The Single Best Thing You Can Do to Improve as a GM!
I have seen a lot of articles, blog posts and similar, addressing the subject of GMing - what Bad GMs do, what good GMs do, how to’s and how not to’s, even tips and tricks to improve. Heck I have written at least one myself.
This time, I would like to go a little ‘meta’ on the subject and not talk about things to do around the table ‘in game’. I would like to suggest a single habit that will reward you across the gamut as a GM, a player, and as a person. It is the same advice a lot of seasoned professional writers have given to prospective authors – READ – widely and a lot!
Why is this significant to GMs? Well, in a lot of ways GMs are trying to replicate the feel of a book, if not the actual experience of a novel. I don’t know about you, but when I read a good book [or see a great movie, but that is a different post] I immediately start thinking about how to bring that experience into my games. And what a GM does is like leading the players through a collaborative novel. Of course if we take the analogy too far, it starts to break down. But don’t we all try to impart that same sense of WOW! to our players that we felt in a terrific book? For me, the pinnacle of GMing is to help my players find the immersive awe of a really good novel.
OK, so we should all read – fine. Chances are, you already do that as a GM. Certainly the rulebooks of your favorite game[s] require reading to digest and master. And reading novels? Well, I have found that gamers, and specifically GMs, tend to be pretty literate. So why am I pushing this?
I would like to encourage the ‘widely’ from my declamatory statement above.
Burst out of your comfort zone. If you like Tolkien, read Winston Churchill’s ‘Second World War’ or ‘History of the English Speaking Peoples’ both of which are likely to make you think about Middle Earth in different ways. If you like space opera, read ‘The Odyssey’. If you want to talk about the original ‘planet de jour’ style campaign ala sixties-era Star Trek, the roots of it are right there in Homer’s second, and for me, better work.
If you like fantasy in the style of Martin, Guy Kay, Patricia McKillip or David Gemmel, read Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’ and Froissart’s ‘Chronicles’, both of which are available in part in very readable Penguin editions. Jean de Froissart likes the parts of the middle ages that get the most time in a lot of fantasy games – knights, warfare, horses, armor, chivalry and courtliness. Chaucer offers a more cynical view of the same material, and other parts of society besides. Then go read Terry Jones’ [yup, that Terry Jones - of Monty Python fame] ‘Chaucer’s Knight’ for a scathing look at the same period.
Or maybe you are all over modern urban magic/ horror in the vein [sorry] of the World of Darkness/ Dresden/ Constantine et al. Give some of the others in the genre, that you may not have heard of, a shot. Charles de Lint is pretty much the Azimov of Modern Urban Fantasy, and totally deserving of your money and praise. Or have a look at Harry Connolly’s ‘Twenty Palaces’ books for a unique take on the genre that is going to make you want to run that world as a game. Or read anything by Chuck Wendig to have your brain peeled back a little at a time to have slices of pickle, onion and agony inserted.
But I said read widely, and that is still in genre. OK, read Dickens ‘Sketches by Boz’ for 19th century urban ‘horror’ [or at least misery and ‘ennui’] that is not even fictional and can apply to street level games set in ANY time or place. Or have a look through the Gustav Dore illustrated version of Coleridge’s, ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’; or 'London: A pilgrimage', which is brimming with his moody pen and ink sketches of Victorian London, along with unvarnished societal commentary by Jerrold Blanchard.
Oh, and no matter what your interest [and most of us are, or have, GMed in more than a single genre, right? Often at the same time?] you should be reading Elmore Leonard all the time - on the bus, under the bus, in your sleep, when you can’t sleep, in other peoples’ sleep. He was that good! If you aren’t familiar with Leonard, he wrote the stories that the TV series ’Justified’ is based on, and about ten thousand more. Look him up on Wikipedia. Nobody does characterization better, and that is a huge part of GMing, right? Conveying depth of character without taking over the entire game with your NPCs.
And maybe you have read all of these – gold star for you! Go read some more. Send me some links to stuff that I should have included in this article, like anything written by Robin Laws, Ken Hite, Steven Brust, Christian Cameron, Robert E. Howard, Glen Cook, Andrew Swann, and loads more. I’m not going to post links to the various works I mentioned because I am lazy and because you will find more to read while you search. Have fun, go get some books, then stay home for about twelve years reading, guilt free.
Hey, it’s research!
Art is 'Wizard's Study' by the terrific David Lee Pancake.
