Review: How to Be a GURPS GM: Improvising

Review: How to Be a GURPS GM: Improvising

Since I haven’t been following the GURPS news and upcoming releases in quite a while, the new book caught me by surprise. Yesterday, How to be a GURPS GM: Improvising got released, written by Sean Punch a.k.a. Dr. Kromm. The How to be a GURPS GM series of books is a mixed bag with some good ones and some not so good ones, so I decided to check this one out. After all, improvisation is indeed a skill and I wondered how one could even explain in text how to improvise better. These days, when many players seem to try their hardest to avoid reading the rulebooks and GMs learn how to GM from questionable actual plays and numerous even more questionable YouTube videos, there is a shortage of good written material to learn the art of being a GM from. And then people complain about the GM shortage!

The first thing that caught my attention isn’t even in the book itself, but in the description on the store page. “Its tricks and tips – swiped from the author's 45 years of gaming experience – cover improvising NPCs, locations, stats, combat, and more, at every level from individual encounters, through adventures, to entire campaigns.” These days, “muh 45 years” usually serves as an indicator that you’re about to read something stupid. I just found this amusing.

The book is 25 pages long. The introduction talks about the trend of RPGs to focus on planning, fully designed adventures, and worldbuilding, and suggests an alternative to do less preparation and rely on improvisation. The concept of low prep game is appealing to me. I probably can be classified as a worldbuilding addict, but I don’t really do a lot of session prep. So far so good.

The first chapter is titled Improvised Encounters. It is all about improvising NPCs, locations, items, and combat encounters. It talks about the three motivations to improvise encounters – the players didn’t follow along your planned story, to get the sidetracked story back into focus, and to have an intermission in the ongoing story to win some time to do some actual planning. This is where I started to understand that this book probably isn’t for me. Storygaming isn’t my thing, as I prefer my players to have some actual agency.

While I disagree with the premise, the details are much better, in my opinion. The advice for improvising NPCs is more or less decent. The one part that raised some questions is the “voices” part. Do people actually do different voices and accents for different characters? I thought that it’s just a meme. I’ve never heard any GM do that, but that’s just anecdotal experience. It’s just that the book says twice that it’s okay to stick to your own voice, that it would be like a dubbed foreign-language film, that it’s not the end of the world, seemingly implying that most GMs actually do voices.

The part about improvising reactions of NPCs also is somewhat questionable. It suggests using predetermined reactions for story-important NPCs and use Reaction rolls only for the irrelevant ones. This yet again seems to undermine the players’ agency and make investment into social traits and skills feel like a waste.

Another highly questionable part is the “Having Doubts About “Roll and Shout”?” box. It’s just a bunch of nonsense. It claims that certain gamers approach RPGs much as they do video games where you fight a fixed number of opponents a fixed number of times with a fixed map, where social interactions do not matter, and there is only an illusion of creativity and choice. The author says not to judge, because back when RPGs were closer to wargames they developed from, they had few rules not related to fighting, the relationship between the players and the GM was adversarial, and adventures and encounters were there to be beaten to find out who would prevail – the GM or players? Such players would also deem fudging dice rolls for the sake of fun and story cheating and have no idea what roleplaying is. Then there’s an entire paragraph about sticking to the rules being unfun, about changing and ignoring the rules, and other Rule Zero stuff. What? Now this really is something that you usually read after someone appeals to “muh 40 years”! As someone who has read AD&D 1e Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide, I can say that this is simply not true. Just open the books and read them yourself if you don’t believe me. The condescending tone doesn’t make it better either.

Then there are two sections about improvising locations and items. They have some pretty good advice, I don’t really have anything to complain about. To an experienced GM, most of it will seem like common sense, but this book’s purpose is to teach inexperienced GMs.

The section about improvising combat encounters is… not good. It does talk a little bit about balancing encounters, but refers to How to be a GURPS GM: Combat Encounters for more details. The questionable parts are “Emergency Measures” and “Black Boxes.” The former says that if you see that the fight is going way too poorly for the player characters, you have to fix it on the fly – the NPCs may change tactics, becoming cocky or stupid, or they may just run away. One of the other ways is to fudge dice rolls because a TPK should never result from an improvised encounter. The “Black Boxes” section basically says that when you wing the stats, handwave the battlefield, adjust the balance on the fly, and fudge the rolls, you can adjust the result to be anything you want to satisfy the story goal. This part is just depressing. As someone who has been on the receiving end of the GM adjusting balance on the fly, I can say that there is no worse feeling than this. You understand that nothing you do matters, you have no agency, you’re just there along for the ride to see the story the GM has in mind unfold. I think this is not a bad advice, but a harmful one.

The second chapter is titled Improvised Adventures. In starts by telling the reader that an adventure is merely a series of encounters linked together to tell a story. Just like the first chapter, it lists three motivations for improvising adventures – being unprepared and having players waiting for you, running a sandbox, or just ad-libbing because you have the end goal in mind but don’t want to plan.

The section titled C² talks about the importance of consistency and causality. It starts by saying in italic that adventures are stories that require a setting, characters, a plot, themes, and often a moral, and the plot needs a beginning, a middle, and an end. In a campaign, each story generates expositions and suggests later stories that might be linked into arcs. Yet again, this smells like the modern paradigm of “players > campaign > rules” where player agency is mostly absent, the GM is too lazy to write a novel and doesn’t understand why his game dies after the sixth session. While I yet again let out my bitterness and jadedness, the actual advice is solid. Regardless of what kind of game you’re running, consistency and causality are very important. Although, the consistency part goes against the combat encounter advice of the previous chapter.

The section on the importance of note-taking is very good. Keeping such records does indeed help a lot to preserve consistency and causality. The part about reading the room and listening to your players also has some sound advice that I can’t really complain about.

The third and final chapter is titled Improvised Campaigns. It talks about how to ad-lib entire story arcs from adventures. It starts with explaining collaborative creation, where players take part in creating the world and the story. The chapter explains what Session Zero should look like for a GURPS game, what you should discuss and take into account. But that aside, I have to give spotlight to the “Chronicles” sidebar that suggests writing up adventure logs by either the GM or players to serve as a reminder of what happened before. This is actually a good practice, and I’ve seen it realized effectively.

The “Aim Big, Start Small” section has some decent and not decent advice. The decent advice is that if you do prepare, prepare relationship diagrams, timelines of events, and similar tools that are not railroad tracks. However, then it follows it up with “there’s no sin in using GM fiat to bring things back on track”, “let the players have their fun – this is imperative! (in bold) – and then put a key location in their path or have an important NPC show up in their path wherever they are and whatever they are doing.” It is justified by the fact that the players don’t know your plans, so it’s okay to lie to them. First, it advocates railroading and removing player agency. Second, making sure everyone has fun is not the GM’s job – he’s not a clown. This is another piece of harmful advice.

In conclusion, I can say that this book is a mixed bag. There are some good bits in there, but also some atrocious ones. Taking into account that this book is aimed at inexperienced GMs, I would say that it does more harm than good, so I wouldn’t recommend it.