Describing your GMing Style
Over the past couple of days, a meme flood has come crashing through my G+ feeds. The basic gist of the thing is to have various people describe how they GM a game using only a GIF animation.
I used the "I regret nothing"/Whose Line is it Anyway? GIF that featured as my header image in my last post. Because I often run games loosely hanging onto the reins as the players direct the story, introducing elements here and there to see where the players might take them, and often pulling in previous character actions to later stories, regardless of where they might have gone initially, and where those actions might take things again in the future. "Oh, you remember that unknown computer chip that you stole on the way through to the main mission and then pawned off for some quick cash to buy that gun you wanted... it's actually a spare part needed to regulate a biological containment unit which is slowly degrading. You've probably got 24 hours or so before the current containment system collapses."
I try to make it a point that at least half the things I inject into a game after two or three sessions of play directly come from the previous actions of the player characters...and anything else can be built off previous things that have seemed like throwaway lines in earlier sessions. Where possible, both.
But it's really imteresting to see these tiny snapshots of how other gamers in the community see their method of controlling play (or not).
If you haven't joined G+ to get in contact with the great and varied community of gamers, you should seriously consider it. If you are active there, do a search for the hashtags... #DescribeYourGMStyleWithaGIF or #DescribeYourGMingStyleWithaGIF ... there's probably a few other mutated variants of the tag around as well.
Honestly, looking at a few of these, there are clearly some people I'd love to share a game with.
I used the "I regret nothing"/Whose Line is it Anyway? GIF that featured as my header image in my last post. Because I often run games loosely hanging onto the reins as the players direct the story, introducing elements here and there to see where the players might take them, and often pulling in previous character actions to later stories, regardless of where they might have gone initially, and where those actions might take things again in the future. "Oh, you remember that unknown computer chip that you stole on the way through to the main mission and then pawned off for some quick cash to buy that gun you wanted... it's actually a spare part needed to regulate a biological containment unit which is slowly degrading. You've probably got 24 hours or so before the current containment system collapses."
I try to make it a point that at least half the things I inject into a game after two or three sessions of play directly come from the previous actions of the player characters...and anything else can be built off previous things that have seemed like throwaway lines in earlier sessions. Where possible, both.
But it's really imteresting to see these tiny snapshots of how other gamers in the community see their method of controlling play (or not).
If you haven't joined G+ to get in contact with the great and varied community of gamers, you should seriously consider it. If you are active there, do a search for the hashtags... #DescribeYourGMStyleWithaGIF or #DescribeYourGMingStyleWithaGIF ... there's probably a few other mutated variants of the tag around as well.
Honestly, looking at a few of these, there are clearly some people I'd love to share a game with.
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