"How to GM" Books

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Lunar Ronin

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Back in my teenage years and early 20s, I had two books about mastering tabletop RPGs, from playing and running them, to creating them. The books were Role-Playing Mastery and Master of the Game by Gary Gygax himself. I foolishly got rid of them when I purged most of my tabletop gaming collection in the early 2000s. I recently became curious as to what other "How to GM" books are out there and have come out since Gary Gygax wrote his two "how to" books.

I'm limiting myself strictly to eBooks. So far, I've bought and downloaded Sly Flourish's Dungeon Master Tips and The Lazy Dungeon Master by Michael Shea, How to Run and The Dungeon's Front Door & Other Things in the Deep Dark by Alexis D. Smolensk, and Never Unprepared: The Complete Game Master's Guide to Session Prep, Odyssey: The Complete Game Master's Guide to Campaign Management, and Focal Point: The Complete Game Master's Guide to Running Extraordinary Sessions by Phil Vecchione and Walt Ciechanowski.

I'll let y'all know how they are as I get through them, but Michael Shea's books look pretty focused on medieval fantasy RPGs so they probably won't be very useful for me. We'll see. Any other good "How to GM" eBooks out there?
 
Most of the best advice I've gleaned (outside of experience) has come from Paul Mason's Imazine magazine, maybe the only publication I know of devoted specifically to people solely concerned with Deep IC immersion.

Robin's Laws of Good GMing wasnt too bad, I guess, though its been a long time since I read it.
 
Any of those books actually help anybody? I am not familiar with most of those, but the ones I've seen before just seem like lists of obvious stuff like "be prepared" or else assume you want to steamroll a certain play style. I haven't seen anything that really struck me as useful, even when I was young and winging it.
 
I found Role-Playing Mastery by Gary Gygax useful, especially the chapter about tinkering with existing RPGs. Granted, I was only about fourteen at the time I initially read it, but it helped me see the GM role in a new light and that it was okie to discard some things.
 
Although Sly Flourish's books are written with a fantasy GM in mind, the advice contained therein can be extrapolated to just about any game. If (like me) you constantly find yourself going down rabbit holes while prepping a game, and have strong urges to flesh out too much stuff that (mostly) never sees the table, it can help reign you in and get you to really commit to focusing on the stuff the matters at the table.
 
Jennel Jacquay and William Connor’s Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb guide, the Creative Campaigning Guide (by Tweet and others) and the Complete Book of Villains by Rick Swan all have great advice although obviously mostly focused on D&D campaigns.

Robin Law’s book still stands up. Vincent Baker’s GM advice throughout the AW rulebook is also excellent I think.
 
Jennel Jacquay and William Connor’s Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb guide

I've heard this one referred to as AD&D2's real Dungeon Masters' Guide and I would love to get my grubby mitts on it.

I've been curious about Graham Walmsley's Play Unsafe in the past, but never read it.
 
I've been curious about Graham Walmsley's Play Unsafe in the past, but never read it.

It's for erstwhile actors only. That's not a criticism, but be aware it's basically "how to improv" and some basic acting advice adapted to a tabletop or LARP context. If you're into that sort of thing it's excellent, but my experience has been that's a very small contingent of the player base for TTRPGs. The ones who really want to do that either LARP or get into community theater.

I find the vast majority of GM Advice books focus on either How To Get Better at RPG Sudoku or How To Compensate For The Fact That Your Players Are Children, so they're not all that useful to me.
 
I've heard this one referred to as AD&D2's real Dungeon Masters' Guide and I would love to get my grubby mitts on it.

I got it when it was first released (1990!) and remember thinking that it would have been really useful when I first started GMing and it should have been in the 2e DMG.

In fact according to Appelcine and Connors most of it was written by Jaquays for the DMG but it was cut due to space!

I picked up a used copy recently and it is still a good read.

But don't sleep on Creative Campaigning, there are three to four chapters written by Jonathan Tweet, one of which is GM advice not specific to D&D full of ahead of its time ideas about 'freestyle' GMing (improv gaming with NPCs, spotlighting PCs and cutting between scenes) and 'jamming' with the players (even allowing them to play NPCs, heresy!).
 
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I've never read any of this stuff, none of it really seems to interest me anyway, I have other things to read. Now as a GM I learned all I needed to by the age of, well, never, I'm still learning at 50. Some simple advice:
  1. Looking at the players and smiling while inside you're screaming, I will kill your character!
  2. Do some prep, all the 'no prep' is advertising bs, when you don't do prep it shows.
  3. Read some other stuff, remember: "Amateurs borrow, artists steal." Get all Ali Baba up in that.
A corollary to #3 is: Most players are more ignorant than you would think and often have no idea you are stealing ideas left and right.
 
I should probably make a disclaimer that maybe my players are more ignorant than yours. They're not stupid people but they are not all that well read. They'd probably spot it if I stole from popular movies and TV shows rather than novels and history books.
 
In preparation for reading How to Run by Alexis D. Smolensk, I finished reading his first book last night, How to Play. It's all about role-playing in a sandbox, with some useful advice for those new to playing in RPGs and/or those new to playing in a sandbox. The book goes into how to prepare yourself for playing in a sandbox, and how a good sandbox GM will let you do just about anything, so really it's up to the PCs to shape the world. However, the book has two faults, at least for me. First, some of the book is quite specific to Dungeons & Dragons and fantasy RPGs in general. Second, in the last couple of chapters the author becomes a bit grognardy. He writes about how classes are "the one true way," and how people born and raised in the '80s, '90s, and '00s are all about "me" and making their characters "special," and how they just don't grok the brilliance of early editions of D&D the way those born and raised in the '50s, '60s, and '70s do. Then the author goes on to slam AD&D 2E and D&D 3.x for appeasing the young whippersnapper players' need to make their characters "special," and talks about how D&D 4E is an entirely different game.

So How to Play would be a good read for those new to RPGs and especially those new to sandboxes, but skip the last two chapters.
 
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I guess he never heard of BRP or any non-D&D system then? :trigger:
 
I guess he never heard of BRP or any non-D&D system then? :trigger:

Apparently not until the late '80s at least, as he wrote that the RPG development of games without classes and unique PCs was due to the emergence of people born and raised in the '80s and their "me" culture.
 
Well, not so much books, but 5 Keys to DMing success in Dragon Magazine was pretty helpful. Rolemaster's GMLAW has some good stuff but I'm told it's mostly in Robin Law's book now. The Master of the Game was interesting but Gygax always seems a bit defensive. The GM advice in RQ3 was pretty decent. Sword Bearer actually has some good material on GMing and World Building. GURPS does as well.
 
Those darn kids!

If there's one trait that all of humanity across various cultures and times over the past several thousand years have shared, it's the belief that the younger generation will bring about the end of society. It's kind of heartwarming, really.

Plato said:
Our youth have an insatiable desire for wealth; they have bad manners and atrocious customs regarding dressing and their hair and what garments or shoes they wear.

Socrates said:
The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love to chatter in place of exercise.

Peter the Hermit said:
The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no respect for their parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they alone know everything and what passes for wisdom in us foolishness in them. As for the girls, they are foolish and immodest and unwomanly in speech, behavior, and dress.
 
In preparation for reading How to Run by Alexis D. Smolensk, I finished reading his first book last night, How to Play. It's all about role-playing in a sandbox, with some useful advice for those new to playing in RPGs and/or those new to playing in a sandbox. The book goes into how to prepare yourself for playing in a sandbox, and how a good sandbox GM will let you do just about anything, so really it's up to the PCs to shape the world. However, the book has two faults, at least for me. First, some of the book is quite specific to Dungeons & Dragons and fantasy RPGs in general. Second, in the last couple of chapters the author becomes a bit grognardy. He writes about how classes are "the one true way," and how people born and raised in the '80s, '90s, and '00s are all about "me" and making their characters "special," and how they just don't grok the brilliance of early editions of D&D the way those born and raised in the '50s, '60s, and '70s do. Then the author goes on to slam AD&D 2E and D&D 3.x for appeasing the young whippersnapper players' need to make their characters "special," and talks about how D&D 4E is an entirely different game.

So How to Play would be a good read for those new to RPGs and especially those new to sandboxes, but skip the last two chapters.

Alexis is clever, but even his insights are marred by groggier-than-thou shit. He was a favorite target of the YDIS shit.

Does this one count?

A Quick Primer for Old-School Gaming

It's not comprehensive, and it doesn't really tell you how to GM, per se. It's more like a punk rock manifesto for RPGs. But it's short and free, and it can be revelatory, so I think every GM should read it.

This one is really good and mercifully brief. Soul of wit and all.
 
Alexis is clever, but even his insights are marred by groggier-than-thou shit. He was a favorite target of the YDIS shit.

I never heard of him before nor read anything by him before so I went into the book blind. Like I said, it has useful advice for those new to role-playing in sandboxes, but yeah the last two chapters were about the most grognardy writing I've ever come across, crapping all over everyone raised after 1980 and every version of Dungeons and Dragons past AD&D 1E.

YDIS? Do I dare DuckDuckGo that...
 
  1. Do some prep, all the 'no prep' is advertising bs, when you don't do prep it shows.
Having taken improv classes, a lot if it is just prep. You hone characters so that when you do an actual improv, you have an entertaining character ready-to-go that can interact with whoever else is in the scene. It's a lot like an RPG in that nobody knows exactly what directions anything will take, but the ingredients were all prepared ahead of time.

GMs that are good at running games with "no prep" simply aren't aware of their prep. They have a head full of novels and movies. They have lots of adventures they have run in the past that they can recycle. That sort of thing.

A corollary to #3 is: Most players are more ignorant than you would think and often have no idea you are stealing ideas left and right.

Even when players catch on, they usually don't mind. People play RPGs because they want to run around in stories they love. Blatantly borrowing from stories only becomes a problem when the GM is contriving to make them play out a certain way, rather then just throwing the elements of that story at the players and seeing what happens.
These books on session prep and campaign management from the Gnome Stew guys look interesting and have free pdf previews for download.

I got the campaign management one in a bundle and started to read it. It felt like a project management textbook with a gloss of RPG over the top to me. That isn't necessarily a bad thing for some people, but it just didn't connect with the way I prep at all.
\Second, in the last couple of chapters the author becomes a bit grognardy. He writes about how classes are "the one true way," and how people born and raised in the '80s, '90s, and '00s are all about "me" and making their characters "special," and how they just don't grok the brilliance of early editions of D&D the way those born and raised in the '50s, '60s, and '70s do.

"This younger generation's inflated ego gets in the way of letting them appreciate the unique and special genius of my generation!"

The whole argument is especially puzzling considering how many younger game designers these days have embraced the OSR. If I announce that I want to run an old school D&D game, I've found people in their 20s are more likely to be enthused by the idea than people in their 40s.
 
Just to clarify my previous post, any time I have looked at it, it is negative, snarky sniping at other people without contributing anything useful. It's exactly the kind of thing that people who come to this forum are looking to get away from.
 
I can't imagine running a game on the fly without my trusty random tables and charts. I'm not that creative, and can only improv so far.

So yeah, don't prep plots, but do SOME preparation, even if it's just gathering some idea-tools for the game's established genre.
 
If there's one trait that all of humanity across various cultures and times over the past several thousand years have shared, it's the belief that the younger generation will bring about the end of society.

This is belief is factually incorrect. It's not, and never will be, the younger generation that will bring about the end of society.

It's me. :devil:

RE: on topic.

I don't have any suggestions to make regarding good GM guides. I've only recently begun getting into these, and the ones I've read so far tend to be meh (good, not great, with some useful information.. I did find Play Your Character Like a Fucking Boss, by Venger Satanis to be surprisingly useful given my low expectations and its small size. I'm looking at his other GM stuff, when time and funds allow.

RE: Prep.

I must prep. Like a prepping machine. Preppin' all the time, day and night. :shade:

Because one of my favorite things about running a game is spending hours preparing for every conceivable scenario that might come up in-game, and have my players somehow go around all of that, like the Nazi's at the Maginot Line, and focus on the one, single game scenario I didn't think of.

This usually results in about five minutes of cold, angry staring by me, directed at my players, who respond to this with childlike giggles of pure, innocent joy. This is followed by me declaring a break, and telling everyone to GTFO of the gaming room to smoke, go outside, get another drink, etc., while I silently weep in frustration. :weep:
 
Because one of my favorite things about running a game is spending hours preparing for every conceivable scenario that might come up in-game, and have my players somehow go around all of that, like the Nazi's at the Maginot Line, and focus on the one, single game scenario I didn't think of.

Beautiful. To be honest, this is usually my favorite part of GMing (i.e. being surprised by the players), but it always yields a few high stress moments.
 
I'm genuinely disappointed if none of my players' PCs try to kill one another. They just keep trying to cooperate! As a team! With a focused agenda pursued in a reasonable fashion!

Screw my players. :fu:
If you really, really want, I can introduce you to players who are guaranteed to attempt killing other PCs within a few sessions.
 
It's for erstwhile actors only. That's not a criticism, but be aware it's basically "how to improv" and some basic acting advice adapted to a tabletop or LARP context. If you're into that sort of thing it's excellent, but my experience has been that's a very small contingent of the player base for TTRPGs. The ones who really want to do that either LARP or get into community theater.

Well that sounds right up my alley.
 
GMs that are good at running games with "no prep" simply aren't aware of their prep. They have a head full of novels and movies. They have lots of adventures they have run in the past that they can recycle. That sort of thing.

While this is true, I think the takeaway here is not so much "no prep" as "you have already prepped as much as you need to, you just don't realize it". Does anyone come to RPGs with truly no prior art in their experience?
 
Just to clarify my previous post, any time I have looked at it, it is negative, snarky sniping at other people without contributing anything useful. It's exactly the kind of thing that people who come to this forum are looking to get away from.

YDIS is pretty much over now, he hasn't posted much over the last year and a half. It was always just a huge troll of the OSR. It is interesting how much attention it attracted. I can't imagine whoever is behind it has any intention of contributing anything useful. Although I have to admit to finding some of the posts amusing and effective in puncturing some of the pretensions of the OSR, the 'community' in the comments though is pretty much the dregs of the net, little better than YT comments.
 
I got the campaign management one in a bundle and started to read it. It felt like a project management textbook with a gloss of RPG over the top to me. That isn't necessarily a bad thing for some people, but it just didn't connect with the way I prep at all.

That was kinda my impression from the sample I read, could be useful for some I guess but I got enough project management training via work it isn't something I'd like to spend my freetime reading.

I've read some grognards put down Aaron Allston's Dungeon Master's Kit but I thought it came with some very good forms for organizing a session and NPCs and some interesting advice on how to handle investigations in an RPG.
 
While this is true, I think the takeaway here is not so much "no prep" as "you have already prepped as much as you need to, you just don't realize it". Does anyone come to RPGs with truly no prior art in their experience?

No, but I think there is a certain skill to taking in art and finding the game hooks in it.

That was kinda my impression from the sample I read, could be useful for some I guess but I got enough project management training via work it isn't something I'd like to spend my freetime reading.
In my case, I mainly read GM books to get ideas. I could see someone finding this book useful if their issue was organizing their ideas.
 
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