Sunday, April 18, 2021

Rant: How to be a Marginal GM

This showed up in my feed (I am not a subscriber) and I thought "Huh, I remember this guy was a full of shit conductor on the gaming railroad".  I went back and looked at his old stuff and I was right.  Apparently he eventually came around, and that's really a net positive.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKEeTusSOIw

This video is only about 10-15% bullshit, otherwise it's not bad.  A few bits of bullshit I'm talking about: He indeed is throwing his old gmstyle in the bin with this video, this GMstyle is actually older than the one the rest of his channel has been about so far (he's just newly come to it, so he thinks it's new), loose threads don't have to eventually connect because that's stupid/unnecessary/artificial/hackneyed, and finally...

You actually need some "where" and "who"s to start GMing like this, preferably a relatively blank overland map (maybe a town or two on it), a few dungeon maps  (preferably with a theme, prerolled treasure, and sensible random encounter tables), some semi-colorful NPCs with selfish motivations, a list of random names, and preferably have consumed at least 10,000 pieces of fiction in your life (TV episodes, movies, radio serials, books, RPG or simply story-based video games, and published adventures count).