There's been a lot of interest in the call that I put out last week, and a lot of it from quarters I wouldn't have immediately thought would have responded, such as the indies and a huge number of people wanting specifically to teach women and children, and while unexpected, that's been a great source of joy to me over the last week.
I've had offers of articles, programs, youtube videos and even turning up at conventions to impart knowledge to those who are just learning, and that got me to thinking...
For me, GMing is a skill best taught by another GM who's already done their time in the trenches, you can't teach surprise, and you certainly don't want people looking through the how to guide when they first take the step to running a game, doesn't inspire confidence in them or the game they're running if they're still looking things up.
The format of the program that's been put together has all the different aspects to it, from written word to live display, but I wanted everyone's thoughts on how they think it best to impart the knowledge?
For me, having run a games team for years, it's starting the new GM as a player and working them up from there.
Reason? Because if they can see how you do it, they'll get the idea of how easy it looks, and it's only afterwards, when you tell them how much was made up on the spot, that they get the idea of what they're getting into. For me, an adventure is an outline of a story that then develops into something else, I know full well that most players don't follow a set path and that sometimes the adventure you had planned will go the way of all things and be seen never again, and you as a GM have to run with that.
Case in point this wednesday when one of the werewolves in the party had given their word to attack something that was decimating the other wolves in the area (it was a Nexus Crawler...Look it up...) and was walking to their certain doom knowing that it was their certain doom, but their character would not allow them to walk away from their stated word.
What to do?
I could have fudged the rolls to have it knock them out, but they'd have known that I'd done it and I don't believe in having characters saved by me. The path they were on would have only one outcome, and in this case, I knew that the character in question also had a promise to save its packmates and always act for the greater good of the wolves, I spoke to one of the other characters who pointed out that the wolves needed to retreat and gather the information, thereby giving them a reason by which they could walk away from the fight without losing their honour, because saving a pack mate is more important than fighting a hopeless fight.
But there was a moment when that wolf kept walking forwards and I was actually thinking about getting out a blank character sheet...
Things like that, you don't learn from articles, you learn from seeing them happen and seeing people react to them, from seeing what needs to be done and knowing the characters and the world enough to make that call.
So for me, teaching people directly, face to face, is always the better of the options, but I'm interested in others thoughts...
