DUNGEON MASTER’S GUIDE TO ROLEPLAYING

Our mistakes while running a game might haunt us, but there’s plenty to learn from our cringy ghosts

I’m going to share a little secret with you. Every GM in the world, whether they’re the wonderful storyteller down at your local club or one of the rising tide of celebrity gamers killing it on Twitch, has had a bad session. Every. Single. One.

I know that I have. I’ve had plenty of nights where things just didn’t seem to gel, or where some idea I was super excited to introduce to the table turned out to be a fun destroyer. None of them have quite turned out to be ‘burn it all down, never go back to that gaming table’ bad – at least, not from my perspective – but a couple have been horribly close.

And you know what? It sucks. Just as a few hours of slick, solid roleplaying and decisive storytelling can leave you on top of the world, a session of awkward interactions and stilted adventuring can suck the very life from your bones.

Realising that you’ve messed up a night of fun, not just for yourself but for a group of your friends or family, is a miserable

experience. It makes you want to quit GMing forever and retreat back to the comparatively safe territory of the other side of the screen.

Now, I’m not going to sit here and claim that everybody absolutely needs to do things that make them feel anxious or miserable, all for the sake of claiming some weird kind of point. If you had a truly terrible experience behind the screen, you’re under no obligation to force yourself back into a situation that you don’t want. However, if you’re just regulargrade annoyed that something turned out badly, I want to reassure all of you that running a crappy adventure is okay.

Yes, it feels crushing at the time, but do you really think that an artist has never produced a piece of work and realised it should probably go into the bin? Do you think your favourite writers have never spent weeks crafting a story, only to wedge it somewhere in a drawer and never look at it again?

GMing is much the same way. It’s a skill that you need to work on and the hone (well, most people do, anyway – I know I sure do), and an important part of practising any skill involve screwing up now and then.

SELF-REFLECTION

When a session goes south it’s easy to look for an easy target to blame. Maybe the players didn’t do what you thought they would. Maybe the adventure you were running didn’t explain things quite the way you wanted it to.

There’s a good chance that this will be at least partially right, but when you’re trying to learn from a bad session it helps to try out a little bit of self-reflection. Sit down with your notes and try and figure out where things went wrong and work out what you can do to avoid it in the future.

For an example pulled from my own dark past, one of the lessons I had to learn the hard way was to avoid situations where my NPCs needed to talk to each other for extended periods. It sounds obvious in hindsight, but it wasn’t until I tanked a session by having my players watch my personalities talk to one another for 20 minutes that I realised quite how much energy it sapped from the room. Nowadays, if I can’t avoid a scene where NPCs share some vital information I make sure to deliver it in a brief, snappy summary. Instead of acting out all the dialogue for them to sit through, I just tell them that the ambassador and the queen quickly descend into a row over the bandits at the border, and soon the insults get real personal.

Would I have come to that conclusion without making the mistake in the first place? Maybe, but maybe not. Ultimately, I was able to learn from it, and that’s the important thing.

I want to reassure all of you that running a crappy adventure is okay

TABLE TALK

The more GMing advice you read, the more and more you’re likely to hear the phrase “just talk to your players.” And while this is a little cliched, that doesn’t make it wrong.

One of the best ways to help your game recover from a weak night is to chat with your table about it. This can clear out the cloud of anxiety hanging upcoming sessions, and simply acknowledging that things maybe didn’t go quite the way you planned can go a long way to getting people to rally round and try to up the energy next time you meet.

Of course, admitting that things didn’t go smoothly can sometimes be a little embarrassing, especially as so many GMs love to cultivate an air of impossible competence and easy efficiency. However, it’s also a great way to improve.

You can ask people if they struggled with any parts of the session in particular. See if there was a reason why they didn’t have so much fun. Check if things actually went quite as badly as you fear they did (you’d be amazed how often people have told me that really enjoyed games I was sure had bombed).

From here you can go on to making plans to avoid the same issues. This could take the form of avoiding drawn-out combat encounters in anything but the most climactic of circumstances, or enforcing a ‘no phones at the table’ rule so that players don’t get distracted by the pressures of reality intruding into their night of fantasy.

And always remember that you aren’t alone. We’ve all made mistakes and had crappy sessions of our favourite RPGs, but one of the best ways to improve your GMing is to try and learn from them.

Of course, it’s always worth remembering that sometimes the real lesson to take from a miserable session is simply “don’t play with those jerks again.”

But at least that’s something, right?