Today I'm going to talk about the most important part of GMing, in my opinion. I know some who prefer crunch over fluff, and others who try to get the crunch to fit how the lore works as accurately as possible. I recall others who want to make each party question their ideals, and others who just enjoy throwing shit in the group's face. None of these are as important to me as planning.
No, I don't mean planning out the campaign's villain's backstory, the session, or a certain story arc. I mean figuring out when and where you and your 5 other friends can all meet up, relax for a few hours, and play the damn game.
Don't get me wrong, other bits are pretty important too, but I consider planning the when and where a serious and important issue because without those figured out you will probably never have a game, no matter how well you know the system, or how perfect your story is, you need to know when you're playing and where.
Many moons ago, when I was new to tabletop role-playing games, the group I was in wouldn't plan their sessions out. Instead, they would hang out, see if anyone wanted to play D&D or what have you, and if enough people were down for it the game would go on.
This was in probably the worst stage of mine, as a player of pen and paper RPGs, because I was what's known as a player (A joke, I swear...) Looking back, I am surprised at how often they played, but the real issue was continuity. New campaigns would spring up sporadically, and old ones would almost never get finished. As a new player at the time, it took me awhile to get that what we were doing wasn't the norm, and after a time the inevitable happened. I got lucky and was able to DM before it fell to bits, thus leading me to making my own group shortly thereafter. But looking back, the constant flow of new games being run did help me in one big way - I got pretty decent at making characters.
Any given GM must also take note of another planning issue that can come up. You can only have so much of a time gap between games before most groups get bored of, or forget about, your campaign. I would argue no matter how interesting your story (or theirs, rather) was, a good month or two without any gaming can kill about most groups. This can change, depending on how much the people talk about it, but it all comes down to a simple point: Work with your players, and be open about scheduling to try and work things out.
I remember when half of my first D&D group, the one I first full-timed DM for, got seasonal jobs including me, I talked with everyone and we wrote up a schedule. It seemed that nobody could play for a while month! I said no, look right here, and they noticed right after work, at 3AM to 6AM we could play, and we played all but one week out of that month. It was tiring, and the sessions could have been better, but we all still kept on playing thanks to decent planning abilities.
I've seen groups that have a player who schedules things, and the DM just follows those instructions. While that may work, I find it less than attractive primarily because ideally the GM is the most invested in any given game - it's his or her world, that s/he put a lot of effort into making and letting players run through. With that logic, the GM will care the most, and will prioritize getting everyone together and playing. I'm not saying that a player-scheduled can't work, I just feel it may not be the most optimal setup. If you find a way for it to work, more power to you.
So remember, no matter how annoying it is to have to set everything up, and make sure everything is fine with everyone, it's all worth it. Without that seemingly annoying task out of the way, there would be no game, no wizards and dragons to challenge your friends.
On a side note though, I would like to say that it's also important not to force a game. By that I mean, make sure people can reliably go to your game. If not, you're asking for trouble. Just wait a month or two. I know that can be difficult, but your amazing story will probably get derailed anyways so just cool down, work on the nearby civilizations or what kind of wildlife is in the area. The wait is usually worth it.
I plan on seeing you next week,
Taylor Shuss
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