Quote:
Originally Posted by GreenLantern
What do you think are the biggest mistakes new gms make?
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The most common and biggest mistake is
not communicating with your players outside of play. Asking feedback can ease a lot of worries, but just talking openly about what kind of a game you want to run before you start is the easy mode for getting the players to play along to the style you've imagined.
It's difficult trying to herd the players into playing towards the plot just by controlling their characters. It's very easy to say before the game "I want to run basically Magnificent Seven". The players will immediately start making the right kinds of characters, and they will need only the smallest hint to start protecting the first village they find from incoming bandits.
In other words, just tell the players roughly what story you're going for. It's still fun to play it, because RPG's are 99% the moment to moment experience
There's a lot more that goes into good communicatin with players, but I think the rest comes once you start doing it and thinking about it. Almost all good things come from realizing that you don't have to keep many secrets and you don't have to guess what what the players liked.
Although as a rule: people don't usually know what they will like, and even when they think they do they're often wrong. The GM is the one who decides what you do, that's easiest. Just talk with the players about how you're going to do it, and then ask feedback and suggestions.
I would say another common mistake is expecting too much of yourself and not sticking with it. I've witnessed probably dozens of GM's over the years doing a perfectly fine first campaign, but who think they sucked and feel like nobody had any fun and thus they just stop doing it. It's a real shame.
GM's who start as adults also have a tendency to try do plots with mysteries, which is a really difficult path, especially since most people when they think of a plot think of examples from movies, which are almost always single character stories. Those are difficult to translate to RPG's.
Executing a satisfying mystery reveal is extremely difficult. Even professional writers (who don't have to deal with protagonists with literally minds of their own) repeatedly fail at this. Many established professional writers can't do mystery plots at all, it's that difficult. I really, really don't recommend mysteries for starting GM's. It's far from impossible, but it's the difficult mode, and trying to handle a mystery plot often ends up being a distraction from making other parts of the game more fun.
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