My GM Style

After watching a few "state of the game" and other D&D videos, I've come around to thinking it'd be a good idea to lay out a few tenets of what I want to do when I run D&D or another Tabletop RPG. This is both for my own benefit to write my thoughts out clearly, and to lay out expectations for anyone I happen to game with.

I think at least in part by simple virtue of it being popular, Critical Role has become an easy target to bag on when people have relatively minor differences with it over how to run the game as if it's transgressive. On a moment-to-moment level, Matt Mercer's a fantastic GM for narrating action, and great at planning a campaign story to make sessions exciting. If I bring it up in these points as I write, I'm sorry, I don't want to bash it, but Critical Role's not quite the feeling I want to strive for in the worlds I like imagining. It does, however, make a great point of reference just due to how familiar people even outside the Tabletop RPG hobby are with it.

More than anything else, what I think I want to recreate is the feeling of my first game, which my father ran for my brother and my friends and I when I was a kid. We were just kids running around with swords and armor, and it was all we needed, but there was a feeling that a larger world than us was in play. His campaign was a sort of legacy game to those he'd run and taken part in through his own college and earlier years, and characters from those games would occasionally show up with relics of those events. One flew a Star Trek shuttle, and we found pieces of Stormtrooper armor. This was a world where we weren't necessarily the main characters, a sense for which I'll point you to Zee Bashaw's video here.


 * 1) Heroes aren't born, they're made. A son of nobility can be a drunkard, and a lowly peasant might cling to his honor as the only thing he really has. Our choices are what matter, and D&D is all about making choices and seeing how they play out. Thus, your Player Character shouldn't be special just for being a Player Character. Their choices won't be right because they're the ones the players made, and the characters will be subject to judgements by other forces in the world. The PCs shouldn't expect to be right and to succeed. They should be someone who lives in the world, has doubts, who fears for their life when they go into battle. Overcoming fear and realizing, admitting to, and righting their own wrongs are some of the qualities I consider most heroic.
 * 2) Players are not their characters. You may have heard player knowledge isn't the same as character knowledge, and you can almost consider this its logical extreme. Your Player Character shouldn't be considered a self-insert, an idealized persona, because that lends itself to the thought they're always right because you think you're right. The character comes from a different background than your own, and might have different beliefs accordingly. After all, if you opened your bathroom door to find a toothy monster, would you run at it with a sword? Play them as someone from the background you gave them, and have them make choices you might not. That's the essence of roleplaying.
 * 3) Death is a lasting consequence. As an extension of the two rules above, death is a possible outcome of the choices you make and the roll of the dice. Losing one's life is the ultimate consequence of risking it, and it sticks. Resurrection can't be learned as a spell, and you can't pay for it at the local temple. If a player manages to acquire a wish or the favor of a god, then that option could be on the table, but to earn those will itself be an effort. This is not to say, however, I'll be going out of my way to kill characters. Kicking you while you're down is no fun for anyone, so if you're unconscious and a fight's still going on, I'm not going to have a monster sit there stabbing you when they could be fighting active threats. But if the remote chance Death Saves come out against you or a dragon's breath takes you below the negative of your HP value, death takes hold. It should be regretted, felt as tragic, but in the end you get to roll up another character, which is exciting in its own right.

On Running Games

 * Insert description in combat. "Roll. Result. Hit/Miss." is boring as heck, but I'll always remember my father describing how my high-damage hit on my first hobgoblin cleaved him in two shoulder-to-hip. Check how Matt Mercer does it:
 * Player rolls to-hit
 * DM confirms
 * Player rolls damage
 * DM launches into description of how their (weapon) cleaves through (monster)'s armor
 * If you're noticing a lot of dead air when you leave off with description, it's possibly because the players don't know what they're expected to do, if anything, in a scene. You should leave off at a point that provides the players with a clear choice, and possibly suggest options yourself to prompt the players. Describe a character angrily leaving a tent? Have him mutter to himself, ask if anyone asks after him. Maybe a PC knows this character and would be more likely to talk to them?
 * Be enthusiastic about the choices players make, even when they lead to negative consequences.
 * How to lead in from mechanics to roleplay:
 * Confront players with a scene.
 * Ask players how their characters feel about it, if there's anything they want to do or interact with.
 * Players may comment on one anothers' actions/statements, and in-character dialogue appears.