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GameMastery Guide / Running a Game / How to Run a Game

GMing Style Choices

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 24
Before you run your first session, there are a number of decisions you need to make regarding the nature of your game. Is your table a serious roleplaying experience, with players staying in character at all times? Is it an immersive experience with painted miniatures, three-dimensional terrain, soundtracks, and mood lighting? Is it a zany get-together with friends, where half the fun is the in-game banter? Or is it some combination of those, or perhaps something else altogether? There’s no best answer, but such decisions have a vast impact on the experience you and your players have. Noted here are a few of the more common decisions a GM needs to make when running a game.

Miniatures vs. Freeform: The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game presumes you’re playing with miniatures and using a gridded mat to keep track of character locations during combat. This isn’t the only method, though— you can also try charting things out on graph paper or drawing it on a white board, or utilize paper minis and combat tokens that can be printed out and discarded as needed. Yet you may decide that focusing on where everybody is and how far they can move in a round ruins the cinematic drama that you wish to create. In this case, you might prefer a more freeform style of play, where the GM keeps track of the action in his head, players describe the actions they wish to take, and the GM adjudicates the results. In this type of game, many rules take a backseat to flavorful flourishes and cinematic descriptions from both players and GM.

In Character vs. Out of Character: Do your players need to remain in character during the game, or can they speak as themselves, strategizing and giving advice to other players? Some GMs allow the latter only if there’s a mechanism for determining when someone’s in character, while others allow a casual blurring of the lines.

GM Tracking vs. Players Tracking: There’s a large amount of information to keep track of during a game. The Pathfinder RPG rules imply that this work should be split, with the players keeping track of their characters, hit points, abilities, ongoing effects, and so forth, and GMs tracking the same information for the NPCs. Yet some GMs prefer to keep everything a secret from their players, tracking even their experience points, hit points, spell durations, and other information, only giving the players vague, lifelike information—such as telling them that they feel weak from blood loss rather than how many hit points they have left. While this can help enhance both the game’s mystery and its sense of danger, the sheer amount of bookkeeping required on the part of the GM makes it easy for such games to bog down and overwhelm the GM.

Taking Back Mistakes: Almost every game session, a player does something they didn’t mean to do, whether it’s stepping on the wrong square or forgetting to add a bonus that means the difference between success and failure. Some GMs have a rule that once it’s left your mouth or you’ve moved your miniature on the mat, you’re committed, even if the end result isn’t what you would have normally done. Other GMs allow players to retroactively add bonuses to rolls, or take back poorly planned spells and other mistakes, letting them make the best moves possible for their character. This is a difficult balance— too much leeway and there’s no risk, but being too strict can ruin the fun for your players. Remember, though, that the standard used for your players should apply to you as well, and such “rewind” moments can be anything from a misplaced miniature to letting a clue slip out too early.

Pregame Preperation

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 24
While this topic is covered in depth in Chapter 1, below are a few key points to remember.

Read the Adventure: If you’re playing a published adventure, read through it at least once. It also helps to reread the parts of the adventure you expect the players to tackle in the upcoming session, to keep it fresh in your mind.

Predict Player Actions: Try to guess what your players might do in a given situation. If you think they might go to a tavern to get info, think about what NPCs will be encountered there, and what information they may have to impart. Likewise, if you think they might use subterfuge to get into a fortress, consider how the inhabitants might react to various plots. A little foresight goes a long way.

Adapt to Players: Consider tailoring your adventure to take into account the backstories of certain PCs, or incorporate a subplot that players initiated in a previous adventure. If one of your players is a paladin who hates devils, think about changing the generic cleric villain to a priest of Asmodeus to get your PC more invested. By tying your characters into the plot, your story naturally has more impact.

Review Relevant Rules: As you’re reading through the upcoming portion of the adventure, take time to familiarize yourself with relevant monsters, feats, spells, magic items, and rules subsets. Part of your job as the GM is to play NPCs and monsters to the best of their ability, which means being as familiar with the NPCs’ options as your players are with their own characters’.

Prepare Stats and Strategies: Make sure the adventure’s challenges are appropriately balanced for your party’s level and composition. Think about the locations where the encounters take place, and how NPCs can turn the location and their particular abilities to their advantage. It can also be good to copy the stats for each NPC and monster for ease of reference, allowing you to make notations on spells used, hit points lost, and other information without marking up a book.

Prepare Additional Tools: If you use props in your game, preparing in advance helps the game flow smoothly. Pick the miniatures and any three-dimensional terrain you want to use in a given session and put them in an easily accessible place. Put any pictures you want to show in a folder on your computer or print them onto sheets. If the players have the map to a dungeon level, think about drawing the level on the battlemat ahead of time.

Running the Game

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 25
Even once the adventure is prepped and the players are gathered, the GM’s work is just beginning. There are a few things to pay special attention to during a game session.

Initiative: Keeping track of whose turn it is during combat can be complicated. While a simple written list helps, such can get cluttered and complicated as characters hold actions and delay. The GameMastery Combat Pad allows you to keep track of initiative order by arranging the characters and their adversaries on erasable magnets and moving them as needed. You might also manage initiative by using a stack of index cards with the name of a characters or opponents written on each one—maybe even with notes for easy reference.

Dice Rolling: Some dice rolls need to be made in secret, such as when a rogue looks for a trap or a monster attempts a Perception check. At other times, you may want to roll in front of the players, such as when a pivotal save is being made during combat which could potentially kill a player character. Making rolls in the open adds a sense of drama and fairness to the moment, and your players can see the result as they root for the outcome they desire. Yet doing so can also tie your hands unnecessarily, interrupt the flow of the narrative, and generally detract from the sense of mystery. For this reason, physical barriers like the Pathfinder RPG GM Screen come in handy.

GM Subterfuge: You don’t want your players to know when something important is happening by watching for you to roll your dice. As such, many GMs roll dice unnecessarily every so often, pretending to look something up in their notes. This makes it harder for players to guess when something significant has happened, such as a failed Perception check. It’s equally important for things like finding secret doors—if you don’t call for a Perception check simply because there’s nothing to see, the PCs quickly learn that rolling dice means something is up, whether they made their roll or not.

Tracking Hit Points: During battles, you’ll sometimes have more than one of the same type of monster on the table, so keeping track of which one has all its hit points and which one is barely holding on is important. Whether you track hit points on a sheet of paper, a dry erase board, or via some other method, make notes about which creature is which and any damage or conditions it may have acquired.

Corpses: If you use miniatures in the game, what do you do with the miniature when the monster dies? Some GMs immediately remove dead or unconscious creatures to avoid clutter. Others leave the bodies where they fall, providing terrain obstacles. With the ability to use channel energy to heal friends and foes in an area of effect, leaving monsters on the board could require you to track hit points of monsters well into the negatives on the off chance that the PC cleric unintentionally catches them in a healing wave. This is just one of many situations in which a GM must choose between the game’s realism and the ease of actually running the game.

Dead Characters: Sometimes player characters die in combat. This is often a traumatic event for players, and how you handle it as GM has enormous bearing on whether those players continue to have fun or not. First off, determine whether there’s a chance for those characters to be revived via raise dead or some similar spell. If they’re likely to be revived at a later date, you can keep them engaged by having them play the role of NPC allies, cohorts, or even familiars or animal companions. Then when the combat is over and the characters get returned from the dead, they can resume their usual roles. If they’re not likely to come back, having them start rolling up new characters is a good way to keep them busy for the rest of the session. For more information on this issue, see Death of a Hero in Chapter 3.

Time Management: Keep an eye on the clock to help you wind up your game on time. If you know your game needs to end at midnight, don’t start the triumphant battle with the main villain at 11:30 p.m. Know when to gloss over less-important encounters in order to reach a good stopping point, but also don’t be afraid to pad things out and leave some goodies for next time. Finding a cliffhanger to stop on—the revelation of a piece of information, or a villain’s dramatic entrance—makes for both a dramatic conclusion and a hook to keep the players excited for the next session.

Keeping the Game Moving: One of the biggest dangers in a game session is the risk of getting bogged down. Sometimes it’s the result of the GM not being prepared and needing to read over something during the game. Other times, it is because of a player not being prepared or taking too much time to make a decision. These slowdowns can ruin the mood, tension, and drama of a game. Preparation as the GM helps minimize these risks on your end. For players, sometimes a decision merely takes a moment, and having a bit of patience is fine. Should long turns and side conversations regularly detract from the action, however, give players a time limit to declare their actions, after which they’re considered to be delaying, and you move on to the next character in the initiative order. Of course, new players naturally require more time to make decisions than experienced ones, which is why it can be useful to assign one of your more adept players as a mentor.

Post Game

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 26
Once the game session is done, there are still several tasks that need to be taken care of. First, award the players any experience earned during play, and allow them to divide up any loot earned. Having your players come up with an equitable wealth distribution system they can all agree on is vital to the long-term health of the campaign, so help them come up with a system that works for all involved. Last but not least, have the players help you clean up the gaming area.

Once the players have gone home, it may be a good idea to do some basic record-keeping, such as writing down what happened that session in case you need to refresh your memory later, or plot ideas to revisit in future sessions.