but you really want to run it, I suggest ignoring complaints, as per above.

• Familiarize yourself with the rules.  While you can say bollocks to the rules, you should know some basic things.

• Adventure path or sandbox?  If you're just starting, I'd suggest a straightforward plot: find the gem, rescue the princess, something like that.  Consider, however: sandboxes (that is, games taking place in an area that the characters are free to explore, with the plot arising from character decisions) work well because they turn action into reaction.  The players do something, then you react, then they react, and pretty soon the plot builds itself organically.  I talk a little about the sandbox, though you can no doubt find lots of word count around the internet.  Leave a post if you want some good resources.

• Organize all your notes.  Get your notes in order and determine what happens.  If you write the adventure yourself, this is pretty easy because you already know it.  If you're using a prepublished adventure, read the adventure carefully.  A couple of times.

• Prepare to improv.  No plot survives contact with the players.  Come up with a list of random names (maybe the characters talk to a random shopkeep and you have to name him) and some other notes.  I devoted an article to improvising statistics in a few systems, so maybe look at that if it helps you.  Also note that some of you (maybe taking a hint from Mandy, according the article I posted at the top of the page) completely improvise the game.  That's fine.  It's a different feel than planning, but it's certainly not wrong (and if you can pull it off, you just developed the most important skill as a Game Master).

• It's okay if you mess up.  I ran two Imperial City games before I started the "official" version.  Just take the ideas you developed and try again.  Your players are probably your friends, so they won't care.  Even if you say, "Wait a minute, I need to back that up," your players will forgive you.  As in acting, though, it's best to just gloss over a mistake and continue playing.  But either way should be cool.

• Run for a small group.  The average group, more or less, is one Game Master to five players.  Limit yourself to three or less players.  I typically recommend trying a one-on-one session with someone you trust: a sibling, a good friend, or a significant other.

Basically, remember that you're running this for fun, hopefully for people who are your friends.  Prepare what you want to do, but be prepared to improvise.  Don't worry about getting something wrong: roleplaying is freeform enough that the only wrong thing to do involves not having fun (if your players cause that much anxiety, maybe find another group?).

If you forget a rule or skip a part, don't worry about it.  Your players will probably never notice.

And if you're ever really stuck, don't forget Chandler's Law.  Use the time during combat to figure out who these guys happen to be (typically working for some enemy faction, or a new faction if your game is really stagnating).