“What do you call the guy who hangs out with the band?”
Give up?
“The drummer.”
This is a pretty standard musician joke. You can remove drummer and insert any other instrumentalist or even use vocalist, and the punchline is the same. Accordians and singers are also favourites, as well as bass players, of which I am one in my spare time. I take all the jokes in stride, knowing that I have keyboardists and drummers lower down in the food chain to pick on.
It just so happens that a lot of band positions get filled by the vacuum created by necessity. If there is a guitar player or two, and a singer and drummer, the band has to either find a bass player or make one. Usually this involves one of said guitar players giving in and buying a cheap rig. In my case, I was the singer for years. Our bassist moved away and a vacuum was created. I had been messing around with a friends bass for a while and decided to step up. After a lot of woodshedding (a musical slang term describing hours of solitary, focused practice, or “going out to the shed”), I was in, and enjoyed years of playing bass and singing. After a while, we found another singer, and I was happy to fade into the background of the rhythm section and do my job.
Now let’s bring this into context and change it one more time:
“What do you call the guy who hangs out with the gaming group?”
“The GM.”
There are people who like GMing. It’s fun. There are people who loathe it, or just can’t do it very well, if it all. No need to be arrogant about it. There are some GMs who can’t play to save their lives. It’s about preference. That said, in most cases and most game groups, there are people who want to play, and usually nobody who wants to GM.
Until somebody steps up to fill the chair.
They do, and then a number of possibilities occur in the wake of that choice. The best case scenario is that whomsoever sits behind the screen discovers they really dig it. They might start off with a homebrew, or more probably a pre-written or published adventure. They look it over, woodshed the rules and the adventure from the GMs’ perspective, panic a little (or a lot), and then sit down to discover that it all comes together and everybody has fun, including themselves.
They continue running games and working with their group to come up with amazing sessions of awesomeness, bleeding from one generation of PCs to the next, with the tales growing with each telling about that fantastic evening when everybody thought they had their GMs’ number, only to discover it wasn’t a doppelganger at all, but the sorcerous sister of the mayor, who happens to be the fighter’s cousin!
Of course, the events can go other ways. Some GMs continue to run sessions because nobody else will. If they’re lucky, they form partnerships with other players and trade off GMing duties here and there, giving them a chance to play out their own fantastic adventures instead of just trying to flick neon lights showing the ever ignorant party which way the dragon lies. A kind of round robin system forms (I think somebody wrote about that on this site, now who was it…?) and the group is treated to a variety of adventuring styles and plots and themes, since there is always a different flavour with a different GM, even in the same group.
Or it all falls apart and the group disbands and starts playing Magic. The horror.
Well, over at the Bracebridge Tabletop Gaming Community, we are trying to institute a new system so that the GMs get a chance to play.
I described the new system in my article “The Year Ahead,” but here is the short version:
Each GM may run games one month at a time (three sessions, as the first Thursday of each month is board game night), then they must take at least a month off. So, they can leapfrog if they want, but everybody needs to be given a chance to play.
For Michael and @grym and I, GM burnout was becoming a factor after having run games for so long both at Game On, and then continuing at the BTGC. Nobody else was stepping up to the plate. Why should they? Three tables and three GMs, you do the math. Everybody seems to be having a good time, so why mess with it?
Mostly because we want to play as well. Having started this whole thing as systems like FFG Star Wars and D&D 5E were just being released, we want to play! They are both great systems with amazing potential for exciting and dynamic characters who can advance in a variety of interesting ways, but how would we ever be able to see for ourselves? We wouldn’t.
The other side of the coin is burnout. No interest or an inability to come up with new and fun adventure plots, map making skills start to fall behind, and you find yourself more interested in Jeopardy than you do coming up with yet another stable of NPCs. Mike has a new baby as well, so his creative time is extremely limited.
We also wanted to generate more GMs so that others were kind of forced to try it out. As per my earlier example, sometimes you don’t know what you might like until you’re kind of forced into it. Then the strangest things happen. You get turned on to a whole new thing you may not have known you were capable of enjoying and a whole new world opens up to you… With a new fantastic point of view… (I couldn’t help it)
Since the mission of the community is to not only provide a safe and encouraging place to explore the world of modern tabletop gaming, but also to create opportunities to experience all aspects of that world. We would be remiss if we didn’t give people a poke in the direction of that aspect of the hobby.
So we’ve done that. And now it’s two months later. We have had an experienced GM step up and take a table of Star Wars RPGers, as well as a novice DM take a table of 5E folks for a spin. That is wonderful since it’s always exciting to bring wizened GMs into a new group to see how it all shakes out.
The best news is that we have had two brand new GMs flap their cruel and unusual wings this month. By all reports, everything has gone well, and both of the associated tables are having a ball. So it looks like our GM roster grew from three to six in the space of two months. That’s great!
The down side has been organization. It’s taking Mike and I a slightly disproportionate amount of effort to make sure we know who is running which tables, and what they are even playing. We have also chosen to have an open world among game systems. That means that any D&D PC lives and breathes in the same time and place as any other D&D PC. This sounds great on the surface, but we are having a few growing pains making that happen in practice.
Running your own campaign or even sharing ideas with a co-GM is one thing. Trying to keep track of who burned down which village and plundered which long lost ruin among six GMs and three or four possible tables of players is very complicated.
We’ve had some good feedback, though. People like the idea that they can flit from party to party, PC to PC or system to system as the mood strikes each month. They can try out different builds, or just climb in with a bunch of strangers and make something cool happen. The Young Ones and The Loud Table were broken up and remade, which everybody found to their liking.
The Grown Ups stuck together, but I’m convinced that’s because we’re old and stuck in our ways. I have faith that as time marches forward we too shall intermingle with the others and have a great time doing it. In time…
The negative feedback has mostly been about the inherent lack of consistency in this format. There are players who want to make characters and build an adventuring group with real bonds and shared experiences. Like Band of Brothers, they seek that party of comrades who have been through hell (sometimes actually through one of the nine hells!) and lived to tell the tale. For whom there is a story reference behind each encounter or occurrence, and only a small number of those who will get the joke, or shed a tear for a fallen hero, who sacrificed himself in some honourable or amusing way, so that the rest of the party could live on.
So they’re not pleased about the idea of people jumping around willy nilly. C’est la vie. You can’t please all the people, right?
The conundrum is how do we figure this out? We have started a group on Obsidian Portal, and even talked about moving from Waterdeep to a newly created world made by the community as they go on their adventures.
As far as the Star Wars group is concerned, they are faced with the same problem, but as people are quite content to play Edge of the Empire, there is also no pressing need to have the groups involved in universe shattering events.
I turn now to our ever growing population of Mad Adventurers to ask for your input. When playing with large groups and multiple GMs and possibly multiple systems or editions, what has worked for you? What has failed miserably? How did you keep it all together, or what made you just let it burn down in flames?
“How can you tell the stage is level?”
“The drummer is drooling from both sides of his mouth.”