GM Advice: Keep Yourself Humble

No tag for Under Sleeping Suns this week, because this is not a Loris-specific essay.

This week (sorry for the delay, folks, life got in the way), I'm going to talk about something that a lot of GM's, designers, and world-builders often forget:

It pays to be humble about your creation.

When I say that, when I use the word humble, I'm not referring to you being meek about your goals: don't say "well, it's obviously not that good because Joe didn't like it." I'm also not suggesting that you be submissive in what you want to see in your game world: no giving in and putting everything in that your players want and nothing they don't (well, unless that's your thing).

No, when I say humble, I mean that you should have a state of being unpretentious about it. You should strive to let go of your ego in the building of your game world and be willing to accept input and criticism about the way that your game world (and therefore, your game) is developing. I mean that you should ask the players at the end of each session "Did you have fun?" and if even one of them did not, step back and take a good hard look at why they did not. Is it a difference in play style? Is it that the player feels that their character didn't get enough spotlight this session (and the last several sessions)? Is it because of personal issues on the player's side?

The art of being a good GM stems from the same root as being a good world-builder, or being a good host and friend. It requires practice, patience, and the understanding that sometimes you're going to get things just plain wrong. You aren't a "bad GM" if you make a mistake during a game. You're not a "bad GM" if you forget to follow up on a promise to a player to delve into a particular plot-hook. And you're not a bad world-builder if you let certain aspects of your world get away from you and go running off onto their own tangents at the expense of others. But here's the thing: Just as you can't be a good GM if you're not paying attention to your mistakes, you similarly can't be a good GM if you only ever pay attention to your successes. The art of getting it right – whether it's just for your regular game group, a convention tournament, or for the thousands of people you hope will one day buy your adventure module – is a constant process of comparing and contrasting your successes with your failures. You must learn from both equally if you want to succeed.

Sure, this is pretty common-sense stuff, but honestly in my day I've seen a lot of games, and I've played in just as many, and I've had good experiences and bad. All of the bad experiences were identical in their failures: the GM didn't take time to really think about the outcome of the actions of the NPC's, the world-building was rushed, set in stone, left little room for adaptability to player actions, and the GM's game style was not compatible with the play style of the group. The good experiences all shared identical qualities, as well: The GM was adaptive to the actions of the player characters, the world was established and firm but still malleable enough to adapt to the events of the game, and the GM (even if their play style and that of the players wasn't the same) was able to figure out what the players needed in their game and provide it to them.

In other words, the "good" games in this list all come from a place of humility in their creation. The "bad" games are inflexible, unconcerned with player actions/ingenuity, and generally fairly rigid in their premise and execution. Under the premise of this essay, then, a successful GM and world-builder must therefore be able to accommodate these things, and enact changes in their approach when necessary.

So why bring this up today? Frankly, because one of my players pointed out that I had done something in my game world that was not consistent (and we do know how I love to be consistent) with the rest of the worlds cosmogony. He asked several astronomical/cosmology related questions, and in seeking to answer them, I discovered that I'd made a few blunders that were not only inconsistent, but outright contradictory to what I'd written elsewhere. Now, blatant contradictions is good for in-game philosophy or religious texts, but it's really bad for observable phenomena such as the worlds orbiting Loris and how they interact. Since I don't want to just hand-wave his questions and say "my world my rules" (and especially since I have made a point of trying to remain internally consistent), I had to step back and ask myself how I was going to answer him while keeping the previously related items.

I did find a way, but in the doing, I had to change a few things. The orbital "dance" of Loris' two suns, to be specific, and the method in which the planets move through the cosmos around Loris herself. But in the end, I think the game world's believability has come out the stronger for it.

Of course, all of this long-winded essay can be summed up with a few short sentences:

* Don't have an ego about your work.
* Be willing to accept your defeats with as much enthusiasm as your victories.
* Get your players input, and apply it where you can.
* Make sure everyone's having fun.
* That includes you.