Aditional advice for an aspiring GM: 1: Know your world, and know it really well, becasue your players are allowed to ask you anything they like about it and you need to answer quickly. You can't make up all the answers in advance, but you can have a good enough grasp of the frame of reference to improvise when you need to. 2: Have a list of unused NPC names to one side. It is generally easy to know what the attributes and skills of an NPC should be from the context, so you can always make that much up when you suddelnly need one. But thinking of an NPC name in a hurry is incredibly difficult! 3: Remember it is not your story: it is the PC's story. You provide the backdrop, the world for them to be in, but they say what their characters do and it might not be what you expect. 4: On the other hand, you need to have a long term story arc to guide them along. Just only guide, never force. Never quest or geas a PC. 5: Unles you are playing a Superheros campaighn, your PCs are not indestructible. If they do something really dumb the characters have to die. 6: However, this is a story. No character should die simply from rolling the wrong numers on dice. If they do not do something really dumb they should not get killed. On the otherhand this can be done in such a way as embarases them. I remember a party which had to be rescued by their far lower level henchwenchs (the all male party had recruited a female hench each). The GM made sure that the party were reminded of this for some time afterwards... 7: After each session ask for feedback, and listen to it. Rgds, Michael. ---------------------------------------------------------------- GMAST Home Page: http://www.phoenyx.net/gmast/
