So I've Never GMed before...
 

And I might want to try it.

Reworking a post that was going to go into the Why I've Stepped Away from GURPS thread before it closed for straying off topic (so here this kind of stuff will actually be on-topic).

There's the stereotypical fantasy setting we've all heard of, and apparently some people have played it a great deal. I haven't; I want more exposure to it than I have.

Whenever I consider leaving GURPS for D20 Micro-Lite or somesuch I keep wanting to houserule in point-buy, templates instead of classes, active defenses, and DR rather than armor class. Only things I ever really want to change about Hawthorne magic is removing the ability to cast spells for free and some features I never use (like ceremonial casting and softening if not ignoring the prerequisite chains in the Magic book); I'm not nearly as much of a tinkerer as seems to be the norm for GURPS fans.

I've played probably fewer than a hundred sessions of a D20-lite (we ignored all feats other than the Fighter's Cleave, spell preparation/memorization, and the skill system, as well as the existence of druids) and three or four of sessions GURPS (100-point adventurers in a land full of dinosaurs with a GM used to 3e and only one player who really knew what he was doing at character generation; I wanted a fighter-mage and didn't have a feel for how small 100 CP was, winding up with 30 spells at skill 12 and 1 or 2 points each in almost every sword skill, but DX 10).

I view being a Game Master rather than playing a player character, or even playing the leader of the party if I do get to be one of the heroes, to be more of a chore than anything else. But if it's the only way to get moar like this, I'll do it. The more I complain about how difficult it is for me, the easier it winds up sounding from the replies I get. Maybe if I squeak enough I'll eventually build up the courage to try finding a group.

My only personal GURPS products are Lite, a copy of Caravan to Ein Arris, and DF: Loadouts(a Christmas gift; in hindsight I should probably have asked for Henchmen, but hey, stats for boomerangs!). I have a friend with GURPS 4e Basic Set, Magic, Thaumatology, several 3e books, and a bunch of D&D (boxed set through 3.5), as well as miscellaneous other system core books, like Rollmaster and Space 1889. Lack of overall materials isn't exactly a problem here.

I do not personally have a means of purchasing more PDFs for myself, so I can't always get specific things from DF to smooth things over play. I have another friend whom I rarely see who seems to have every PDF imaginable, and I sometimes take a look at the DF series from him. I plan to obtain DF 2, DF 3, Henchmen, and possibly Allies and/or Treasure Tables. Any other recommendations, should I suddenly go from Wealth(Poor) to Wealth(Struggling) and find a means of electronic purchasing?

I don't have people for in-person gaming. I do however have a number of friends on Skype and IRC channels, some of which seem to be interested in playing at least a little bit when I discuss these things. I need to be confident in what I can and will do and able to set a scheduled time to play before I try bringing a group together.

Hex maps are a little bit of a sticking point for me, so maybe I'll use LEGO Heroica board game pieces and miscellaneous bricks for the miniatures and architecture, ignoring the GURPS RAW's preference for hex grids. Seems a lot easier than trying to find a dry erase board with a hex grid on it, or meticulously putting one on myself.

Dungeons and buildings tend to be rather rectangular anyway, so it's hard to get grid maps to play nicely with them (or at least it looks that way to me), though they do work very nicely for caves and mountain trails. It's not like I can trivially overlay a hex grid over an existing gridless dungeon design, not with MSPaint at least.

I can give an inventory of the miniatures I have available. I don't think I have what it takes to wing the stats for monsters on the fly, though the goblins are easy enough for me and there's a tiger in Basic I can copy into my notes and give attack stats to. Last time I listed them asking for help with stats, the thread got buried without a response...I don't know how much of that was lack of interest, or if I just named or tagged it badly. Anyone want to take a stab at helping me? SMs based on relative size to my hero figures, ST appropriate to the monster's size, and venom stats for snakes and spiders at least (the humanoids are easy to stat as monsters).

There are a few things about my personal fantasy setting that stand out at least a little bit from what I hear to be the norm. First, I like to put a big focus on the culture not having "racist dickweed" as the default attitude for anyone(not elves, not humans, not even dragons), cities being racially diverse and mixed breeds being at least as common as typical single-race characters. Second is that I'm currently waffling about how blatantly my Christianity-with-the-numbers-filed-off religion is exactly that, and whether or not there are lesser beings than the Dragon Himself that would be classified as gods in typical gaming parlance. I'm also not sure if my first attempt at GMing should be set in such a weird world or if I should try to stick to something more familiar.

I have my race templates and interbreeding rules written up on Google Docs...in my GURPS-inspired Fantasy Heartbreaker, not GURPS proper. Perhaps I should try converting them. Perhaps I should make a separate thread for discussing my half-breed rules, simple as they are, because I like the way they look on paper. Anyone interested in that?

Re: So I've Never GMed before...
 

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Re: So I've Never GMed before...
 

And to piggyback on what FarTrader has to say - it's absolutely okay to not ever be the GM. Some folks just don't have the desire, and that's a preference that folks should honor and accept.

There are a handful of play by post GURPS games going on at any given time over on myth-weavers.com, if you'd like to keep an eye out for them there. It's not the same as being at the table together, but it's not terrible either. Roll20 hosts GURPS games that take place in real-time, but online, as well. You might find someone there to join.

Re: So I've Never GMed before...
 

Sounds like I'm talked out of it.

Maybe some day I really will feel like it. I love worldbuilding, I just don't feel like I have the what it takes for something as social and improvizational as game mastering. With luck I can get into a DF game with a custom race and/or religion :3

Re: So I've Never GMed before...
 

Well, I'll just say this. Not to try to talk you back into it, but to paint a different picture. Some GMs love adventure design. They love to build challenges for their players. I've played with some and the experience in an adventure is stunning. But they don't enjoy the world building aspect so their adventures seem really isolated. But they know their strengths and they play to them. If you like world building, you could GM and play towards that strength.

Build the big-picture layout of the world. Fill it with giants, dragons, or whatever cool big picture threats you can envision, and then have the players make characters who deal at that level. Movers and shakers who shape the world and challenge evil realms instead of evil orchestra tribes. Who explore evil lands in search of Intel for the upcoming battle instead of dungeons in search of MacGuffins and loot. Who wield armies in battle with dark lords instead of swords in battle with orchestra chieftains. Then, you're playing to your strength because you've built something you're interested in.

Re: So I've Never GMed before...
 

I think this approach would actually require even more improvisational skills ob the part of the GM. Designing high-powered opponents takes much more time, and higher powered PCs are much more able to throw the GM a curveball. Just saying.

Re: So I've Never GMed before...
 

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Re: So I've Never GMed before...
 

My most successful campaign with my current group was run in a world that one of them built. You could potentially find yourself a me to actually run the thing and be the other guy who wrote the setting if that's what you really want.

Re: So I've Never GMed before...
 

You can do this without too much work using GIMP, a very powerful freeware image manipulation tool. You'll need to download that and find a script (like this one) to create the grid.

Re: So I've Never GMed before...
 

Well, I GM'ed my first game over the Christmas break. It's a very different experience sitting on the other side of the table.

One thing I really wish I had done before hand was acted out the various major NPCs by myself. When I'm a PC, I generally have an easy time playing the characters I've created, largely because I spend a lot of time in their heads, so to speak, but I didn't think to do that with the NPC's to they were a bit flat.

For the rules management, several of the other players were experienced Gurps gamers, and a couple of them had been GMs before, and they helped immensely with resolving rules questions. Also, when you are the GM, you can pull numbers out of your bum, when you need a solution, and nobody knows which rule covers the situation.

The last thing I ran into was player management. One of the players was playing a very dishonest character in an adventure that was fairly oriented around the party being honest. Near the end of the adventure his character got caught in a way that the only reasonable response for the NPC's was to remove him from the party. Overall, that part was not so much fun. I should have started dropping warnings earlier that the character was treading on dangerous ground. On the other hand, we were able to salvage it by having his character ally with the villains for the climactic end battle, which the party managed to successfully evade...

We didn't actually use hex maps; we just did the fight sequences by calling out what was there, and each player called out who they were fighting when it was their turn. We did not go into the detailed tactical game.

I'm working up for a larger campaign, and one things I'm doing to get ready for it is, I'm setting up little scenes I can play out with some of the other players, so we can get a good handle on the rules and what they mean in practice.

I'd say just run something like Caravan to Ein Arris with a bunch of disposable characters, and see what you think, before tackling something bigger.

Re: So I've Never GMed before...
 

I GM for the power trip. Dance, my puppets, dance! Never even suspecting where your strings are... :P

Re: So I've Never GMed before...
 

I tried GIMP out a year or two ago. It takes around half an hour to boot up on my "good" computer and the tools are really difficult to use, and it had a tendency of saving the wrong layers when I tried saving layered images.

Re: So I've Never GMed before...
 

I strongly suggest that you GM at least three times.

I speak from experience. I was extremely shy. Without my experience at GMing, I doubt my college job interviews would have gone so well.

The reason I recommend at least three times is that you will probably think you did poorly. It takes a few times to get that out of your head. One of my favorite playing experiences is once when a friend of mine GMed. Unfortunately he thought he'd failed and he never tried again, no matter what I said.

My biggest mistakes as a GM:

1. Do not have powerful NPCs go along with the PCs.
2. Do not have a "GMPC"
3. When one or more of the players proposes doing something that short-circuits or avoids your planned adventue, don't force them back on track. Ask yourself "why not?"
4. Practice playing the NPCs.
5. Create a few NPCs that are designed around the power level you want the PCs to be. Use this to determine the starting CPs. Be generous.
6. Don't screw over the PCs. It's their story.

Re: So I've Never GMed before...
 

So Kenneth, are you in the 313 proper, or are you out in the suburbs like me (in my case, Dexter)? GURPS is really great for doing the sort of old-school fantasy that you're looking for, but if you haven't experienced it before you're going to have a hard time GMing that setting. My regular group is having a hard time getting together on a regular basis, and I'd love a chance to run a more beer and pretzels game.

If you can get to Ann Arbor, there are a couple of public places we could meet and run a beer and pretzels sort of fantasy game.

Re: So I've Never GMed before...
 

Actually Detroy is the name of a city in one of the settings I've made and Kenneth Latrans is the name of a character that lives there (in Infinite Worlds I classed it as a Q4 Weird Parallel; Ken himself is a cryokinetic police officer). I named my account after the character rather than the other way around. I sometimes consider asking for a name change or altering my profile to suit reality better.

In reality I live in Wyoming, near Grand Rapids. Same state, different side.

Re: So I've Never GMed before...
 

Dear lord, this. I have a habit of building settings I probably lack the ability to GM simply because I'd really, really like to play in them.

Excellent pieces of advice, particularly speaking as a player. A few comments...

1. The primary GM I've played with had an absolutely horrible habit of having large numbers of super-powerful NPC's populating his worlds, and occasionally had them join the characters... which resulted in said NPC's being the only ones capable of doing anything, resulting in the actual PC's being stuck watching them be awesome.
2. I had one of these myself during my brief foray into GM'ing, intending to eventually have the GMPC be separated from the rest of the group and later (much, much later) come back as an antagonist/anti-villain (fulfilling a similar narrative role to Magus from Chrono Trigger, although optionally serving as a Patron, not Ally), but the campaign fizzled out. The character was sneakingly stealing the spotlight as it was, however, which was rather problematic.
   Of course, in the longest-running campaign I was in the GM I referenced above actually combined the first two options. I ended up munchkinizing my own character to a ridiculous degree just to keep up, which ended up somewhat-alienating the other players (as they could accomplish essentially nothing) while silmultaneously making the game rather boring for me... so I left (leaving 1 player and the GM; not certain what became of that campaign).
3. This can require a bit of improvisation, but if you're not very good at that a cheesy solution is to still run the same adventure, just "reskin" it to match what your players are trying for. If their idea was particularly good, give them a tactical advantage. Say they're investigating a missing caravan, and you have an adventure planned where they find the caravan (plus corpses, minus goods) then get ambushed by the brigands. Your plan is for them to defeat the brigands, then track them back to their base. If the players instead opt to head to a cartographer and try to determine where the robbers might be holed up (rather than heading to the caravan itself), and they succeed, have the ambushers instead be sneaking about near the base, and let the characters get the jump on them instead.
4. I'd imagine things would have gone better if I'd done this, and the only session I played in where the GM appeared to have done so was excellent. Contrariwise, I've had GM's who apparently don't realize their "helpful ally" NPC isn't supposed to come off as "rude, ungrateful prick," and are shocked when the party gets wiped out by an enemy said NPC was meant to help with, due to the party not bothering to get the NPC to help them out.
5. Additionally, be certain you're clear to your players what you're expecting. There was a thread not long ago with a player trying to create a knight on a mere 80 points (with [20] eaten up in Status). If the GM opted to do what DangerousThing suggests, he would know a knight really isn't doable on 80 points - and if he knew this, he certainly should have made it clear that a knight really wasn't an option in this campaign.
   Of course, if you're running DF, your work is already done for you.
6. Agreed. There's little worse than an adversarial GM. If your players get their characters into serious trouble, by all means let the chips fall where they may - but don't go out of your way to screw them over, and never put them in an unavoidable situation where they can't win (the GM from [1] did this a few times, and it was always rather annoying; the time we killed off his "unbeatable" opponent was kind of fun, though).

Re: So I've Never GMed before...
 

In short, "GM unto others as you would have them GM unto you."

:3

Re: So I've Never GMed before...
 

And the key is: preparation. Luckily, you like worldbuilding, so you will enjoy that. Make sure that when you do start up a campaign, the players know what is going on.

I'm planning to start a new campaign soon, and I have the world view ready to go. It's a 1930s dieselpunk game, and the world-view is about 12 pages of the history of the world since the end of my previous 1880s steampunk game. Some people will tell you that is too much, but I enjoyed writing it, the process helped me clarify some details of the world, and the players don't have to read it if they don't want to. It won't be killing any trees or waste any face-to-face time as I'll be distributing it electronically, along with a four-page campaign outline telling the players the campaign background, patron, what kind of characters they can play, new houserules for this campaign, etc.

Re: So I've Never GMed before...
 

I like the suggestion of GURPS Lite with Caravan to Ein Arris as a good starting adventure to try.

I would try to keep the number of player small 1 to 3, to give you less to try to keep track of.

Keeping the number of disadvantages down would be good too. Rather than 3 to 6 125+62+5 (max 192), I would go with:
3 to 6: 170+25+5 (max 200);
2 players: 195+25+5 (max 225); or
1 player: 220+25+5 (max 250).
For 1 or 2 players, suggest Allies.

Making practice characters, as either test NPCs or Pregrens is a good idea.

Make sure you read through everything a couple of times. Take notes, use a highlighter, make a cheat sheet, or do what ever works best for you.

Run the test NPCs/Pregens through the major combats is a good idea too.

If you have a few bucks, get Robin's Laws of Good Game Mastering (available at e23); or if you can find it on the web, get/read Uncle Figgy's Guide to Good Game Mastering.

Best advice is to ask specific questions here on the sjg forum.

-Dan

Re: So I've Never GMed before...
 

In my experiance the keys to a good campaign have ben mostly stated above but I will hit a few for emphasis.
1. Prepare but do not overprepare. The players often want to do things you did not think of or expected them not to. This is where a broad outline and brush can help you quickly fill in the new area or NPCs without seeming to have improvised it. Pretend like you had it planned all along. Its ok to tell them later but during the game provide the illusion it is all going according to plan. Smile evilly at appropriate times.

2. Keep notes. Write down key details and random ideas during the game. Just quick notes no book or nothing that slows down play. A LOT of my best ideas came from my players.

3. Your the world builder and designer but its a group authoring effort. Let the players steer the campaign. Call for pizza breaks or stall sometimes if your really stuck but try to have material you can use on hand for any situation.

4. Dont overprepare. really you can easily do this. The trouble with overpreparing is you can waste a lot of time on unexplored options and you may feel like pushing the players towards things you made just so the effort was not wasted. Do not be afraid to recycle! Change a name or personality trait of an NPC and you have a fresh one ready to go. Make some generic NPCs to cover various roles but most NPC can be made on the fly in seconds.
Remember youd ont need to worry about points, just skill levels in key skills and maybe combat ability. Prepare generics for the latter and the time consuming work is done. recycle as needed.