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[fledgelinggm]

My Love/Hate relationship with writing for my players

This is fairly straight forward. 

My players and I, all quite like playing in a descriptive way, like reading a book, where you can envision your situation and thereby make a decision on what to do. We all need to work on this, but for me, my current method is writing down the scene i imagine. 

This has multiple purposes for me.

1. I think writing has some meditative properties and it relaxes me. 

2. It gives me the words, without having to come up with them on the spot.

3. It trains my ability to describe the scene i visualized for myself. 

4. And i get a more direct idea of what is going to happen and where i am taking it. 

There is however, ONE point in this process with which I have a Love/Hate relationship. The, ‘When are you done?’ moment. Because, there comes a moment when you are writing these scenes, in which you can’t really continue, because the continuation entirely depends on your players reactions to the situation. 

Pro:  Getting done, and knowing that you are done. 

Getting excited for how your players will react. Especially if it’s an important character scene, or character specific.

Con: 

Starting to worry about what you might have to describe after your player reacted. 

Being unable to prep more, essentially unable to strengthen the scaffolding you’re desperately clinging to. 

So far, I’ve found nothing else to do, than trust yourself and your players, take it to the session and just see how it goes.

Positive experiences from GM’ing

One of the things I’ve enjoyed the most in my first few sessions, with my current group is their different reactions one specific NPC.

This NPC is the guard captain in the city in which they are currently staying. 

1. PC essentially things of this guy as his adoptive father, and therefore trusts and care about this character. 

The 2. PC got thrown in the dungeons for a day, and while he doesn’t ‘hate’ the guard captain, he does not like him but also has a begrudging respect for the guy.

The 3. got thrown in the dungeon together with the second PC. Again, this PC doesn’t hate him, but isn’t necessarily on good terms with him either. 

The 4. PC in general is just trying to avoid the guards, and so too with the guard captain. Despite the trust shown by PC#1, she doesn’t trust him, and doesn’t take him at his word.

And the last and 5. PC really hasn’t gotten to know the Guard captain yet.

The reason i love this diversity, is that the complexity of interpersonal interactions, does not result in everyone liking/disliking the same people or to the same extent. Thus i take it as a personal victory, in making a none 2 dimensional NPC.     

[fledgelinggm]

Fledgeling GM

Like half the DnD community on the internet, i quite like some of the GM’s out there, namely the GM tips of Evil Matt(hew Colville), the GM’ing of Matthew Mercer as well as Adam Koebel. I also realize that i should probably add in some diversity there, like Satine Phoenix and others, but with CR and Rollplay, my Roleplay  plate is pretty full. 

ANYWAY, at this point in time, this Fledgeling has played some few sessions of World of Darkness (human only), and some few hours of Pathfinder. It has GM’ed a oneshot of MaidRPG, for an easy entrance into GM’ing, 2 oneshots and about 6 sessions, 2 from a campaign that didn’t last long, 2 zero sessions for our current campaign, and the 2 first sessions of 5th edition DnD . Thus i’m currently planning the third session. 

Apparently there is a lot to learn from new GM’s, so this is me, discussing the things i have learned so far, and learn from now on.