Last month, we offered a blog post that was the foundation of building your community. I wanted to build on that theme and have a series of blog posts that discuss how to contibute to and grow your local Pathfinder Society community.
The first bullet point in that post suggested that you should offer to GM. However, you may feel you aren't experienced enough or don't know the rules well enough to be a "good GM." One thing I have learned in my years of gaming is that often people who want to GM, but who feel too shy or uncomfortable running a table, actually turn out to be some of the best GMs.
Over the past year, our Venture-Captains and Venture-Lieutenants have often said that there is a lack of GMs. This is why I worked with a group of the best GMs in the Georgia area (people I had personal experience playing with and GMing for) to develop a GM 101 course. This course debuted at PaizoCon and was also offered at Gen Con. The feedback from attendees was incredibly positive and it is now time to share the course with everyone. The GM 101 instructional PDF will support the running of GM 101 courses in your area. Even if someone just reads the GM 101 course, there is a ton of great information to be shared.
The course is divided into four lessons, each lasting approximately one hour. These include "Roleplaying: Bringing Scenarios to Life," "Rules: Enabling Awesomeness, Restricting Abuse," "Running the Game: The Science Behind the Art," and "Advanced Topics: When the Unexpected Strikes." These four basic topics will allow new GMs to ease into the role and also feel more comfortable overseeing the enjoyment of a table for a group of four to six players.
One thing the GM 101 PDF refers to in the second half of the course, but that it does not include, is the Deck of Many Situations. This deck allows new GMs who have been through the four building-block lessons above to take those instructions and adjudicate real situations that have occurred at Pathfinder Society tables at local game days and regional and national conventions. I will refer you to several of our Venture-Captains for access to the deck. They have developed different decks, which include situations encountered in their local regions. If you would like to obtain a Deck of Many Situations, please refer to the Pathfinder Society Regional Coordinators page. If your Regional Coordinator does not have a copy of the Deck of Many Situations, he or she will be able to obtain one from another Venture-Captain and provide it to you. Some of the more memorable situations I was able to be a part of at Paizo Con were "warring spouses" and "a child pitching a temper tantrum" (yes, I was playacting the child). It was interesting to see how GMs handled both of those very tricky situations.
The other PDF I wanted to provide for download today was the Kid's Track lesson plans. The lifeblood of our hobby is the next generation. A decade ago, I took my son to his first Gen Con when he was eight years old. There was very little for him to actually participate in or be involved with at that age. Over the years, I had toyed with the idea of creating some kid's games so that young children would have something to do. When I was hired by Paizo, it jumped to the top of my priority list since I had resources available that I had never had before. I reached out to Ontario Venture-Lieutenant Jeff Mahood to help me develop a lesson plan. He has experience with early childhood education and I wanted to gear these lesson plans for kids that were six to twelve years old. What he put together and provided blew me away and I can't thank him enough for his work on it.
With this awesome document in hand, I was unsure how it would go over at Gen Con. I reached out to several store owners and forum members, and received overwhelmingly positive feedback, so I put it on the official Gen Con schedule. We sold out every slot at Gen Con and ran eight unscheduled overfill tables. With the reponse we had at Gen Con 2012, I have my sights on expanding the program even more at Gen Con 2013.
What the Kid's Track lesson plan offers is four lessons on the basics of roleplaying games, broken down by the total minutes spent on each subject, using the Pathfinder RPG Beginner Box to teach those fundamentals. Each lesson builds on the previous lesson and helps a GM teach children as young as six what roleplaying games are and how to play roleplaying games, specifically using the Pathfinder RPG Beginner Box rules. Each lesson plan is followed by the four children playing one of the four Beginner Box Bash Demo adventures.
I hope you find both of these PDFs useful for building Pathfinder Society, and roleplaying in general, in your community. I would love to hear your feedback on how we can make these programs better and look forward to reading your comments.
Mike Brock
Pathfinder Society Campaign Coordinator
