Melody [0:00]
The Game Master Certification Organization had the opportunity to interview Bo from the Guild of Navigators! Welcome! I am your host, Melody Rainelle. Our interview excerpt for this episode will provide some insight on some interesting questions. Have you ever contemplated how to handle mistakes when playing tabletop role playing games? And, how do you know if you did a good job as a game master? Well, without further ado, let’s ask Bo!

Bo, would you please tell us - how do you handle mistakes?

Bo [0:40]
I don't think there are any mistakes. Is it my mistake that I misread a rule? Well, let's slide over it. Is there a mistake the players made, and they got themselves into a situation which is like, impossible, well come up with something, you know, there is all the time, something you can improvise you can come up with. So I would say when it comes to a GM's mistakes, it's most of the time, you can't memorize a rule book. For example, in GURPS, you have a rule book in two versions, you have a GURPS lite, and you have the full book. GURPS full book is over 800 pages of rules, and you have rules basically for everything there. The lite book is some 30 pages, which you can get for free and you can play the game quite easily. So I would say the mistakes which are made by GMs, mostly are rule mistakes. Don't dwell on it, you have to take one thing as main: you play for fun not to be, you know, out for the rules. And I always tell my guys, well, if something is not running by the rule, it's not a problem, we always can come up with some adjustment, or we can always agree how the result came out something differently, it's whatever, you know, don't forget, it's always up to the fun factor. So go for the fun, and don't be bogging down your games by searching 200-300 pages for a rule of what happens when you fall from 10 feet, you know. So as I said, any mistake can be easily jumped over. And in most of the cases, these are really the greatest mistakes or the big mistakes, I see that some smaller rules, we don't look at it.

Melody [2:31]
Excellent! Stepping over to the analytical side now, how do you know if you did a good job as a game master?

Bo [2:40]
Well, a good job is done when- there is one indicator I see always when you finish the game, you still see the people, your players, chatting about what happened. And even after two, three days, you see messages popping up or people chatting about the game like, well, this Sunday that was so crazy, you know, when we went into that room with the red carpet, and it just suddenly started everything exploding, and those ghosts coming out from the mouths of the statues blah, blah, blah. You know, it's something that you left an impression, you left some thinking with these guys, your players especially. So this is what I see that I did a good job. That they already think about the game even outside, they re-live the excitement, they are reliving - yeah, this is the probably the good word for it. They are reliving the excitement that's happened during gameplay even in later stages, even days after. And that's actually what I think a real and a good game master should do. He should create experiences, and he should make the time great. You know, I still remember two or three of my characters I played like 15-20 years ago. So I would say that's the main thing when I see that I did a good job.

Melody [4:04]
As a side point, we would love to hear how you have improved as a game master.

Bo [4:09]
As a GM, I think I improve on multiple stages and multiple things. So first thing I worked on the handouts; I worked on my mapping skills. So what I mean is here on the handouts, I prepare maps for my players, I prepare maps of the continent, for example, of the city we are playing, if there is an encounter fight somewhere happening while they are going through the forest. I have multiple maps ready, actually, to pick out a map and put some tokens on the map and they already see and visualize the whole fight much better. I also have miniatures; I also have paper miniatures. So sometimes we, you know, change the style and we play with paper miniatures, sometimes we are using a monitor and/or my flat screen TV and we just put the maps on the flat screen TV. And actually, I can move the tokens around there as well. And of course, the main improvement is actually story building. It's probably coming out from the aspect that I also read a lot. So I read a lot of books, a lot of stories. And you know, with 50-60 books, probably a year I can finish. So with that, I have quite a lot of stories, lot of options to build my own stories, you know, borrow an idea from here, an idea from there, and put together two, three ideas from different books and make a story that would be actually quite interesting for the players. Well, when it comes to improvement, I also actually watch- well, I watch famous people play Dungeons and Dragons. So last time, I watched Terry Crews playing his character. And I also watched Vin Diesel playing Dungeons and Dragons. And it's not basically, I would say, it's not really them I'm watching but the dungeon masters, you know, building up the story and the way how they interact. So I'm also trying to see how other people are playing it. So as I'm not a native English speaker for me, and I'm playing with the British and American and South African people these days. So for me, working on the way how I use my English in being a Game Master also is one of the points I'm looking at whenever I'm actually checking out different game mastering channels. But it helps, I would say it's a plus because I feel that it gives me some extra words, some extra options, how to build the environment, and how to build the game up to a point where I think that the players have no problem actually seeing, feeling, or even smelling the game; you know, when you are actually putting them at a location when you play the words. So I would say: you need to play all the senses or the more senses the better. Make them smell that they are in a necromancer's layer, make them feel it that they are there, and that's somewhere the main thing where I think I improved in the last years.

Melody [7:27]
Awesome! Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and experiences with us!

To our listeners - please check the podcast description for details on how to find more information about Bo from the Guild of Navigators.

We have an exciting episode coming up next, so be sure to check it out! We’ll be talking with Bo about several topics related to his specialty of world building!

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