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Unwritten: System Reference Document/The Art of Gamemastering
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==What a GM Does== If you’re the GM, then your job is a little different from everyone else’s. This chapter is going to give you several tools to make that job easier during play. We already talked a little bit about the GM’s job in The Basics, but let’s take a more detailed look at your unique responsibilities. ===Portray the World=== It’s your job to decide how everyone and everything else in the world responds to PC’s actions, as well as what the environment is like. If a PC fumbles a roll, you’re the one who gets to decide the consequences. When an NPC attempts to trap a PC’s friend, you decide how they go about it. When the PCs stroll up to a food vendor in a market, you decide what kind of day the vendor is having, what kind of personality he or she has, and what’s on sale that day. You determine the weather when the PCs approach that dark building. Fortunately, you don’t have to do this in a vacuum—you have a lot of tools to help you decide what would be appropriate. The process we outline in Starting a Game should provide you with a lot of context about the game you’re running, whether that’s in the form of aspects like current and impending issues, specific locations that you might visit, or NPCs with strong agendas that you can use. The PCs’ aspects also help you decide how to make the world respond to them. The best aspects have a double edge to them; you have a lot of power to exploit that double edge by using event-based compels. That way, you kill two birds with one stone—you add detail and surprise to your game world, but you also keep the PCs at the center of the story you’re telling. ===Portray NPCs=== When you have NPCs in a scene, you speak for and make decisions for them like the players do for their PCs—you decide when they’re taking an action that requires dice, and you follow the same rules the players do for determining how that turns out. Your NPCs are going to be a little different than the PCs, however, depending on how important they are to the story. ===Create Environments and Scenarios=== You’re responsible for making all of the stuff that the PCs encounter and react to in the game. That not only includes NPCs with skills and aspects, but it also includes the aspects on scenes, environments, and objects, as well as the dilemmas and challenges that make up a chapter of Unwritten. You provide the prompts that give your group a reason to play this game to begin with—what problems they face, what issues they have to resolve, whom they’re opposing, and what they’ll have to go through in order to win the day. ===Arbitrate Rules=== It’s also your job to make most of the moment-to-moment decisions about what’s legit and what’s not regarding the rules. Most often, you’re going to decide when something in the game deserves a roll, what type of action that is (Overcome, Discover, etc.) and how difficult that roll is. In challenges and contests, this can get a little more complicated, like determining if a situation aspect should force someone to make an Overcome action, or deciding whether or not a player can justify a particular advantage they’re trying to create. You also judge the appropriateness of any invocations or compels that come up during play and make sure that everyone at the table is clear on what’s going on. With invocations, this is pretty easy—as long as the player can explain why the aspect is relevant, you’re good to go. With compels, it can get a little more complicated, because you need to articulate precisely what complication the player is agreeing to. ===Make Everyone Look Awesome=== Get used to the word “interesting”—you see it again and again throughout this book. Fiction is about interesting things happening to interesting people in interesting places. Your job is to keep it coming. As protagonists, the PCs already live on the fringes of the probable. Exploit that so that cool things happen. Characters should have moments to shine. That not only means doing really cool things, but having challenges to overcome, because beating the odds is inherently cool. Don’t forget about yourself. Make places fun to explore and be. Secrets that are uncovered need to mean something, and have consequences. Give your antagonists chances to be, well, antagonizing. When your players are interested (there’s that word again) in the world, then you look awesome, too.
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