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Whenever my mom talks about leading groups of people in present or past bible studies, I can’t help but think “That sounds like a situation that’s come up in my Pathfinder groups.” After experiencing this enough times, I decided to briefly interview my mom with the goal of finding useful parallels between successfully leading a bible study and being a successful GM.
Question: What are your primary goals as a women’s discussion leader in Bible Study Fellowship?
Here’s a few things I keep in mind:
1. Be well prepared for the discussion – Read your material
2. Most situations can be resolved with charm, kindness and encouragement.
3. While rare, when all options are exhausted, sometimes you have to tell a woman she’s not a good fit for the group (One instance in the last 23 years)
Question: What responsibilities do you have as a discussion leader outside of discussion time?
Also, every week we have a leaders meeting, probably about 20 minutes each week where we go over what’s going on in our groups each week, like what’s been working, what hasn’t been working. You’re leading a group of human beings; there’s bound to be differences in opinion. So during our leaders meetings we run through hypothetical situations and discuss possible methods to resolve them.
Finally, once a year we have a workshop. We go on a weekend retreat, fellowship and learn how to better lead our groups.
Oh, and most importantly of all, we pray on our knees.*
*I finally let on I was interviewing her for the sake of Pathfinder and thought this was important for you to know.
Unsurprisingly, at least to me, there are tons of parallels on being a good discussion leader and being a good GM. Managing people, no matter the reason, deals with the same issue: You're dealing with people. Some are easy to work with, others not as much.
Here's some lessons I've taken away:
1. Balanced Sharing - This seems an eternal struggle in one of my groups, where we have dominating players and shy or simply less talkative players. The GM should single out the shy ones to get them more involved; have an NPC interact with them specifically, delegate some task to them like tracking initiative.
2. Communicate with players - In BSF, this takes the form of a weekly phone call. In Pathfinder, it's sometime easy to skip this step, but I think it's an important one for the long term health of a gaming group. It doesn't have to be weekly even, but you really want to keep a pulse on how players are individually feeling about the campaigns. Is it fun? What makes it not fun? What would you like to do in the future?
3. Training - In our group, everyone has been/will be a GM at some point, so I think it could really be fun to put together a workshop once a year, every 6 months or whatever and try out new strategies/ways to play to shake things up. One idea I want to try out is a scenario where we take turns GMing a single session; shifting control of the bad guys and NPCs. But the bad guy has a stated objective "I'm going to destroy this city with my hoard of undead" and each GM works within that framework.
What do you think? Does the bible study model have something to offer to GMs learning the ropes?
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It's basically all different forms of organization and management. It reminds me of how back in the day being a WoW raid leader could actually be listed on a resume. Because organizing a team of 40 people to perform a common goal with separate roles was quite a feat.
It's basically all different forms of organization and management. It reminds me of how back in the day being a WoW raid leader could actually be listed on a resume. Because organizing a team of 40 people to perform a common goal with separate roles was quite a feat.
If only employers counted my gaming as useful experience...
Bought and sold virtual items for virtual wealth until I was an infamous tycoon, learned principals of optimization by playing competitive speed runs on Kingdom of Loathing, GMed for Pathfinder...
Really, Mr. Christopherson, these are legitimate skills! I'm qualified to be your CFO. *cough cough*
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It's basically all different forms of organization and management. It reminds me of how back in the day being a WoW raid leader could actually be listed on a resume. Because organizing a team of 40 people to perform a common goal with separate roles was quite a feat.If only employers counted my gaming as useful experience...
Bought and sold virtual items for virtual wealth until I was an infamous tycoon, learned principals of optimization by playing competitive speed runs on Kingdom of Loathing, GMed for Pathfinder...
Really, Mr. Christopherson, these are legitimate skills! I'm qualified to be your CFO. *cough cough*
Depending on how you word it, the GMing Pathfinder games could be good on a resume. Something along the lines of "leader and organizer of a weekly skillset based creative solution group" or some other resume talk.
Whenever my mom talks about leading groups of people in present or past bible studies, I can’t help but think “That sounds like a situation that’s come up in my Pathfinder groups.” .
Thanks for sharing. An annual workshop sounds good. I've never done one of those with my groups. The closest thing we do is talk about builds and ideas when were are on of weeks playing board games and such.
This made me chuckle. It's kind of spooky how similar two very different things can be. I like your "inexperienced/shy player should be put in charge of something like initiative" suggestion. That's a good idea and I'll definitely use it in the future.
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I'm always looking to become a better GM. I popped into this thread and realized I'm already doing nearly everything your mom is in BSF. The only thing I don't do is work with other GMs.
I've been the defacto GM for decades through several different gaming groups. For some reason each group I've been in has always been composed of folks who just don't want to spare the time to run a game. Most of these other players though have the skill and have done it in the past, so they COULD take on the job, they just choose not to.
I feel like one of the ways I could be a better GM would be to be a player and let the responsibility rotate through the group a bit. Then after a time take on your mom's idea of a GM's meeting. What's working, what isn't and why? Those are good things to get specific feedback on.
What would you do in a GM workshop?
I've actually been to one. I went Dragoncon a few years ago and Tracy Hickman did a talk/pitch for his Gming guide with many anecdotes. I have notes from the seminar somewhere. Ill post some if I can find them.
I ask because the idea has me interested in a group GM workshop, and I am brainstorming what one could do. 1 hour dungeon/adventure sprint creation? Painting miniatures/making terrain (The DM's Craft on YouTube is good for terrain as GW), presenting a small topic of research on innovating adventures (show others stuff you found on the internet and implement it in an example or the above rush dungeon), making rival adventurers for other DMs.
I suppose a GM workshop would be a live version of all of us on this forum. It would be a meeting where you could go over rules disputes, trading stories to illustrate different gaming techniques, go round robin asking and answering various advice requests, etc.
This is awesome. Thanks for sharing!