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Venture-Agent, California—Concord 1 post (272 including aliases). No reviews. No lists. No wishlists. 14 Organized Play characters. 8 aliases.


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*** Venture-Agent, California—Concord

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My lodge is less than a year old, so while we've had great success in developing our player-base, we have struggled with bringing new GMs into the fold. I won't bother touching on the common anxiety-based complaints against making the jump, as that's been covered. However, there are four important barriers that have stopped people in my area from either GMing at all, or have kept them from becoming regulars.

1) Cost - Whether it is maps, printing sheets or buying adventures, costs add up pretty fast. This creates a barrier that you can smooth over, but it is definitely a barrier.

My store provides wet-erase maps for GMs to use and I have been building a library of flip-mats and pre-printed adventures for people to run off of. I also have taken on the cost of printing chronicles and sign-ins.

2) Time - It takes a number of hours per week to prepare to run an adventure. That is significantly more 'homework' than just showing up and playing. I've had people drop out of GM bootcamps because they didn't feel like they'd had enough time to read a quest.

Whenever I can, we talk about adventures that a new GM could run a few weeks in advance. Sometimes engaging in a plan can help.

3) Jargon - There's a lot of information that needs to be translated into a usable form in an adventure. Stat blocks are utterly dissimilar from character sheets. Where to find information for a given scene. How to parse information for the GM only versus information that you might need to give to players. There's a lot of skill development here that takes quite a bit of effort on the part of a new GM.

We do semi-regular GM bootcamps where players who are potentially interested in running games can break down a quest and talk out how to best prepare for running it.

4) Repeatability - New GMs are almost always uncertain about their ability to run games, but they often also have issues with how to prepare particular adventures as well. Telling those same GMs who have stepped up and tried running an easy non-repeatable adventure that they cannot grow more comfortable with a scenario and still get rewards is a really tough conversation. AND it has been made significantly harder with the introduction of Replay points.

I currently try to offer easy to run, repeatable adventures to new GMs, but I haven't found a satisfying way to have that conversation so far. Some sort of system of GM replays would make it much easier for new GMs to build confidence with material they are comfortable with.