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- May 15, 2017
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Reading the 4e The enemy Within thread about railroads and experiencing a pf2e game, I’m somewhat surprised that we still deal with experienced GMs who are also not very good GMs and are also not aware they are not very good GMs.
I don’t think I’m looking for advice here, per se, as the advice is talk to the person and all of that. However, there was an attempt to get my GM to tactic up the combat a bit, and they rebuffed it immediately, saying that’s what the module said. This strikes me as sort of self imposed railroading, which I find kind of interesting.
We all know railroading sort of sucks, and yet the desire to conform to the structure that is presented is there. I’ve felt that. I’ve done that I’m sure. In my GMs case, it’s chronic over multiple times - a tendency to run these big sandbox campaigns. He’s done hoard of the dragon queen, Storm king’s thunder, and now this one. none of these are well put together to just run beginning to end, even the railroad ones.
Writing this out, I’m seeing that there is a desire to do a big epic campaign where the heroes save the world. This is great, and a long running campaign is very satisfying. But also it’s kind of missing the thing that we learn when getting into “being a good GM” which is to start small.
this is a bit of a ramble, as it’s consumed a fair bit of thought and there are a lot of pieces - my desire to help, my knowledge this person is going to get very defensive, my desires to let them learn and for me to have fun (which I’m not), long long friendship, the publishing of adventures and how they are not well catered to learning how to GM,, and many other things.
my group functionally has 3 GMs. We have one guy who is very natural, but he can’t seem to stick to a campaign more than half a dozen sessions. We have myself, who is pretty tenacious, but every step is learning and I spent a lot of time on learning how to GM, then we have this person who I don’t think spends any time on it and is not improvisational either. I feel like we have the entire GM community pretty well represented right there.
ok, this is a lot of a stream of consciousness but I’m sure someone will find something to discuss in it! Adventure railroads, GMs railroading themselves, learning to GM, etc.
I don’t think I’m looking for advice here, per se, as the advice is talk to the person and all of that. However, there was an attempt to get my GM to tactic up the combat a bit, and they rebuffed it immediately, saying that’s what the module said. This strikes me as sort of self imposed railroading, which I find kind of interesting.
We all know railroading sort of sucks, and yet the desire to conform to the structure that is presented is there. I’ve felt that. I’ve done that I’m sure. In my GMs case, it’s chronic over multiple times - a tendency to run these big sandbox campaigns. He’s done hoard of the dragon queen, Storm king’s thunder, and now this one. none of these are well put together to just run beginning to end, even the railroad ones.
Writing this out, I’m seeing that there is a desire to do a big epic campaign where the heroes save the world. This is great, and a long running campaign is very satisfying. But also it’s kind of missing the thing that we learn when getting into “being a good GM” which is to start small.
this is a bit of a ramble, as it’s consumed a fair bit of thought and there are a lot of pieces - my desire to help, my knowledge this person is going to get very defensive, my desires to let them learn and for me to have fun (which I’m not), long long friendship, the publishing of adventures and how they are not well catered to learning how to GM,, and many other things.
my group functionally has 3 GMs. We have one guy who is very natural, but he can’t seem to stick to a campaign more than half a dozen sessions. We have myself, who is pretty tenacious, but every step is learning and I spent a lot of time on learning how to GM, then we have this person who I don’t think spends any time on it and is not improvisational either. I feel like we have the entire GM community pretty well represented right there.
ok, this is a lot of a stream of consciousness but I’m sure someone will find something to discuss in it! Adventure railroads, GMs railroading themselves, learning to GM, etc.