To jump on the bandwagon from a Questing GM, he is graciously hosting this month’s RPG Blog Carnival Question, ‘How to be a better GM.’ There is a lot of thoughts I could add to this. I’ll bring up 2 things I think are the key though.

Communicate and listen – At the end of each session I say, ‘So what do you all think? Are you having fun?’ So many folks will point out that reading your players, knowing your group, understanding what your players want, all are important for being a good DM. Maybe you are a master at poker and can read your group’s enthusiasm well. Do yourself a favor and make sure your impressions are right. Give them all an opportunity to talk about the game with you, and do it frequently. Most importantly, be sure to listen to them.

Guess what? You are going to make bad calls. You are going to find some players bring interesting characters, while others are sort of dull, and this might make yourself slip towards favoring one player over another. You are going to make both game and personal mistakes. Give your players a chance to tell you about it.

Don’t let a player sit and stew about it for weeks on end. Eventually bad things are going to come to a head and things will blow up. Get people comfortable talking about the game. Don’t get defensive. Don’t get upset. Find out how they feel. Did I mention you should listen to the group?

If you are doing a good job, your players will realize that yes, you made a bad call. You flubbed understanding a power or whatever, but you are all there to have fun. It’s a game. The DM is not out to torture or punish anyone, just trying to make things challenging. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. But reinforcing the idea that everyone should be having fun, and more importantly, communicating that idea to the group helps smooth things out immensely.

You will learn things. Maybe they absolutely loved that stupid NPC you quickly made up. Maybe they felt the combat wading through lava was too tough and simply frustrating. The combat on an airship was cool. The fight on the ice sheet against trolls was tough, but they enjoyed the challenge. You will learn the things your players like and dislike, all giving you ideas to make future sessions better. Again, make sure you listen to your group.

Play games – First off, you should spend a little time in the player’s seat. You should get a chance to see how other people DM. You should find out new tips and tricks. You should experience someone making things engaging and exciting. Or experience a heavy handed jerk, making your group suffer (and learn it is not fun). You will get better ideas how, or how not, to run a game. I cringe when I hear some guy cackle that he has never played D&D as a character, has always been the DM, and has absolutely no interest in ever being a player. That guy is missing a big part of understanding D&D.

Play different games. – Lots of them. You will learn by exposing yourself to different game designs how they work. What things are engaging and fun. What things are tedious and boring. You can port these aspects to your game, and doing so you’ll learn how to be a better DM.

Maybe you’ll find that intricate paperwork keeping track of game effects is serviceable, but having simple tokens makes book keeping interesting. Maybe you’ll realize that having events every other turn is predictable and boring, while making it somewhat random is more interesting. Maybe you realize penalties that make you sit out the game for several turns is frustrating, and that having some other mechanism to keep the player engaged is more rewarding.

Play lots of different games. Communicate and listen to your players frequently. These are two things (in my simple mind) that will make you a better GM.

Sometimes you might have this happen. Some NPC spills his guts dropping off some key information to the party. You get one guy that grabs a D20 and says, ‘I’m gonna see if he’s lying with Insight.’ Nope. Hold on. Back up there, buddy.

See I don’t buy insight acting like a default lie detector, where players wave their hand an automatically read untruthful thoughts. Insight is also about reading social situations. Great insight allows a person to recognize the two people chatting civilly over in the corner really cannot stand each other. Insight allows a player to hear the slight strain in an NPC’s voice saying things are fine, and recognize that subtle shift of their eyes to some burly thugs nearby.

Want to go all out with insight being a BS detector like Christopher Walken in True Romance? I’ll be rolling a bluff check against it. As a DM you should always be rolling bluff checks to counter the ‘insight = truth meter’ that players pull out. If they blow it, I say they believe them. If they beat out the bluff check, I rarely say, ‘You think he is telling the truth.’ I always try to obfuscate the result with, ‘You think he’s holding something back’, or ‘You see him lick his lips and give a smirk.’ I rarely ever give a black and white answer to passed insight checks if they are just seeking a truthful answer.

To me, insight is more about reading the subtle body language of people. I like to frequently give clues to the NPC’s mindset more than if they are simply telling the truth. Does the person have a pleading look in their eye when they beg the group for help? Do the player’s see the Duke slightly roll his eyes when he thanks them for dispatching the orc marauders? Does the group see the inn keeper tense up when they approach?

I use passive insight checks a lot to allow a group to read an NPC’s motivation. Sometimes it is a much more effective hook having a NPC say one thing, but his body posture or mannerisms give a completely different impression. I find it frequently sparks that investigative process where the players slowly poke around an NPC through dialog. It is much more interactive than just having a PC roll a D20 and see if the NPC is BSing.

I also allow insight to get clues on other skill checks. Sure some PC might ace the diplomacy check, but he just successfully made the flunky patrol guard allow them to pass. It’s the seasoned sergeant of the guard that really decides who gets into the king’s court. Insight is the key skill to walk into the room and assess who are the likely people with some authority, seem knowledgeable, or are well respected by others.

When do I have PCs use insight for a yes/no answer? Illusions. Yup, most folks forget insight is the key skill in disbelieving illusions. Since the players have a tool at their disposal to counter illusions, don’t be afraid to pull them out. In a magical fantasy setting, there should be plenty of opportunities to pull out the illusion card. It doesn’t necessarily have to be diabolical either. Maybe a merchant uses a simple illusion to make his wares look plentiful. How about an enchantment to give an elder noblewoman a slightly youthful appearance (think of it as gnome magic botox)?

So the next time a player quickly rolls a D20 for an insight check, don’t just respond with a yes/no to queries for the truth. Tell the player he thinks an NPC is holding something back. State the NPC appears to be sweating profusely as he stumbles over his words. Get away from treating insight as just a lie detector.

There was a general theme I had gotten from the DMG2, don’t take the rules in D&D as gospel. If something doesn’t work in your game, tweak it and have fun. I especially got this impression from the skill challenge section. WotC changed the success/failure ratio (something I think needed to be done to make it a challenge), but made it clear that DMs should feel free to modify skill challenges to make them fun and engaging. At the heart of it, I think WotC finally wanted to get some kind of structure and reward to all those roleplaying and skill aspects of the game, so players didn’t feel like the only way to get XP was from killing monsters.

The recent podcast posted on the D&D experience seminar I think has cemented this idea. Save my game had a seminar that was a great listen. It covered a fair bit on skill challenges. If you are still finding skill challenges a little clunky in your game, or just unsure how to make them more engaging, I highly recommend giving this a listen. Even if you think you’ve gotten a good command of running them, I think it has some helpful tips.

One thing I have had little experience with is running an extended skill challenge. Most of my challenges have been short ones, as I couldn’t quite wrap my head around having one that would go through several rounds of checks. After listening to a few suggestions, I think I’ve definitely gotten some good ideas on how to approach running one. I’m eager to try one for my game and have a good series of scenarios for such a challenge.

They also dole out some good advice on encounter makeup and addressing some tips on handling a game on a time schedule (like for conventions and LFR events). I highly recommend giving this a listen. Some great stuff in this podcast.