PinkFae Archive #49: How to GM Part 8: The End of a Game Session

Today we have another entry from the PinkFae archives. This article is part of the 'How to GM' series. It was originally posted on 14 January 2017.

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The evening is drawing to a close. The session is ending. You're nearing the end of the time allotted for tonight's game. All done, right? Time to say, 'See you next session!' and pack up your stuff and go?

Not quite.

The end of a game session is at least as important as the beginning. Before you call it a night, there are a few important details that you should cover. In this entry, we shall look at some of the essential issues to consider at the end of your session.

PinkFae Archive #22: How to GM Part 1: Selecting a Game

Today's entry is the first in a series. This is the 'How to GM' series that I wrote for PinkFae. This particular article was published on 19 June 2016.

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I'm going to do something a little different. Today's post will be the first in a series, which will run until I'm done. How many posts will there be in this series? I don't know. I'm making this up as I go. 😊 But this series of posts will be an analysis of GMing. How to do it, how to get players, how to prepare, how to be good at it... that's what we will look at in this series. The series won't be consecutive; I'll intersperse it with my other articles. But for today, we'll start with How to Choose a Game System.

Advice for a First-Time GM

Recently, one of the players in my Fate group asked me for advice on how to GM. She had some friends who wanted to play, but there wasn't room in my group for new members (I have a hard limit of six players plus the GM on any games I run). So instead, she decided to run a game for them herself.

I wrote her a fairly lengthy email full of advice, and it later occurred to me that it might be the sort of thing that could be useful to others. So I will adapt the information I wrote in that email into an entry, and share it with you.

I will point out that as we get further into the PinkFae archives, there will be a series of articles entitled 'Analysis of GMing,' which will have a lot of advice that will be useful to the first-time GMs. But that series isn't targeted specifically at new GMs, and it's still a couple months out (the first entry is going to be Archive #22, and we just had #17 last week, so it's going to be about four months from now).  So we'll start here, and as more information comes out, it will be additional advice to add onto what you're about to read!

GMing for New Players

A local medieval re-enactment group recently held a special event, and I chose to take part. Specifically, the group hosted an RPG night; several people volunteered to GM a one-shot introductory game, and the others chose one of those games to play. The idea was to give veteran gamers a chance to play, if only briefly, and to give players an opportunity to experience a new system, and to give newbies the prospect of getting a taste of tabletop roleplaying games for the first time.

In case you're curious, there were six total GMs, running the following games: Dungeons and Dragons (because of course), Pathfinder, Starfinder, a Star Wars game using a modified Warhammer 40K system, Changeling: The Dreaming, and Fate Core. Surprisingly enough, I was not the one running Changeling: someone else had already offered to run that one, so I ran Fate instead.

But here's what I thought was interesting: a good friend of mine was very nervous about playing. She ended up joining my Fate game, but in the weeks leading up to the event, she asked me several times if it would be a problem that she had never really gamed before (technically, she had, but only in a limited way... more on that in a moment). I reassured her that I was very familiar with GMing for newbies, and had introduced quite a lot of people to the hobby over the years.