anxious, story games
I'm going to be facilitating a story game on Tuesday, and I'm anxious about it because it's been over a year and I know my skills aren't that great.
I tend to fall into the same ruts when improvising, and I forget to describe a lot of things.
anxious, story games
@lizardsquid You're going to do fine.
It's almost a mirror image from the OSR D&D side. Advice for fourth edition or Dungeon World doesn't apply because those games are meant to work differently.
A lot of "general" RPG advice is based on personal taste, false assumptions, or overcomplicated solutions to easily avoided problems.
anxious, story games
@lizardsquid I played a game at Gencon once where the facilitator showed up, and he didn't really know what he was doing. But instead of running from that, he embraced his uncertainty and fear. He told the rest of us at the table "I don't know what I'm doing. But I think if we all work together, we can have a really fun time. We'll get the rules wrong. We'll make poor decisions when improvising. But we'll do our best and hopefully enjoy ourselves for a few hours."
anxious, story games
@lizardsquid And that honesty at the start of the game helped get everyone at the table working together. His anxiety wasn't a personal failure, just a problem for all of us to defeat, together, by playing an awesome game and having a good time.
So I'm saying that you should be honest with your players about your anxiety. But also not to worry about it. If you do something wrong or say something uncreative, it will be fine and the other players should support you.
anxious, story games
I think the worst part of this is that so much advice online is not only advice for D&D GMs (which doesn't apply to the games I'm going to be running at all), but is also just not good advice outside of a very specific context