The TL:DR Answer: Know thyself and thy group.

Picking the right game is all about making sure you and your group are gonna have fun. To do that you need to know yourself and your group. If you’re not sure about what would be fun for you, I have some questions you can answer to guide you to a game you’ll enjoy.

The Questions

What kind of games do you like playing?

Tactical battles, dungeon crawling, heists, mysteries, resource management, survival, exploration, dramatic interactions, world building, timeline building, deck builders, city builders, other kinds of games my brain can’t pull from its dark recesses. 

What kind of game play do you think you’ll enjoy based on the games you like playing?

As a GM do you think you’ll like having the tactical play of grid based combat? Would you rather facilitate the unraveling of mysteries while the players try to solve things before a timer runs out and the bad guys get away with it? Do you want to craft places for your players to break into and steal stuff from, where heat gets generated by their actions and if they cause too much trouble or take too long they blow the job or get caught? Are you more interested in games that are about narrative storytelling about the characters and their lives? Games that are more on that dramatic side where phrases and motivations on their character sheets change over time as you provide those dramatic situations they’ve let you know they’re interested in before and during play? Is it about building or building up kingdoms, worlds, universes, or even timelines with your friends, either through prompts or resource management? There are games that do all of these things and more.

What’s your favorite genre?

Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, Romantasy, Post Apocalyptic Fantasy, Muppet Fantasy (It’s called the Land of Erm), there’s a lot of Fantasy out there. But there’s also Cyberpunk, Pirate adventure, Arthurian Fantasy, Space Opera, Soap Opera, Horror, Super Heroes, Super Anti-Heroes, Interpersonal Drama, Political Drama, Hospital Drama, a Drama Drama, Shakespearean, Espionage, Police Procedural, Hard Sci-Fi, Splatter Punk, Steampunk, Artpunk, Altpunk, I mean if you can think it there’s probably a insert word-punk version of it somewhere. I’m sure I’m missing a few thousand of these.

What’s your favorite tone?

Goofy, serious, grim dark, whimsical, satirical, adventurous, epic, horror, hopeful, bleak, eerie, suspenseful, romantic, tragic, comedic, satirical, gritty, mysterious, heroic, melancholic, nostalgic, unsettling, lighthearted, intimate, surreal, stonered. Stonered is probably not a tone but Dude Where’s My Car might beg to differ.

Do you want a bunch of support for the game you’re going to run?

Dungeons & Dragons 5e and 5.5e has the most because it’s everywhere, but there are plenty of subreddits, Discords, YouTube videos, and blogs for other games out there. Call of Cthulhu if you want some 1920’s cosmic existential mystery horror, but it can also do modern. Delta Green is a smaller game but has a lot of community support if you prefer a more modern take on existential horror with tragic drama and spy game play. Daggerheart is newer but has plenty of people writing about the game and making content for it if you want a different flavor of kitchen sink fantasy that’s not D&D. The Marvel Multiverse RPG is decently supported if you want some super hero game play. There are many others, especially a lot of the OSR (Old School Renaissance) or NSR (New School Revolution/Rules) games that have very active communities, which I would say the BORG games fit inside. That’s MorkBorg. If that’s too weird for you, check out PirateBorg.

Do you like complex or lighter rules?

This one’s a little trickier but I’m gonna say Dungeons & Dragons is in that medium complexity so we have a starting point. It has classes and subclasses for your player characters. There are three kinds of d20 rolls. Spell casting can get to be a lot of load management for players at later levels. There’s a lot of simple math, adding up several numbers from dice and modifiers off your character sheet. There’s also a number of edge case rules. So lots of potential rules packages in feats, spells, class features to layer on top of the core rules. That’s medium complexity to me.

Also medium. Blades in the Dark and other Forged in the Dark games. They have lots of procedures to be followed and require you to understand position and effect so you can improvise many answers to situations based on dice rolls made. The procedures also have a lot of actions that players can take which the GM will need to react to. There’s also a part of the game where away from the table the GM should be updating the factions and what they’re doing as part of the prep.

Lighter would be other PbtA games. (That’s Powered by the Apocalypse) They do require a lot of spotlight management, so controlling the flow of play since who gets to take their turn is entirely dictated by the GM, but the rules are mostly up front and contained on a small amount of move sheets and playbooks. It only requires rolling 2d6 and adding one number along with potentially advantage or disadvantage. The most complex thing is understanding fictional positioning as a concept and leaning into it. The Borg Games and Shadowdark are also pretty easy to pick up and play.

More complex would be games like Pathfinder 2e and Draw Steel. They have more mechanisms to learn and understand, more resources to potentially manage, and more difficult action economies and player builds to deal with, along with complex adversary mechanics. Draw Steel has a subsystem for longer challenges and a subsystem for negotiation on top of its very involved combat system. Pathfinder has bigger numbers and math than a lot of games, with some moving target number threshold play where criticals come into play. The vast amount of material and character build concepts also can be a lot. That said, they’re great games, and would be great picks for you if that kind of play is enjoyable.

Putting it Together

• What kind of games do you like playing?

• What kind of game play do you think you’ll enjoy based on the games you like playing?

• What’s your favorite genre?

• What’s your favorite tone?

• Do you want a bunch of support for the game you’re going to run?

• Do you like complex or lighter rules?

Answering these questions should give you a decent starting place for finding a game you’ll have a good time GMing. Now you need to find some games. The internet is a great place for getting some help figuring that part out. Just Google, Edge, Bing or whatever search engine you prefer some questions about what you’ve learned by going through these questions. For instance:

What Tabletop RPGs do Space Opera? 

I hit enter on Google and some of the top results were Starfinder, Traveller, Stars Without Number, Scum & Villainy, Star Wars: Edge of the Empire, and Star Trek Adventures. I wouldn’t classify all of those as Space Opera but it’s a space to start. 

So I followed up with “Which ones are Rules Light?”

That’s when I went in and started reading some reddit posts, websites like RPG.net, watched a few YouTube videos at 1.5 speed, checked out some posts from RPGG (RPG Geek).

I still wasn’t there or happy with what I was reading and seeing so I added a mechanic to my question which was: what games do small ship to ship combat?

The one that kept coming up in the different places I was reading was Tachyon Squadron for a more cinematic aerial combat maneuver game. A description of Top Gun in space sold me on checking it out but I put Warbirds with their Space Age expansion, Stars without Number, and Scum and Villainy on my list just in case I didn’t like Tachyon Squadron. Now it was time to do a little reading.

Find Your Joy

The questions are starting places for you to find your joy in gaming. While answering all of them gives you some pretty decent insight into what you’ll probably enjoy, you’ll still need to find out if your friends would also enjoy the game. If you want to find out what they enjoy you can just ask them these questions too and figure out where your enjoyment overlaps. 

I hope this helps at least give you a place to get started when it comes to finding a game you’ll want to GM. Also, let me know how you figure out what games are your joy. I’d love to see other methods of getting games we can enjoy to the table.

Join Ang, Jared and Josh as they talk about different ideas on how to encourage your player to get into their characters and roleplay more. How do you get them from just telling you what their character does to diving into the narrative with both feet?

LINKS:

Mutants & Masterminds 3e Character Builder

Marvel Multiverse RPG Godzilla Sourcebook

I’m a Fan

Ultimate RPG Gameplay Guide by James D’ Amato

Ultimate RPG Campfire Card Deck

What would you like to know if you were going to start GMing?

I’ve been at this for so long that I have no clue how to answer that question, sooooo, I asked a bunch of  folks I know who have low or no GM experience. These are the answers I got.

A QuickStart rulebook with the basics that includes an adventure that’s also basic and bite-sized. Something that’s in one simple package. 

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How best to balance prep around where the players might take the story in a session. A big fear is prepping what I thought would be a whole nights worth of encounters and dialogs for it to be blown through in an hour or so.

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I always struggled with the idea of “I have a story I want to tell but I can’t railroad players”, so what’s a way to establish balance between the two?

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How can I increase player engagement?

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How do I pick the right game (playstyles, settings etc)? 

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Everyone talks about having very little prep these days. What are the downsides to preparation?

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What are key points to decide and write first to build the storyline around? Do I decide on a main antagonist? A town or area the story takes place in?  What the main story line is? Where do you start putting together my campaign?

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I think if it were my first time GMing I’d want to know how to handle totally unexpected turns taken by players, how to improvise, how to keep the pace moving, how to keep the vibe fun, respectful, and orderly without stepping on players’ toes. I think for me a lot of it comes down to “am I confident (or brave) enough in myself to do this?”

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I think there would be game-specific questions, but in general, the one I struggled with starting out was really “am I ready?” Or “do I know the game well enough or did I prepare enough?” And I assume a lot of people share those particular nerves. So how do I know when I’m ready to GM my game?

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How to prep, and number one worry about starting as a GM is how to run a new game if you don’t completely get the rules? How do I approach getting a good understanding of the system?

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How much time each week should a GM put aside for game prep?

What makes a good communication method for helping organize the group, re:  schedule changes or cancellations?

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How far in advance do you plan out the story?

How high level of story do you put together?

Do you make decision trees for the story or use some other kind of methodology?

Over the next bunch of months I’ll answer these questions starting with my first response in two weeks. I’ll do my best to keep them short and filled with tools so you have things you can try in your games. Now all these answers were from people I know personally. I didn’t go to the internet because I couldn’t verify that they weren’t folks who didn’t GM much, which was part of the point. But I’ll ask you now. What would you want to know as someone who’s never GMed or GMed very little if you were about to start running more games?

The answer is always more dragons, right?

I feel I kind of suck running published adventures. I have been running RPGs for over twenty years now, but I feel like I skipped a step in the standard GM skills evolution by going straight to homebrew campaigns and adventures. Adventures written by someone else always feel like a bit of a struggle.

Earlier this year, as I was angrily typing away at my computer attempting to hammer a published adventure into something that would work for my group, I pondered why these were almost always a problem for me. It occurred to me that when I first began running games back in 2005, I was doing everything on my own. It was all homebrew, with me coming up with prep, adventures, adversaries, and tying it all to the player characters. Why did I do it that way when most people start by grabbing a pre-written adventure of some kind? And then I remembered. I was desperately broke.

Back then, I was struggling to dig myself out of a financial hole caused by layoffs and unstable employment. There were so many bad temp jobs during the early 2000s. The one constant in my life that kept me sane was my Saturday game group. They started encouraging me to try my hand at running games, so when I finally said yes, there was no extra money to pick up a published adventure. It was all what was in my imagination and the core books I already owned.

Eventually things turned around and my life is comfortable now. Well, other than – vague gesture at the state of the world around us – inflation. I have been able to buy published adventures to add to my book collection and my gaming repertoire. For a few different campaigns, I’ve chosen to run published material. Some have been better than others, but I still struggle getting them from the page to the table.

Now to be clear, anyone running published adventures will need to do some level of work. You can’t just grab it off the shelf and bring it to the table with no preparation and still expect to give your players a good game. I understand this, but I’ve found I have issues balancing the benefits of using published adventures without feeling like I still have to tear it all apart and rebuild it from scratch. 

The other day while prepping for my Saturday game, I was growing frustrated because of hidden information that can’t easily be discovered by the players. In the adventure, there is a conflict devastating a region that is the result of someone becoming corrupted by an artifact that wreaks havoc over a large region. While the adventure obviously sets up taking down the big bad, they can’t actually solve the problem until they destroy the artifact. Nowhere in the adventure is set up for the players to learn any of that, let alone the name of this artifact. At least, not that I could find.

I should take a moment and confess something else about the way my brain works and why I struggle with these adventures. When I was in school as a kid and a returning adult student, I could never deeply read textbooks. My process involved skimming and taking notes. That was always good enough to gain the knowledge to pass tests and write papers, but it doesn’t work with published adventures. They’re not textbooks and I’m always missing some important detail not called out in an obvious, skimmable way. 

Heck, during one campaign where I was using an adventure series, I had to look in another OPTIONAL adventure to figure out the truth of the series’ biggest mystery. You’d think it might have been important to put that blurb towards the front so the GM could at least understand what was going on and why.

So, here are some things I’ve learned over the years on this subject: 

• Published adventures are not GMing on easy mode. While they can be a good way to see how adventures and campaigns can be structured and a good resource for new and old players alike, there is still a significant amount of work to be done to make sure it can run smoothly.
• It helps to create your own notes separate from the text. You do not want to have to page through a book or a PDF in the middle of the game to make sure you have all your details ready. The authors have put together something they hope will help you run the game, but only you know what format is going to work best for you.
• Sometimes you will need to create material that fills the gaps. Good adventures offer hooks that you can adapt to your group, but very often you still need to figure out how to put it in front of your players in a way that makes sense. Sometimes the hooks presented don’t work for your group, or they’re not there at all. What’s going to make your players want to engage with the adventure?
• These are not sacred texts. Unless you are running for organized play or a game company, when it hits your table you can do whatever you want with the adventure. Pull it apart and put it back together again in whatever is going to work best for your group. There is nothing that says you have to stay true to what is written on the page. Add, subtract or modify in whatever way is going to make it fun for you and your players.

Ultimately, your mileage is going to vary. For some people, running published material is the way to go and it makes their lives easier. Some of the heavy lifting of campaign creation and world building has been done for you. But for other people, the effort to adapt to their play style makes it harder. I’m enjoying the material I’ve been working with, but I do wish I had unlimited free time to just do it all on my own.

What are your thoughts on published adventures?

Join Ang and Jared as they sit down with Mike Shea from Sly Flourish and talk about his latest GMing advice book, Rise of the Lazy Game Master, as well as a bunch of other topics related to creating content for the RPG community.

Links:

Sly Flourish

Rise of the Lazy Game Master Kickstarter

Three Game Mechanics I Want

There is a lot about the mechanics of Blades that makes it a great game; it is to heists what Gumshoe is to investigations. Honestly, it was hard to pick three things I loved the most about the mechanics of this game. The way I made my decision was along the lines of “what mechanics would I steal and put into other games I run”. In doing that, I found three obvious candidates. Here are my top three:

Clocks

I love clocks! I love that Blades gives you an option for a task that is more than just one Action Roll. Sometimes, it takes some time to complete a task. This is where clocks come in. In Blades, clocks represent anything that takes more than one roll to complete. Clocks have several ticks, and as you make various checks, you fill in the ticks on the clock. When the clock is full, what it represents comes true: a safe cracked, a guard patrol finding the characters, etc. 

In Blades, clocks get used everywhere, and there are several different types of clocks. Sometimes they represent things in the moment, like Cracking the safe, and other times they represent longer-term objectives like The Bluecoats Plan A Raid. 

There are so many other games that lack this mechanic, and as a GM it’s frustrating, because I don’t want the safe cracked in one roll; it lacks a certain amount of tension. Also, using clocks to foretell future dangers is fantastic. A clock called The Guards Are Alerted, that is slowly ticking up, creates fantastic table tension.

Porting This Mechanic

Stealing clocks for your game is not that hard. It’s a bit more than I can write about here, but clocks need some ticks based on the complexity, a mechanism for adding ticks (an optional mechanism for removing ticks), and an understanding of what happens when a clock is full or is emptied. The trick is calibrating the number of ticks based on the action economy of your game, but tinker a bit, and you can put clocks nearly anywhere. 

Phases of Play

Blades has three distinct modes of play: Free Play, The Score, and Downtime. You are expected to cycle through these modes. Have a bit of Free Play to play out various scenes in the lives of the characters, move to The Score where you do some crime, and then into Downtime, where the consequences of your crime are played out.

What I like about these phases is that they set expectations at the table. Both players and GM know the purpose of the phase and know their roles within it. Also, some of the game mechanics are tailored for each phase. So everyone knows what rules and options are available in each phase. 

Phases also set the expectations for how a story in the game will go. Players know that they need to move from phase to phase, so they tend to work towards the objectives that allow them to switch phases. You need information and a loose plan before you start the Score; you have to complete the Score Clocks to get to Downtime. It creates a North Star for the players. 

It also makes prep easy for the GM. You know what phases you need to prep, and you know what the players need to get from phase to phase, so that gets rolled into your prep as well. 

Porting this Mechanic

This is another easy mechanic to take for your game. How it looks will have a lot to do with the game you are playing, but your phases might be something like: In Town, Delve the Dungeon, Return to Town, where each phase has specific actions that occur. You may even make some custom rules for each phase. 

Fortune Roll

This is a smaller mechanic in Blades, but one I love. The Fortune Roll is a roll that the GM makes when they don’t want to make a specific decision about an event. Perhaps the Bluecoats are investigating a crime scene, and you don’t want to decide how successful they are; you then make a Fortune roll for the investigators, and based on the roll, determine how good the clues are that they find at the crime scene. 

The dice used for the Fortune roll are tied to a specific attribute, but are often tied to the Organization’s Tier (how powerful they are in the city). If the Bluecoats are a Tier 3 organization, when they need to make a Fortune Roll they roll 3d6. 

The Fortune roll can be used in many places within Blades, and exists anytime the GM wants to let fortune determine how successful something is. I love this mechanic, and I use it during play and during the campaign downtime, where the other factions in the game are going through their machinations. 

When it comes down to it, I love being surprised by the game as much as the players, so I don’t like deciding things by fiat. It would be easy for me to say, “Oh yeah, the Bluecoats found enough clues to pick up your trail”, but for me, it is way more fun to roll and then have to play off the result. What if they do get enough clues? What will they do if they hit a dead end? Not knowing that until the Fortune dice roll creates a level of in-game excitement for me.

Porting This Mechanic

This is a somewhat more difficult mechanic to port, but not impossible. The gist of the fortune roll is that it produces a gradient of results moving from failure to partial success, full success, and critical success. Your fortune roll has to be able to emulate that range or something similar for your game. Then you just need to know how things that are advantageous and disadvantageous affect your roll, such as the Faction Tier, mentioned above.

Tools In Your Toolbox

The wonderful thing about playing a variety of games is encountering interesting mechanics. Some mechanics sit so well with you that you wish they were in every game. With a little work, they can be. For me, Blades in the Dark has some great mechanics, some that are perfect for the game and some that are universally great, and I want them in every game. And that is what I am going to do.

What about you? What mechanics from games are your “must-haves”? What are those mechanics you want in every game you play?

Join Ang along with JT and Tomas as they talk about what they think makes for good players. What qualities in a player make them excited to see someone coming back to their table again and again?

Links:

Rise of the Lazy Gamemaster

Crypt of the NekroLych

Masks: A New Generation Second Edition

Bob, Chris, and Phil take over the Gnomecast for a special return of the Misdirected Mark Podcast, at least for one episode. This time, they dive deep into initiative in tabletop RPGs, exploring different types of initiative systems, how games handle turn order, and what those choices mean for pacing, spotlight management, design, and player engagement at the table.

Patreon.com/mmp

It got me thinking about how players can sometimes limit their own ideas without the GM’s input. That made me think there has to be a better way to do it. So let’s talk about it. 

Limiting Thoughts – What are they?

A limiting thought is when a player comes up with an idea for an action or a plan, and then shoots it down for some arbitrary reason. Both ideas can come from the same person, or they can come from two different people at the table. To be clear, not every idea is a good one. There are plenty of ideas that won’t work within the game you are playing. Limiting thoughts are ideas that could work, but for some reason, the player talks themselves out of it by having another idea that counters the original idea.

A quick example. A player is thinking of ways to sneak into a compound to reach a magical gem that the group intends to steal. They start thinking out loud and come up with an idea to zipline down to the roof of one of the buildings in the compound from a nearby building using their magical rope. Then, in the next breath, they say, “Nope. I am sure they have guards on the rooftops.” Like that, the idea bloomed and was cut down. 

One thought limits the other. 

Why do we limit our thoughts? 

I am not a mind reader, so I don’t know why my players have done it, but I can tell you what has gone through my mind when I have done it, as a player.

Imperfect Shared Narrative Space

Aka – I thought I heard the GM say that. The image of the game world we hold in our mind is a shared narrative space, one that is built mostly with words and occasionally with some images. We all try to maintain the same narrative space in our heads, but it’s never perfect.  

If we misheard or misremembered a description, we could then build a flawed logical argument. In our example, one player may have thought they heard someone ask the GM about guards, and thought they heard they were on the rooftops. 

Being Too Smart 

We sometimes assume something is true because that is how we would have done it. We all know the thing about assuming… 

Why we assume this can be for several reasons:

• We assume the NPC has enough resources and insight to account for every possibility.
• We think the initial idea is too simple and assume that the GM has accounted for this possibility.
• If you were GMing this, you would have made that precaution.
• We could think that the GM is going to try to outplay the table and has come up with a dozen counter plans. 

The reason does not really matter. Once you start assuming you are limiting.

Mimicking Competency 

You could be trying to mimic the competency of your character, and are limiting your thoughts because your professional thief would never do something so simple or lazy. The thing is, you are not a skilled thief; you are playing one, so you really don’t know the answer to that question. It really is just another assumption. 

The GM Secret

For experienced GMs, there are a few things when it comes to limiting thoughts.

One – I may have thought of your idea and may have even come up with a counter, but if you are excited about it, I may make some on-the-fly changes to let you give it a try (often with some kind of skill check). 

Two – I can’t think of everything, it’s nice you think I do. So sometimes, when you assumed I thought of it, I did not. But also, I will fake or hide my reaction so that you think I did, and then go back to One. 

Three – most of my opposition is flawed in some way. I like them to be normal people. So they likely don’t have every possible contingency covered. If a magic rope is a rare item, then it’s unlikely I’ll let the NPC have a counter for that.

So, what is the better way? 

So how do the players and the GM work together to stop using limiting thoughts? 

Player-Side

Ask, don’t assume. If you are worried about there being guards on the roof, ask the GM if there are guards on the roof. If that knowledge is knowable, I am going to either tell you or ask you for a roll. 

Also, tell me your intent. Sometimes players ask these oblique questions, like “Is there a guard on the roof?”, so sometimes I give a basic answer. But if you tell me your intent, I can do a better job giving you my answer. So rather than ask me if a guard is on the roof, tell me something like, “I want to zipline down to the roof using my magic rope. Is there a time when the roof is clear, where I can do that?” 

I now have a lot of options for my answer. You don’t need there not to be guards on the roof the whole time; you need a window of time for your action. More often than not, I am going to say yes, and build some kind of check around your action to make it exciting, since we know the stake for that roll is going to be getting down off the roof before you get spotted by a guard. 

GM-Side

Clear up any mistakes or misunderstandings. While I listen to the players plan or brainstorm, I will interject anytime they are working with bad data. Make sure the shared narrative space is as aligned as possible. 

Ask for intent. Help your players get good at this skill. When they ask one of those oblique questions, don’t answer it; ask for the intention first. Once you understand the intent better, then answer.

Provide as much information as possible. Players will overthink things when they have a lack of information, and overthinking will also lead to limiting thoughts; again, working from limited data. Make sure players have as much information as they can reasonably obtain. You don’t have to just give it away to them; they can work for it, through skill checks, spent resources (spells, money, etc). Be generous with information so that they can work through their ideas and plans. 

Break Through Your Limits

Limiting thoughts is a problem for both sides of the table. For the players, it can prolong coming up with actions and plans. For the GM, it can remove potentially cool ideas from coming to the table. Both sides can work on policing limiting thoughts, and removing them from play. Doing so will make for more engaging and exciting play. 

What about you? Do you, as a player, have issues with limiting thoughts at the table? As a GM, do you run into this when you are running a game? From either side, how are you dealing with them? 

Join Ang, along with Jared and friend of the show, Carl Lehmann, as they talk about all the little details you need to have in place when playing RPGs in certain genres. We talk about genres with broad strokes, but when you dig down in, there are a lot of small details to decide before you get started.

Links:

THAC0 with Advantage: Genres of Fantasy

Your Mileage May Vary

Umdaar: Rebel Broadcast Edition

Symphony Entertainment