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open mind and listen to what and how your players are describing what they understand is the world, and the rules, and what their characters are doing, and then play off of those. This playing may be to the benefit or detriment of the characters, but it is always fun to see your players smile when they find out that, whether it was true in your mind or not, the world and the rules and their actions are as they say they are; as well, it helps soften the blow of damage or death or some other pitfall for their characters when they can only blame themselves for the condition and belief of the world.

Running the world, the rules, the NPCs, the creatures, the world laws, etc., all becomes the easier part of the game when you have played in the game for so long. However, sometimes you don't have that luxury, such as when a brand new game has hit the stands and you're so impressed with it you insist on running it immediately. For example, when I ran the Aliens RPG by Leading Edge Games for my friends for three years before I left for the Army, I was running the game from scratch, no one else had the main book, and I was a relatively fresh GM. Fortunately, I knew the series of movies, had read nearly every comic book and novel out for Aliens and Aliens vs. Predator at that time, and had spent two weeks straight, prior to starting character generation for the game, reading and making sense of the rules. I did all the formula's, on paper, time and time again as though I were in school again, I memorized the statistics for the Aliens, from Eggs to Chestbursters to Drones and Praetorians to the Queen, and by the time the game was ready to begin, I was able to provide an extraordinarily immersive environment for my players. My friends all remember their characters to this day, what they did and were able to do because of my relatively loose style of gaming, and periodically they'll ask me to pick the game up again.

Running, instead of playing, a role-playing game MUST be a labor of love, and although you can quit whenever you want to, more often than not you really don't want to. However, this means you're going to be spending a lot of time, after work or school, away from your wife and children -this is okay if your wife and/or children are members of your role-playing group- developing the story for the game and the world and your friends, and designing and building any props you might need, or writing out terse descriptions to read to your players if you can't build the props. During my time running my on-line BattleTech/MechWarrior unit, Armageddon Unlimited -yes, we were the first and original, since 1985 baby- I found myself so immersed in trying to run the unit in it's entirety that it became a second job for me, another forty hours a week.

For those of you who are budding GMs, this is WAY TOO MUCH time to be spending away from real life, and I do not recommend. However, if you spend, say, eight hours per week on your art -running a role-playing game is most definitely an art- then that should be sufficient. As time moves on for you as a GM, you'll find that you either spend less and less time preparing -literally because it becomes second-nature and you become very fast at it, knowing exactly what you need to do instead of fumbling for ideas- or the same amount of time preparing more, and more elaborate, props and descriptions.

Well, that's it for this part of my dissertation, although I should have a new one relatively soon, containing settings and how to use them and the importance of game history and how to use that.

Learn more about this author, Paul Emerson.
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