Finally looking back at my many years of GMing games with a critical eye (something I should have done a long time ago), I've started coming to a few conclusions, mainly about my GM style, but perhaps also GMing in general.
Perhaps the most glaring thing that I saw was that I dislike rolling dice. A lot. When given the choice of rolling a check, or just looking at numbers and thumbing an outcome, I'd go for the latter. Unless the uncertainty matters, or there's an important enough reason to let characters try (and players roll). Somehow, dice just add unnecessary complications, they take away time - it's not just picking out the right die, throwing it, and waiting for it to land - and they can be abused way too easily. A thief might steal a person's pants because he can, or you get the very arbitrary "You've tried to pick this lock already, you can't roll again." Or players decided with a roll whether or not they can handle a certain drink.
Very often, the GM rolls behind a screen. Why? One of two reasons; first, so that the player's don't always know whether their actions succeeded or not - people don't always know whether there's anybody hearing them sneak around - second, to be able to fudge the roll in case it doesn't go right. Then why roll in the first place? Other than to create the illusion that you're letting coincidence decide.
More often than not, I just decide what happens, and my player's know that I'm not rolling for it. - mostly because I improvise anyway. I tend to gauge values and then decide a likely outcome that is scaled, rather than yes-no. In one game of the German RPG "Das Schwarze Auge" (The Black Eye), one of the characters had a rather low superstition stat of 6 (it works with a d20). They encounter some strange occurances in a forest with trees moving subtly or so. Instead of having him roll on his superstition, I looked at the value and said that he was slightly frightened, but not incapacitated. The player understood and kept himself slightly in the background for that encounter. What would a roll have achieved here? Either a player who got lucky and could drown his superstition (making it moot), or someone who becomes paralyzed with fear and can't act (and play) anymore.
The roll was rather unimportant for the plot, and to speed things up, I ruled an outcome. Ignoring the stat completely would have been bad, however; after all, the player did choose that disadvantage (and got points for it), it has to come into play somehow. So ruling can be a good tool to speed up gameplay and get rid of unnecessary or disturbing dice rolls. In fact, I'm going to go one step further and say that gauging, the step before ruling, is extremely important, and is most of the "work". Whenever a player asks "Can my character jump across this pit?" or "Could my character sneak past the guards?", the GM looks at the values, and says a likely outcome: "No, the pit is too wide for you." or "Yes, you could try." Going from there to actually ruling the predicted outcome is just a small step, really - if rolling would just add complications - such as the character falling into the pit.
Qi
Very often, the GM rolls behind a screen. Why? One of two reasons; first, so that the player's don't always know whether their actions succeeded or not - people don't always know whether there's anybody hearing them sneak around - second, to be able to fudge the roll in case it doesn't go right. Then why roll in the first place? Other than to create the illusion that you're letting coincidence decide.
More often than not, I just decide what happens, and my player's know that I'm not rolling for it. - mostly because I improvise anyway. I tend to gauge values and then decide a likely outcome that is scaled, rather than yes-no. In one game of the German RPG "Das Schwarze Auge" (The Black Eye), one of the characters had a rather low superstition stat of 6 (it works with a d20). They encounter some strange occurances in a forest with trees moving subtly or so. Instead of having him roll on his superstition, I looked at the value and said that he was slightly frightened, but not incapacitated. The player understood and kept himself slightly in the background for that encounter. What would a roll have achieved here? Either a player who got lucky and could drown his superstition (making it moot), or someone who becomes paralyzed with fear and can't act (and play) anymore.
The roll was rather unimportant for the plot, and to speed things up, I ruled an outcome. Ignoring the stat completely would have been bad, however; after all, the player did choose that disadvantage (and got points for it), it has to come into play somehow. So ruling can be a good tool to speed up gameplay and get rid of unnecessary or disturbing dice rolls. In fact, I'm going to go one step further and say that gauging, the step before ruling, is extremely important, and is most of the "work". Whenever a player asks "Can my character jump across this pit?" or "Could my character sneak past the guards?", the GM looks at the values, and says a likely outcome: "No, the pit is too wide for you." or "Yes, you could try." Going from there to actually ruling the predicted outcome is just a small step, really - if rolling would just add complications - such as the character falling into the pit.
Qi
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