An important
element for a good Game Master is to be comfortable and confident. You
have to be confident in your abilities and that will show to your
players. If it looks like you have everything in control the players
will accept what you say as being part of the "master plan". Eric does
this all the time, he only has an outline or a few ideas and he can run
and make it stick. That's because Eric has his world down cold. If we
think that all those weird things that are happening are part of Eric's
plan, we accept it.
Similary, as long as I stay in control the players aren't as distracted
by my fumbling around. This and the last episode were both good for me.
I tied in a lot of elements loosely and extrapolated as needed and I
stayed in focus and everything turned out all right. Now the next step
is season 7, where I get to make up whole episodes by myself and
knowing how bad I am preparing for adventures I'll probably only have
outlines for each run.
One of the things I do is let the players initiate action. Well, I'm
sure every GM is the same. But especially during social scenes I need
the players to do things because I'm bad about making things happen to
them. I had this presidential ball scene where the players can use the
ball to further their investigations. It was also a chance to throw in
a few clues for the players. But if that was all then it would only be
a five minute scene. But them getting the clues and immediately
pursuing them a bit stretched it out and made it more fun.
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There were a
few things that the players missed. There were several groups involved:
the Romulans, Starfleet Intelligence, Section 31, the Gentaran
governmens, the Gentaran rebels, and the rebels' Nausicaan hirelings.
They missed the Section 31 guy. During the ball Major Sela and the
Ambassador disappeared and came back together. For some reason the
players got caught up in the sexual innuendo. But actually Major Sela
had mind controlled the Ambassador with the mind control technology
introduced in Episode 602 I believe. And after that they assigned
Krystal to help the Ambassador and since Donald was asleep they didn't
notice that the Ambassador was decidedly different afterwards.
But it was a fun game. Slightly over four hours. My fault, I should
have been looking at the time a bit more. Usually when there's an hour
or a half hour left I can wind down the adventure and end it before I
run out of tape. It's not that hard to just delete elements and make
things a bit easier or harder and change the pace of the adventure such
that it all ends up at the right time. Having a tape helps keep you
focused -- two tapes == four hours and that's about the max that I want
to run because the next jump is to six hours and that's just too long.
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