And so Jonathan over at The Core Mechanic has hung up his blogging boots today to make time for Nevermet Press. Best of luck with that one and I’m sure I’ll be talking more about it over the coming months!

photo by heath_bar@flickr

As a final farewell Jonathan decided last week to end on a high and end with a project based on ‘This I Believe’. You can hear the final product here.

I had five attempts at recording my own addition to the project but with 4 kids in the background and various chickens insisting that was the time to lay an egg and tell everyone about it it didn’t really get very far. For those that don’t know my contribution is the cheesy one right at the end.

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With all this talk of Old School and New School going on these days I’ve got to wondering. In fact it was a comment on Game Of States latest post that gave me a good kick. I don’t judge a game by how it plays instead I judge a GM by how he preps and runs that game.  Ideally I shouldn’t be able to tell what system is being used apart from the very basic game/combat mechanics. That’s how I like my games run.

greekadman on Flickr

If I were to ask you to prepare a gaming session for a bunch of random new players using your favoured system how would you go about it? There are a few examples that jump straight to mind.

• Sandbox it. Throw the players into the random town and make up everything as you go.
• Grab a book that you know inside out and have the players run through a few of the chapters.
• Take a film and stretch it out a little. This takes away having to create locations from scratch as you can beg/borrow/steal almost everything from scenes.
• Go for that Lvl 1-4 adventure you picked up years ago and never had the chance to run before.
• Throw them in to your current campaign setting and roll with whatever happens.

They are all valid methods but if I’m completely honest if you didn’t go for options one or five I’d be less likely to play in your game. It’s completely hypocritical of me as I regularly use two and three for my campaigns but I want the GM/DM/ST/whatever you want to call yourself to be able to think on thier feet and accept anything the players manage to achieve or mess up.

So if you did only have 10 minutes to create this n00bfest I mentioned how would you go about getting it ready and running it?

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I’ve been trying to think back over my first games, my first characters and my first sessions as a GM and do you know what? I think I may have mixed up a few of my firsts.

My first gaming session and my first character are well documented thanks to my drug fueled GM and his knack for memorable sessions. Where my memory has started to slip though is in my very first GM’ing session. I could have sworn it was for a Rolemaster game where I threw dragons on an hourly basis at my friends Arch Mage and Warrior Monk. In fact I was so convinced of this until I tried to remember the Spacemaster games I used to run.

One summer when I was about 14 I had picked up a copy of the Spacemaster box set from the Virgin Megastore in Glasgow. It was the first ruleset I actually owned as until then every game we played was owned by either Joe or Chris. There was nothing wrong with this but being 14 it was very much a case of getting half way through a campaign and then falling out with one of my friends who then took their books and went home. My parents were going away for the weekend and taking my brother with them so I had the house to myself on the Saturday and Sunday. I locked myself away for those days in an attempt to learn all the rules so that the following weekend I could run the game. My friends wouldn’t hear of it though as knowing I would have an empty house they all wanted to come over and stay. that wasn’t going to happen though as I was determined to get these rules into my head. I told a white lie in that I was actually going away with my parents in an attempt to stop them coming round. They still did as they knew fine well that by the time I had told them this my parents had already been away for 4 hours.

So anyway I sat in front of the TV with my years supply of Irn Bru and a bag full of snack food and went to it. I’ve no idea what time I was awake until but I remember waking up in a heap on the floor with my face in the middle of the star map that was included in the set. You can still see the drool marks if you hold it up to the light! By about 7pm on the Sunday night I had drawn up a few characters and ran through a couple of combat scenarios so that I knew the differences between Spacemaster and Rolemaster. Whilst not ready to GM I knew the rules.

Over the next few days I came up with very brief scenario to start the game off and decided to wing the rest. My limited experience was already going to mean regular stoppages for checking the rules and mistakes would happen without a doubt. I was as ready as I was ever going to be. I managed to limit the players to Frank and Joe. Anymore than that and I would have seriously struggled.

So the Friday night arrived and we were staying over at Frank’s house so we could have a good run at the opening session. Frank had decided he wanted to be a space pirate so had drawn up a mercenary of sorts and Joe was the pilot for the ship. I filled out the group with a couple of NPC’s and surprisingly the game went very well. My only regret about the game was using our original GM’s star chart instead of the one supplied. There is only so many times you can let the players visit the planet populated by Ogryns that manufactures rubber sex toys without wanting to give up.

How did your first GM’ing session go?

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