Hell Yeah, Gamemasters!

Elizabeth writes:

Vincent Baker gets a ton of love for the games he designs, as well he should. The thing to remember, though, is that the same philosophies and core ideas that make him one of the best game designers I know are what makes him an amazing GM. Even when he is screwing the characters, giving them untenable choices and filling their lives with nervousness and adventure, he is actively advocating for them.

Vincent trusts his players to do great things, and he goes hard on the characters because he’s their biggest fan—he wants to see what they do, how they get out of this one.

Life isn’t easy when Vincent’s GMing, but it is a hell of a lot more interesting.

Fred Hicks writes:

Rob Donoghue is my business partner, but he’s also my brother GM. If you look over the sweep of play I’ve enjoyed in the last decade-plus, the vast majority of times I haven’t taken the helm, Rob has. When I think of what a Gamemaster is, I think of him.

Rob sets a high bar. His appetite for games is voracious — if I’d read a twentieth of the games Rob has, I could call myself well-read on the topic. And while he can’t possibly run every game he’s encountered, he still makes use of all of them.

Where the rest of us are just walking around with an small, portable toolbox, Rob’s the guy who drives up with a van full of hardware. Rob uses his vast mental library to tweak, modify, or outright replace parts of whatever system he is running to make it better — he’s the master of finding the right tool for the job, and always has it right on hand.

Rob has been hacking bits and pieces of systems together for as long as he has played.  So when our D&D 3.0 game got to a big battle that he couldn’t easily run with that system, he broke out a modified set of Button Men rules and special-action cards and used our polyhedra as miniatures on a vast field. (There, I got to triumphantly capture the opponents’ massive d30 beast and then bend it to my will long enough to ride it to a victorious assault on their main line of defense.) When we didn’t have the language of “aspect” yet for our Fudge Amber game, he reached into his toolbox and pulled out an element from 7th Sea that got the juices flowing. When his Shadowrun game was grinding down in the face of too much system for the final session, he blended it together with Wilderness of Mirrors for maximum fun.

If your game is broken, if the fun is leaking out the bottom with a slow drip drip drip and you can’t find the hole, Rob can. He’ll do better than plug it up. He’ll refit it with the valve you didn’t know you needed.

With Rob GMing a game, there are no problems, only solutions.

Bret Gillan writes:

It was one of the earliest games I played with Judd Karlman. It was a session of The Mountain Witch at a small mini-convention. I played a disgraced samurai who became a ronin after following his master’s order to kill all the children of a village for failure to pay taxes or something like that. He followed the order, then left.

So we’re playing this cool game, fighting raven spirits and ogres and things, and as my character climbs the mountain he’s haunted by the ghosts of the children he killed. He feels their hands touching them when he sleeps, he sees them staring out of shadows, etc. Finally, the samurai come to a clearing of dead trees and I narrate that the children all come out from the trees and they’re closing in on the samurai.

I say, “That’s it, he lays down his sword and he lets them kill him.” It was a fitting end and one I’d pretty much planned on.

Judd says, “No. Fuck no. You are rolling the dice. If you succeed they forgive you.”

I was pretty much stunned by the idea. I rolled. I succeeded. The children approached the samurai, who was ready to die, and laid their hands on him and whispered forgiveness to him and he broke down and cried.

It was this amazing, beautiful, hopeful transformative moment which is something that I experienced a lot when gaming with Judd. I always felt like there was someone else at the table who was a fan of my character, who understood my vision of the character, and helped to take me there even when the way was muddy to me.

Doug Hagler writes:

I’ve often been the GM/DM/Storyteller/Narrator/etc. in my 20 or so years gaming, and I feel like I do pretty well, but a friend of mine, Aric Clark, is better, hands down.

The story that comes to mind as an example is the opening session for a game of Heroes of Karia Vitalus, which we are currently working on completing and publishing.  This was the “intro” session with all the problems that come with introducing the characters to each other, getting used to a new setting, and so on.

We all sit down, and Aric has three sheets of paper and a totem from Jungle Speed laying out.  On the pieces of paper in huge dark letters are one word each: Distant Past, Recent Past, Present.  

He slams the totem onto the paper that reads “Present” and turns to one of the players: “Kyoshi - the force of the blast throws you backwards through the window.  Glass rains all around you, and you are falling.”  He lets that sink in, then slams the totem onto “Distant Past” and turns to another player.  “Rei - because of your family’s position in the city, you’ve been invited to an unveiling of a new technology from Goshi Corporation’s R&D Department…” and so on.  Throughout the whole session, we jumped through time, each time coming to rest on a moment of peak tension with no unnecessary exposition, and at the end, it all came together and we were already in deep trouble and ready for the next session.

I remember thinking “Holy shit this is going to be good” — and for 42 sessions the game just got better.

Jared Sorensen writes:

The guy is a machine. A one-man army of storytelling. His game scenarios are cinematic, moody and well paced and he’s a pro at educating new players about the rules. He ran a game for me when I first met him (way back in 2000) and I still remember the human skull missing its front teeth. Oh, Todd. You sick monkey.

Scott Walker writes:

I’ve had the pleasure of gaming with four different GM’s on a regular basis over the past 25 years or so. All good in their own ways, and unique in their GM styles.

The GM that stands out for me in particular, is Tony Graham. Tony’s house rules emphasize simplified elegance, streamlined mechanics, and a focus on collaborative storytelling. The result is an evening of spontaneous narration and exciting combat.

The moment I knew he had a gift for GM’ing went something like this:

Tony: “You see three guards running towards you across the empty street. Their swords are out, and they’re looking right at you. The one in front screams, ‘Kill him!’ What do you do?”

Me: [staring at my character sheet, trying to figure out which skill makes the most sense to use, trapped in the mindset of having to navigate rules-heavy systems] “Uh….”

Tony: [seeing my paralysis] “Don’t worry about the skills. Just tell me what you do, and I’ll handle the stats.”

And it all suddenly made sense. Tony was less interested in enforcing rigid rules and more interested in letting the story unfold, one improvisational, collaborative moment at a time.

The creative space possible when players trust their GM - and don’t use the rules system as either a shield or a weapon against the GM - is truly amazing. Of course, it doesn’t hurt when the GM is also a master story teller!

Zack Walters writes:

I’d like to nominate Will Hindmarch as a Hell Yeah, GM! Here’s why:

Will Hindmarch is by far the best GM I have had the fortune to spend my evenings with, and I’ve learned a lot from him about how to run a great game. But the single greatest trick he passed on to me was this: musical cues. We’re all trained to respond to crescendos and tempo changes in background music, so that’s pretty easy to set up. Where Will really shines, though, is his uncanny ability to not only find great atmospheric music, but to also time moments of drama perfectly with sampled sound effects and musical shifts. It’s basically his superpower.

To illustrate, I once took up the role of a miner-turned-explorer in a Tolkienesque, all-dwarf one-shot Will ran. My fellow dwarves and I were making our way deep into an abandoned hold. We knew by the orc scavengers and foreboding music that something dire lay ahead of us, but it wasn’t until the tempo change that we started to get worried. We had just barely survived crossing a chain link bridge when Will began to interlace our action rolls with descriptions of the narrowing corridors and menacing darkness. We joked around about delving too deep and balrogs… until the dragon roared. And I don’t mean Will saying “You hear a dragon roar.” Motherfucker had included a song on the game’s soundtrack that incorporated a dragon roaring, but not until almost two minutes into the track. He managed to pace out the action just right so that sound effect came up mere moments before we moved on to the final (ultimately fatal) encounter of the evening. That one musical cue, timed just right, yanked us as players back into our characters’ skulls and got us geared up for what is still the most fun I’ve ever had killing a character.

To me, the atmosphere evoked by timely narration and musical cues serve to keep everyone invested in the game, regardless of story. And that’s the heart of a GM’s job.

Rob Donoghue writes:

Fred Hicks has commented that the reason he wrote Don’t Rest Your Head was to try to mechanically simulate all the things he tries to bring to the table as a GM: hard choices, escalating tension and, of course, intense, personal pain. I’ve got no shortage of stories of fantastic GMing that Fred has done, and a lot of them are full of those things he values so much, but for all that he can really bring the pain, that’s not the thing that really bring out the Fuck Yeah.

No, what’s amazing about Fred is that, as a GM, he’s willing to try anything. All those ideas for things you might someday like to try in a game, Fred grabs with both hands and incorporates into next week’s game. He showed me how to end a campaign with one grand wrap-up-session. He’s shown me how you turn an egg timer into the most powerful prop in an Amber game. He’s run entire sessions where no conversations is allowed between characters except in the flashback to the planning session, which occours only in flashback. He’s used mechanics to organically push players to have a conversation about being a demon that hit all the Buffy notes of coming out to a family member. He’s made sure systems can give players as much as they ask for and more, along with the full weight of price. He’s interrupted an entire campaign to have a courtroom session in one character’s head to decide if they live or die. He is a master of tools and toys.

As a player, this makes him engage your game with vigor. As a publisher, it means he goes out of his way to share the tools he’s had to claw and fight to gain. And as a GM, it means he will use every resource you can imagine, and many more you’ve never even conceived of, to make the game fun, compelling and awesome for everyone at the table. It’s a joy to behold, and has been my honor to learn from.