Don't make any plans!

Who remembers their first time GM'ing a game? I found it kind of terrifying. It was like laying myself bare, like I was all raw nerve endings and the slightest rub was going to be agony. I planned and planned and planned, I think I sunk about 20 hours into just planning that first game, I went into my first session of my first ever campaign with everything planned out, I mean everything.

This was my downfall. My plans fell apart at first contact with the other people at the table. It was a nightmare. See I had made a pretty fatal error in how I planned my adventure: I thought of it as *MY* adventure. I had not actually planned a roleplaying game, a share myth for myself and my friends to explore, I had planned a book I wanted to read to my players and that they got to make minor choices in, but choices that ultimately wouldn't affect the outcome. This isn't how I think roleplaying games should be played. Maybe you disagree, if you do it's fine, tell me why I'm wrong, I'll learn something.

I think this is probably pretty common for first time GMs. especially teenagers, but I don't have any backing evidence of this so I'll just present my experience as a sort of case study. I felt at the time that I had to provide a great epic story, something that mixed Conan, Druss, Lord of the Rings and at the time various Anime and JRPG cliches I had a love for. I though I had to craft this great baroque thing, this sprawling narrative into which the other player's characters would fit and become the heroes of the story. I had applied all that I knew about writing at the time, not very much then, only a little more now. My story had a beginning, middle and end, themes were lovingly hammered into place and concepts were primed for ramming.

Upon contact with my story the players decided to attach to some throwaway line about a city in the south that seemed interesting. It was just some fluff in the background I had pulled out of thin air, it had nothing to do with the story. So I laid down the railroad tracks and how. I think about it now and see the almost literal battle that was happening between my story and the much more interesting shared mythology that could have developed. I was proud and petulant, so I let the game die. I don't think I intellectualised it very much at the time, I think I just did what was pretty typical of teenage me, I took my ball and went home, without telling anyone. I never ran another session of that game. I was dejected and horrified by what had happened to my poor story.

In the end I ended up running my next game some 5 years later in University, I was covering for a friend who had been slated to run a very cool Ravenloft one-shot based on pirates. I took his game, and seeing as I didn't have a full grasp of his story or the ideas he was trying to present I just used it as a framework around which to allow the other players to play and for me to react to. This felt so much more natural, I had fun, the other players had fun, we shared a story in which the only survivor was the innocent and damaged young pirate who rowed out of the mists to his freedom. My friend's reaction to this? "I was not aiming for that at all, but it sounds cool" Cheers John, that one line set me up to GM again and again, it was pretty formative in the way I game.

So what's the point of all this? Well I guess if by some magic you're a starting GM and you're reading this, I would like to be so bold as to offer you the one piece of advice I would have loved to have heard when I started: Don't plan anything, react and build your myth collaboratively.

Maybe that’s two pieces of advice?