Ok, here's an article that my one reader, Dave, shouldn't read (get out of my mind!). We'll see if this works or if he gets mad and holds this article against me forever, like he is known to do (it's that ball of hate thing). Otherwise I have to keep on self-editing myself too much. In general what I write I don't care if other people take wrong. I do care if Dave takes it wrong, so hence the previous warning.

So, I was reading the Red Prison adventure that Dave has been running for the last three GURPS sessions. Now Dave is proud that he has made this adventure extend for those three or four sessions. But I read the adventure and I can't help thinking that this is a one session adventure. It's only about eight pages long, two pages being two maps (a rather abstract area map and a map of the main villain's hideout), and most of the rest filled with stats for the various monsters and villains. There is only about one page of plot!

Dave does have a lot of notes. It's amazing how much backstory and thought he put into fleshing out the monsters and politics, especially considering that he had no familiarity with the AD&D monsters in the adventure (it's some sort of Planescape adventure). So that's great. But considering how much he kept going back to the adventure to read up some bit or other, it just seems like he should have had all this memorized. It's only one page of plot!

Let's critique Dave's GMing style. HIs excuse is that this is supposed to be a tempory campaign until Eric gets his next Erzoquest campaign up and running. But that is no excuse for the seeming lack of preparation and readiness on his part every week. Considering he wasn't working (sure he was doing odd jobs around the boat, but we're still talking about two months of no regular job), I would have hoped that he'd have a good command of the rules, even the GURPS Lite rules, and the scenarios.

Here's what Dave needs to do. First is be the sole arbitrer of the rules. Take the rule books away from the rest of us. Every rule decision is the GM's. He has a bad tendency to defer to the rule for say lighting a fire and looking it up in the rule book rather than just making a spot decision and keeping the game flowing. Tell us that his rules are final and he doesn't want any backtalk from us.

Second is he's got to stop trying to use the correct rule in every single case. If he doesn't know the rules, don't try to use them all. There is only like one page of essential GURPS mechanics, plus a lot of pages for skills and weapons, but that's just stats. There are only three GURPS mechanics: success rolls, reaction rolls and damage rolls (as said in the GURPS rule book, though only the first is really important). Make up reasonable skill rolls, or do what I do and just say it works except during combat.

Third is he should stop trying to run every scenario exactly as written. Too many times (just about every week) he has to stop play and look up some small tidbit: get the right name, the right fact, whatever from the prepublished scenario. It's jarring when the GM does this and breaks up the flow. When he's running, he does just fine but if something unexpected happens he doesn't deal with it well and stops. I try to have one sheet of names and stats and another sheet or two of plot and encounters. He doesn't need to do this but he needs to have a way of having the facts on hand so he only needs to glance at them.

This is actually more important in combat light campaigns. When people are actually role-playing, there is rarely time to stop and look at the rules. During combat there is usually a bit of time before each round as the players organize themselves, so the GM can stay ahead. But during role-playing, unless the players start talking to themselves or argue the next course of action, a GM doesn't have that time to take a few minutes to read up on the next plot point.

I'm probably being too hard on Dave. This is his first campaign in years, and the only one that's lasted more than two weeks. Probably he should have done something simpler. Forget the back story and just do the adventures, don't try to keep everything together with a time travel plot line. Probably would have helped to use something besides GURPS, which is so deadly that there aren't that many long fights. Sure, there are fights, but they're over quickly (or they should be if Dave knew the rules better and ran the combat smoother). Too much role-playing for a beginning GM.