From the article archive
Don't GM Angry
I’m an idiot.
Why you ask?
Because last Friday I GM’ed angry.
I got home late from teaching my Tae Kwon Do class Thursday night. I was worn and sore, having re-injured my left ring finger (still can’t get my wedding ring on). When I got home my wife told me that she had made an accounting error and our checking account balance wasn’t what we thought it was. One of the traditional money arguments husbands and wives have ensued and I went to bed a bit ticked off.
Friday morning I woke up late (slept through my alarm) and found I didn’t have a shirt clean for work. I got a shirt cleaned and then hopped in my truck to find out I was almost out of gas. Anger rising…
Of course I got to work late, and to help things get worse one of my client’s servers was down. Unrecoverable down. And it was one of my tech’s fault. The client is now pissed at me because I coordinated the work that the tech did incorrectly. Anger turned into rage.
At noon I found I’d forgotten my lunch at home. So no food until the game that night. Rage gets stronger.
When I show up at the game I discovered I’d forgotten my notes for the dragon. I was so angry I was shaking.
It was a huge green dragon for my D&D game and the party had spent a whole week prepping for the fight. I had three pages of spells, powers and other essentials set up for this dragon. It was going to be an all session battle, a huge climactic, cataclysmic battle that the party and I would discuss together in years to come as “That time we fought the Green Dragon…” But now it had a good chance of sucking as I was totally unprepared and in a very bad mood.
As most folks know, I like to improv as much, if not more, than the next GM. Part of my reputation as a GM is my love of improv. But I was so mentally beaten up by the day’s events that the forgotten notes were an unrecoverable blow to my GMing spirit. I did NOT want to run D&D that night. But I did it anyway.
The players had been prepping for this fight all week – I’d been answering email questions for 3 days and they’d sent dozens of emails between each other creating their game plan. You could tell by the look in their eyes they wanted this fight bad. Heck, they were practically drooling on the table. They wanted to game and I let them talk me into it.
I winged it as best I could, but my heart wasn’t in it. The dragon was half of what it should have been,and in the end the players won. Not because they out thought, or out fought the dragon, but because I didn’t want to play. Sure, the players had a great plan, but I didn’t care enough to put up a fight. They got away without hardly a scratch and it was pathetic.
We’ve all seen the advice before regarding GMing when you don’t feel like it. But more often than not we’ll ignore it and run the game anyway. Why? Because we allow ourselves to get talked into it. Don't let it happen to you.
Gaming is, at the core, about having fun with a group of people who are at the game to have a good time. How fun can it really be for anyone at the game if the GM is only going through the motions?
As a player I’ve been there when it was obvious the GM didn’t want to run the game that night. He was tired, and had other things on his mind. The events were sub-par and no fun was had because we the game was numbly wandering along. I’ve seen some players who try and take advantage of the GM in this situation, trying to get the GM to allow items, powers, etc that he normally wouldn’t if he were mentally fit to GM – but in the end, even these players feel the hollowness of their victory.
In my Friday game tempers flared more often than I’d seen before. The players and I became overy adversarial, looking at each other as The Enemy, even though we were supposed to all be there for the same purpose: To have fun. That could have easily been the end of that game group. We could have said to heck with it and quit because we didn’t have fun. And without fun, why would you game?
One of my players suggested that we pack along some board games or card games so that if another case of “GM Fatigue” were to hit us, we could still have some fun together and give the GM a break for a while. Another player said that he would be willing to GM sometime if this happened – just running a one-shot game for the group. Sounded like some good ideas so we’ve adopted these as our contingency plans.
What gets me the most, and the reason I feel I'm an idiot, is that I knew what would happen if I let the players talk me into gaming that night. I knew it wouldn’t be much fun and that the players would have a cheap gaming experience. I knew we should have done something different. I’m a smart guy, but I didn’t listen to the voice of reason in my head and I ran the game anyway. I had a choice and I took the obviously bad option.
Life is sometimes about learning from the mistakes of others so think up a contingency plan for you game group and don’t GM angry. It’s not worth it.
-Brett J.B.
Why you ask?
Because last Friday I GM’ed angry.
I got home late from teaching my Tae Kwon Do class Thursday night. I was worn and sore, having re-injured my left ring finger (still can’t get my wedding ring on). When I got home my wife told me that she had made an accounting error and our checking account balance wasn’t what we thought it was. One of the traditional money arguments husbands and wives have ensued and I went to bed a bit ticked off.
Friday morning I woke up late (slept through my alarm) and found I didn’t have a shirt clean for work. I got a shirt cleaned and then hopped in my truck to find out I was almost out of gas. Anger rising…
Of course I got to work late, and to help things get worse one of my client’s servers was down. Unrecoverable down. And it was one of my tech’s fault. The client is now pissed at me because I coordinated the work that the tech did incorrectly. Anger turned into rage.
At noon I found I’d forgotten my lunch at home. So no food until the game that night. Rage gets stronger.
When I show up at the game I discovered I’d forgotten my notes for the dragon. I was so angry I was shaking.
It was a huge green dragon for my D&D game and the party had spent a whole week prepping for the fight. I had three pages of spells, powers and other essentials set up for this dragon. It was going to be an all session battle, a huge climactic, cataclysmic battle that the party and I would discuss together in years to come as “That time we fought the Green Dragon…” But now it had a good chance of sucking as I was totally unprepared and in a very bad mood.
As most folks know, I like to improv as much, if not more, than the next GM. Part of my reputation as a GM is my love of improv. But I was so mentally beaten up by the day’s events that the forgotten notes were an unrecoverable blow to my GMing spirit. I did NOT want to run D&D that night. But I did it anyway.
The players had been prepping for this fight all week – I’d been answering email questions for 3 days and they’d sent dozens of emails between each other creating their game plan. You could tell by the look in their eyes they wanted this fight bad. Heck, they were practically drooling on the table. They wanted to game and I let them talk me into it.
I winged it as best I could, but my heart wasn’t in it. The dragon was half of what it should have been,and in the end the players won. Not because they out thought, or out fought the dragon, but because I didn’t want to play. Sure, the players had a great plan, but I didn’t care enough to put up a fight. They got away without hardly a scratch and it was pathetic.
We’ve all seen the advice before regarding GMing when you don’t feel like it. But more often than not we’ll ignore it and run the game anyway. Why? Because we allow ourselves to get talked into it. Don't let it happen to you.
Gaming is, at the core, about having fun with a group of people who are at the game to have a good time. How fun can it really be for anyone at the game if the GM is only going through the motions?
As a player I’ve been there when it was obvious the GM didn’t want to run the game that night. He was tired, and had other things on his mind. The events were sub-par and no fun was had because we the game was numbly wandering along. I’ve seen some players who try and take advantage of the GM in this situation, trying to get the GM to allow items, powers, etc that he normally wouldn’t if he were mentally fit to GM – but in the end, even these players feel the hollowness of their victory.
In my Friday game tempers flared more often than I’d seen before. The players and I became overy adversarial, looking at each other as The Enemy, even though we were supposed to all be there for the same purpose: To have fun. That could have easily been the end of that game group. We could have said to heck with it and quit because we didn’t have fun. And without fun, why would you game?
One of my players suggested that we pack along some board games or card games so that if another case of “GM Fatigue” were to hit us, we could still have some fun together and give the GM a break for a while. Another player said that he would be willing to GM sometime if this happened – just running a one-shot game for the group. Sounded like some good ideas so we’ve adopted these as our contingency plans.
What gets me the most, and the reason I feel I'm an idiot, is that I knew what would happen if I let the players talk me into gaming that night. I knew it wouldn’t be much fun and that the players would have a cheap gaming experience. I knew we should have done something different. I’m a smart guy, but I didn’t listen to the voice of reason in my head and I ran the game anyway. I had a choice and I took the obviously bad option.
Life is sometimes about learning from the mistakes of others so think up a contingency plan for you game group and don’t GM angry. It’s not worth it.
-Brett J.B.
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