PbP PFS GM school 2024

Game Master Redelia

That's a great question and one which bears discussion. What should players expect?

For Pathfinder Society adventures in an Organized Play environment, this is what I am thinking:

Character expectations:
* The character is a member of the Pathfinder Society and holds to the goals and requirements of being a member in good standing with that society.
** This means that characters should not be breaking social laws, or being disrespectful to the Pathfinder leadership characters.
** It also means that they should be accepting the assignments of those Pathfinder leadership characters and attempting to follow the instructions and complete the mission presented.
* The character should be a team player. A character that wants to, and actively does, work with other members of the Pathfinder Society.

Player expectations:
* Players should be actively participating in playing the game.
* Players shouldn't be trying to bypass the challenges through 'creative roleplay'. Creativity should be rewarded, but it should not allow for completing an encounter without rolling any dice (yes, I have seen people wanting to do that).
* Players should share the spotlight.

Various people have their preferred styles of GMing/playing, Society or otherwise. That's fair, as long as everyone is aware of which standards are being used before the game begins.

Hmm, in the sense of staying on the plot, I think running games as written is especially valid to new gm, I think more experienced ones know how to be a little more flexible, an I right?

100% agree. Knowing how to be more flexible takes experience. Anyone can change things, but changing them well and within appropriate boundaries is a nuance that is learned.

* Players shouldn't be trying to bypass the challenges through 'creative roleplay'. Creativity should be rewarded, but it should not allow for completing an encounter without rolling any dice (yes, I have seen people wanting to do that).

You make a valid point about completely bypassing encounters, but I think there are some gray areas there that could be acceptable, depending on the situation. Some 'creative roleplay' is a way for players to avoid being murder hobos. PFS1/2 & Starfinder can lean in that direction unless the GM and players make conscious decisions to do otherwise. In such a case I'd allow creative roleplay for non-violent solutions, but it would require some dice rolls for success.

Why do we play society? I'm not sure where the question is coming from. In my view, for play-by-post (PbP), it just works. Most sessions are finished to the end, although people going out of action (OOA) can happen. Everyone also has different reasons to play—maybe they haven't found a group, are between groups, or just want their gaming fix. While everyone can play with friends, here it is organized, we have rules, and hence, people that don't follow them are disruptive.

ome 'creative roleplay' is a way for players to avoid being murder hobos. PFS1/2 & Starfinder can lean in that direction unless the GM and players make conscious decisions to do otherwise...

In my games, I usually handle it the way Warah does, if players prefer a non-violent solution. But I also request dice rolls (Intimidation, Diplomacy, whatever applies). And to be honest, I appreciate it if players take the opportunity to bypass a fight this way and don't wait for the next 'Initiative' call while surfing on their phones. Unless the scenario tells otherwise, of course, it is a boss fight or the creatures the characters encountered are mindless etc.

And I also had players in my sessions who took the chance to play one or two games in Organized-play format but then decided to not get back, because it's not their style. Most of them said PFS scenarios don't have enough depth or they feel too restricted by the character building rules. That's ok, but they tried at least. I also met players who said they don't have the time to play long campaigns and PFS is a great opportunity to play a session every now and then.

In my experiences, I haven't seen many people trying to bypass combat challenges - it is the skill challenges that they want to avoid.

An example:

The party was traveling through a jungle type terrain. They encountered a sluggish river that was made almost entirely of quicksand. A small layer of water above it where some large frog creatures were lurking. The path that they were following at one point had a bridge across the river, but the bridge deck had long ago decayed and all that was left was the bridge support posts and a few bits of random wood.

We could either make acrobatics and athletics checks to jump across on the bridge posts, or make climb checks to climb through the treetops to get across.

Or there was the one player that opted to spend over an hour in-game time rigging up a rope and pulley system to suspend a basket that could be swung across the river so that no one had to roll any checks at all.

Barry VA Cleveland OH 75 wrote:

Here is my question to where I see people talking about when "they sign up for a PFS scenerio they know what to expect"

1. Do they?

2. Is society it self more important then the indiviual players.

3. What should the Players except?

Okay, I'm going to step in here and make a few observations.

2. That's a straw man argument if I ever heard one. Is Society more important than the players? No. Are players more important than the Society? Also no. What is important is that the GM does what they can to make the game engaging for the players, while still meeting the goals of the table. If the goal is to play a Society scenario for Society credit, then Society rules and guidelines should apply. If the goal is to run a Society Scenario "for funsies" and no credit, then the GM is free to modify the gameplay as they like.

Ok Let me get specific and thanks for you comment

My Friday has two players one a serious pfs person and my daughter who could care less about pfs but likes DnD and wants to support me. We play at the game shop across the street from my house. A heavy 5e game house. The owner is very supportive. The clientele wants 5e only. Granted I can be pfs snub but is that good for the game. What happened last night made me see things that I have been trying to say. My daughter got a cold so she could not make the Game. We need two to a run the game. So one of the Dnd 5e GM did me solid and showed so we could play. He rolled up a Dhampir on Pathbuilder. I setup it up so his character would be legal and started to play. He played like an out of control 5e murder hobo. Or so it seemed and the other PFS guy was very put off and made a snide remark. What I eventually figured the problem was communication I wasn't listening to him. I found what his motivations were concerning how he understood to RP his character everything he did made sense. Case in point the scenario said as a clue "smell was coming out of a hut". He immediately ran into the hut right past a guard. I said the guard sees you says "halt". He said "good I want everyone to know since the smell is a dead body". I says "your character a Dhampir right" he says "yes". "it has seen a lot of dead bodies right?" he goes "yes". "Well then your character is sure it is not a dead because it does not smell like one." He says "oh I don't that."

my point is He was not trying to be a murder hobo or destroy the game. It was a case of GM and player communication. My point is about PFS being more important then having fun in concerns "the scenario as written" I don't think is a straw man at all. It comes from experience. Whether it be a snide remark that the other serious PFS player was making. Or it also comes from things on this message board that I have read. So when someone makes that argument that a player who plays a PFS scenario should know what to expect. No. That is a dangerous prejudice on the GM's part that could hurt other GM's like me who are struggling to keep their games together even if it's your PBP game. This is a real life example not a straw man. You want to call that a "Straw man" OK.

This is question I have asked other GMs especially good ones.

Do you learn more on how to be a good GM from good GM's or Bad ones?

They always told me bad ones.

Your question is interesting and legit, but I'm starting to feel we are getting bypassed. Maybe a more experienced GM can help you with that. I think you are asking two things:

1. How to get players at my table who are used to another system.

2. How to handle in-game communication with a new player.

So, the first one is a little too much in my opinion because you can't force people to play. The system we are playing, after we know what happened, is more popular, and this is good.

About the second point, there is a session 0 for these things. I guess what is relevant is to set expectations. Perhaps the expectations weren't the same, so running as written wasn't enough this time.

Hope I'm okay. This is interesting, but I'll also want us to get back on track (GM school).

My Friday has two players one a serious pfs person and my daughter who could care less about pfs but likes DnD and wants to support me. We play at the game shop across the street from my house. A heavy 5e game house. The owner is very supportive. The clientele wants 5e only.

They say if you can't beat them join them but I have an idea to you, why won't you try to run them kingmaker (or AV) 5e if you are up for the challenge? Maybe you will interest with this approach more players? Only an idea..

One of the things I like to keep in mind is that the audience, settings and expectation of people may vary a lot. I like to compare it to what happens when I play board games with different groups of people. I used to play a lot of Risk with my friends, and we had an unspoken understanding of what we wanted to do there: everybody played for the win, according to the rules, with a lot of negiotiating going on, and absolutely no softballing. The dynamic changes when you mix up the group: with inexperienced players you'd want to tone down the take-no-prisoners style a bit, and if you find certain players don't enjoy competitiveness or losing, you'd play a different game altogether (I've enjoyed cooperative boardgames a lot, lately).

As soon as you sit down to play a(ny) game, you enter into a social contract - everybody at the table is ultimately there to enjoy themselves, but what that means may be different for everybody. The contract requires everyone to compromise a bit to find a middle ground, and that may be easier to find the more familiar you are with eachother, and the smaller the group is. Barry's example is a really nice showing of a group of people that started a bit further away from eachother, with different interests and priorities, but with people definitely showing the willingness to compromise.

For Society play, the group is really big: instead of a group of (about) seven players, we now have a campaign with thousands of players all over the world, and we want to be able to freely change up characters between sessions. Ultimately the rules are set from above as a kind of ruleset you can subscribe, which works for a lot of people.

By design, Society play works quite differently from a more free-form campaign, an I'm sure my 16-old-year self would have frowned on the way I run campaigns now (but then again, those 16-yo campaigns never went anywhere, and my homebrew stories were bad). He probably would have understood that this is a cool way to play with a lot of different people around the world, quite consistently, and with interesting stories. You sacrifice some flexibility, but you get a lot in return!

Even in the constraints of Society, there's a lot of variation in play style and people's preferences. Some people prefer very gritty scenarios, others the bubblier ones, I see people that really go for developing their characters, people that want to banter with other characters a lot, people that are less comfortable in writing out dialogue and prefer to describe what their characters say rather than putting it down literally, people that really go for the mechanics, optimizing their character along the way, and people that just build whatever character fits their flavor. I can accept all of those, as long as you're contributing to the fun of the group and keeping with the social contract.

This is question I have asked other GMs especially good ones.

Do you learn more on how to be a good GM from good GM's or Bad ones?

They always told me bad ones.

Oooh, you're in a good place then, because I'm a REALLY bad GM :-P

My own experience is a bit different. There are a couple of GMs on the boards that I really look up in the way they run their games. Mostly because they have a style that I really like, which truly brings the story to life. Whenever I play in their games, I feel challenged to create better posts as a player. Their games have really made me think about how I can improve my own games, and how to create player engagement.

Did you have any experiences where another GM (regardless of whether they were good or bad) made you reflect on your own style?

I meant played with. Not on boards or watched their Youtube videos. I mean played with in a game.

Ah, when i say ‘boards’, i mean the paizo boards where i play most of my games. Sorry if that was unclear. I have been a player in the games i referred to.

There are definitely some GMs that I think are good role models for how to run a game well, and some that don't suit my style. The ones that take the time to craft well-thought-out responses to players'/PCs' choices rate highly in my opinion, so that's one of the things I'll be conscious of when I start GMing on PbP.

This is question I have asked other GMs especially good ones.

Do you learn more on how to be a good GM from good GM's or Bad ones?

They always told me bad ones.

I learn more from the bad one simply because I encounter them more.

Whenever I get to play with a good GM, I always feel so inspired to improve my GMing so that my players can enjoy the same good experience that I had.

I learn more from the bad one simply because I encounter them more. And when I say bad I mean there's something that the GM is terrible at which significantly and negatively impacted the players' experience. It could range from not familiar with some specific class mechanics, didn't utilize the monster's full potential, to impose arbitrary time skip to mess with character's buff because the characters/players don't behaive in the specific way he envision them to be.

I would say this applies even when I am a bad GM. I ran a boss battle from an adventure path last night, and realized I completely forgot one of the boss's defensive abilities that would have really made the battle much more of a challenge. Definitely learned from that experience.

I had some bad GM experiences, and for some reason, he decided that he didn't like me when someone new joined without saying what I did wrong, although I asked. He just said that I play like a munchkin or something, and it is not fun to him. It ended when he killed my character, and I left. Sorry that I didn't leave earlier, but I was in several sessions with him before, and I didn't see this coming. Didn't learn something; maybe when you are starting to not have fun and there is no communication, just leave.

He just said that I play like a munchkin or something, and it is not fun to him.

"Munchkin" is another word with a lot of emotional baggage attached to it and very little actual defined meaning.

Has this been your only GM?

My first 'serious' GM in my native language. After this, I mainly lurked in LFG. Found a PbP GM in society that I'm still with, playing in the Discord lodges and also participating in oneshots. I think it's good that I let go and didn't try a forced stay.

This is question I have asked other GMs especially good ones.

Do you learn more on how to be a good GM from good GM's or Bad ones?

They always told me bad ones.

Well, the short answer is "Both"

The good ones are the ones who you want to emulate (in my case, most of how I run things like combat trackers and whatnot) are copies from good GMs.

The bad ones are the ones who show you what to avoid. If you feel that this GM is doing something badly, then it should be to tell you what not to do.

GM_Colin wrote:

I learn more from the bad one simply because I encounter them more. And when I say bad I mean there's something that the GM is terrible at which significantly and negatively impacted the players' experience. It could range from not familiar with some specific class mechanics, didn't utilize the monster's full potential, to impose arbitrary time skip to mess with character's buff because the characters/players don't behaive in the specific way he envision them to be.

I would say this applies even when I am a bad GM. I ran a boss battle from an adventure path last night, and realized I completely forgot one of the boss's defensive abilities that would have really made the battle much more of a challenge. Definitely learned from that experience.

And these kind of things is viewed differently by other players. Some people enjoy the tactical combat aspect of the game and would like to have a worthy opponents, so the enemies being underplayed(forget about abilities, didn't use Power Attack, etc) affect them more than people who focus more on roleplaying. But there're so many rules in Pathfinders that it's inevitable to make mistake.

Whenever I run higher level scenarios, the monsters are often lethal despite the fact that I follow the their tactics to the letter. Some people can't handle the difficulties and may consider me a bad GM as well.

The reason I say bad ones is they teach me what not to do. If something feels wrong to me then I say I don't want to be treated that way.

Every GM will make mistakes, and every new(er) GM has a learning curve. The good ones are open to respectful discussion about it and willing to improve. I think sometimes people are tempted to label someone a "bad GM" (or a "bad player") when they have a different communication style. This is amplified over PbP. Effective communication is vital.

after I posted that I thought should clarify what I'm talkin about and maybe most people haven't experianced a bad GM. It's more then a few mistakes. You do see horror stories about it on redit and in the comments on youtube. When you experianced it you know it. Just because you don't have great technique dosen't make you a bad GM. It's about the awful felling you have at the table. "like why am I here and what I do wrong" as a player. (this rarley happens) If you are tying to get better at your craft your probely ok. The type of guy i'm talkin about ain't in this class. it's an extreme. If you don't know what I'm talkin about then you haven't experianced it.

I think GMs need both good examples and bad examples to learn from. A bad experience can show you where you want to do something different, but you still want to have good experiences to notice what you can do differently.

Next assignment: Decide if you want to make a GM alias, or use your main alias. If you make a GM alias, post with it here. If not, please post with your normal alias to let me know.

I've noticed that many students have already done this; please still post here. We'll move on once I have a post after this question from every student

For your information, here is my GM alias.

And here is mine.

Here's mine...

I think GMs need both good examples and bad examples to learn from. A bad experience can show you where you want to do something different, but you still want to have good experiences to notice what you can do differently.

Oh tell me about it... Did something pretty bad as a GM recently... feel bad since it's the players that suffered for my lack of foresight...

My GM alias :)

My main GM alias.

Bound to have some avatar image collisions here since we have a limited set to choose from.

My bright, shiny, and new GM alias.

I'll be using my GM alias for this. Thanks!

First, do you learn more from good GMs or bad GM. I think you learn from both, but what you learn and how it helps you is different. I tend to learn processes to emulate from good GMs.

For example, Early on in PFS I had a GM who basically reworded/reordered the sequence and order of the PFS scenarios they ran into a separate document to better highlight possible skill rolls and how those rolls affect the current situation. They didn't change the plot, instead they just made it easier to see the possible checks and results at a quick glance. I adopted this and have never looked back. However, you milage my vary. I don't know that it is for everyone.

Conversely, things a bad GMs does/allows that basically wind up destroying adventures and scenarios tend to be more universally applicable. Pretty much any GM should avoid them and be well served by doing so.

And finally this is my GM alias. I previously posted as Takeyabue and Soave.

I'll also use my new GM alias. Thanks.

Here's my GM alias.

Still being new to PBP and PBD gaming I try to reflect on each game I play and consider what worked, and I would like to incorporate into my own GMing, and conversely the things I didn't enjoy so much and would prefer not to emulate. The mistakes I make when GMing are the lessons that really stick of course.

I think people will more vividly remember problems from things that went wrong.

But I also think that knowing what pitfalls to avoid does not necessarily show you what to do that make things work better. To learn that, you either need to experiment and find out from the school of hard knocks, or learn from other successful GMs.

This is my GM alias.

My bright, shiny, and new GM alias.

So when we gonna test drive it? :)

GM Warah wrote:

My bright, shiny, and new GM alias.

So when we gonna test drive it? :)

I just set up my first PbP game a few minutes ago. It's for a PF1 GM rotation group. Once that one's done, I'll look at GMing a PF2 game.

Here is my alias.

Here is my alias, thank you Zoey.

I will use my main as my GM alias, if it works.

Sorry I have been a bit out of posts the past week. Fittingly, I am getting ready to run a PF2 game for a high school class. That has eaten a lot of my time.

I want to touch on a few things I didn't get to earlier. First, language matters a lot to some groups, and it's important to know what everybody is talking about. As was pointed out, "railroad" is usually said and taken in a negative light. "Off-road" sounds more adventurous, but doesn't convey the same stress that it can put on people who don't want to be in the situation. I have had GMs who wanted me to stick to a specific path, and I have had one who wanted me to play a specific class, use specific weapons, and wear a specific color scheme on my armor. That is my go-to for "railroad" games.

On the subject of learning from good/bad GMs, I think we tend to learn from bad ones more because good ones rarely take the time to talk about their mistakes. We talk about bad GMs because of the things they do, but we focus less on the performance of good GMs. (The same thing happens in theatre with anybody backstage.) I think I may have been one of the GMs Lantern mentioned earlier. During a PBP, I kept waiting for certain players to roll checks so the plot could move forward, and they would put it off for 3-4 days. By the end, a couple of people dropped the scenario, and we added a pregen so we could finish on time. I learned some ways to handle that problem afterward, but in the moment, it was embarrassing.

If any of you have not yet completed the most recent assignment, please do so soon.

I'll be checking tomorrow to see if everyone has completed the assignment, and if so, we'll be moving on.

Sorry for the delay. Laptop died of water damage. Can't afford a Greater Make Whole or a technological equivalent of.

And here's my GM alias.

Hi, is there a class syllabus or something? I'm a slow reader, so if there is any reading prep to do, would appreciate having pointers. Thanks in advance :)

Sorry for the delay. Laptop died of water damage. Can't afford a Greater Make Whole or a technological equivalent of.

And here's my GM alias.

Rotten luck. Here's hoping the universe sends you a boon to compensate.

I am switching to my GM Alias from Zonurel.

I will use this as my GM Avatar

Muji, Ancient Wizard, and Klonac, I need your assignment if you're still participating.