What do you want from a GM Guide?

[Thought]

On the topic of GM Screens, don't forget that there are two sides. Filling the side facing the GM with useful information is good. Fill the side facing the Players with something useful as well. Personally, I used to keep a library of cool background images that I could switch out depending on the scene the players were in. Admittedly, this is easier when the potential backgrounds don't include the black of space, but I've found it can help set the mood. And if you have pictures of your NPCs, that can be good to flip over when the PCs are talking with him/her/it.

Of course, screens probably should be on the website, not the book, unless you are making some very fancy screens.

Regarding what to cover, I would also recommend thinking about how Icar is different from other games. If something is bread and butter for all games in the genre, you can afford to spend less time on it. But if something is unique (or nearly unique) to your game, more time is necessary in order to help GMs properly frame the concept.

Just a screened,

Thought

[Sanglorian]

[Rob Lang]

Sanglorian, that's a brilliant post right there. I think I might have enough information here to put a blog post together to assist other authors.

[misterecho]

I also love random generators. The cyberpunk 2020 rule book has some way cool random stuff. The encounter table alone is epic.

I love the Insant game for this very reason. However I agree these come second to the afore-mentioned.

[Kinslayer]

Sanglorian, you have given me much food for thought. These are points that can--and should--be addressed for each game, rather than just generic GM advice.

[Rob Lang]

[madunkieg]

Here's one that I'm working on (and my game assumes someone GMing for the very first time), how to choose a target number. Seems easy, right? You just list easy, medium, hard, very hard, etc., each with a number. But I want to step back a bit and think about the GM's incentive to choose a number.

Let's assume there's an obstacle. If the players fail to pass the obstacle, the game grinds to a halt. If the game grinds to a halt, nobody has fun, including the GM. If the target number is too low, then the obstacle is passed too easily. Without challenge the game becomes boring and nobody has fun. So, you need a target number high enough that the players might fail, but what if they do?

Maybe they can just try again. Maybe they have to think of a twist in order to do so (this time, I use a ladder!). Maybe they can find a completely different way around it. There should also be consequences for that failure, but how do you design them so that they don't wreck the game at an inopportune moment?

What seems, at first, to be a simple task isactually quite complex and tied to other elements of the game. Right now one of my designs (not the one for the cyberpunk contest, sorry) is including explanations of all this in the GM section, in the hopes that it helps keep new GMs from ever falling into an adversarial role. It's some of the advice that I wish I'd been given when I started GMing.

[koipond]

I'm going to echo the awesomeness of Sanglorian's post.

[sean2099]

[Thought]