Now THIS is a self-contradiction :). If you ran a game that people enjoyed, by definition you rocked as a DM. Sure, there are styles that work better for differnt people, but running a game is a very little bit like directing a play: the goal above all is to create something that people enjoy. (The difference, of course, is that you and the actors are also the audience).
Okay, I see where you’re coming from. I admit, my best gaming experiences have come from sandbox situations. One memorable example, I was helping playtest the rules for some indie game with rules for running a post-apocalyptic setting. First game session, the GM unrolls a sheet of butcher paper, pulls out a sharpie, and says, “Okay. Tell me about where you guys live.” We spent the next four hours just world building, guided by a few questions from the GM (“Whose your tribe’s biggest rival?” “Where do you get water from?” and so forth) but with no actual direction from him. Second game session, we start to actually play in it. Absolutely fantastic campaign, but there’s no way it would work with my game group.
For one thing, there are currently twelve people with standing invitations to the weekly game. Three or four of them live outside of the immediate area (one out of state entirely) and so only rarely make games anymore, but on a given Sunday, I’ll usually have six or eight players, and only half of them the same guys from the week before. I can’t really be subtle about the plot cues with that set up. I need to make them loud, so people can hear them over the din of the enormous mob of people in my living room, and I need to make them often, because not everyone is there every week.
My group also tends to be very tactical. Most of them got into table top gaming through Warhammer 40k. They like big set piece tactical battles. An eight hour session spent planning out a massive combat with ebbs and flows and surprise re-enforcements and sudden changes to the battlefield is considered a session well spent. Half of my players would be completely at sea in a sandbox game. And the other half, left to their own devices, would get caught up in an astonishingly tedious level of micromanagement. (One game, that I was a player in, involved a party of 14th level characters giving up adventuring to take up the cloth merchant trade. This did not end the campaign.) I do my best to strike a balance, letting players have in-game “downtime” where they can work on personal schemes and pure roleplaying, punctuated by events that demand their attention unequivocally.
I usually explain it as “improptu theater, with an element of randomness provided by the dice”.
Creativity (the “long door” spell was used vertically most of the time - eventually Middlebro and I got that manoeuver where he 'ported me to the middle of the enemy and I used the 3/wk fireballs from my hammer down pat - there was that bat who had a pet human and don’t let the human say otherwise as the bat was clearly the smarter one…), socialization with people who like the same things I do (completely different from socialization with “normal people”, see * below), being allowed to yell “¡FIREBOLO!” (purposeful mispronunciation of “fireball”, the actual Spanish would be “bola de fuego” but that’s less yellable), and lots and lots of Nesquik. What’s wrong with that?
- I’m good at nodding and a-humming as kindergarten teachers talk about “their” kids’ poop, doctors about bureaucratic hurdles or accountants about their battle with Santander to obtain a discount on a commision. Now try talking to those same people about the project to use urban trash for compost (agricultural engineer), to migrate a multinational from a bunch of separate management databases to a single one (hi), or about your difficulties with a new piece (trumpet player in the local band / jazz trumpet player / carpenter).
Too lazy to read: Skald, has anybody told you to look at Paranoia yet? The most common COD is “being backstabbed / thrown into a trap / made a scapegoat by one or more of the other players”.
I once survived a game with all my clones intact, something which may be a world record (since dudes tend to underestimate me… I let them). Yes, the death rate is so high that each character gets four ready-made replacements.
I play because, at some point around age seven, it became socially unacceptable to play pretend. I wasn’t ready to stop. So I write, and I play tabletop, and I RP in Second Life (though not in a Gorean sim). And I RP in IMs. And I occasionally do my daily workout in character, because it’s marginally more palatable that way.
The appeal for me is being able to play pretend with other people. Same as when I wanted to play Thundercats or Power Rangers on the playground.
I realise now that I did not prepare for gaming sessions as thoroughly as I should have. I basically used the published “modules” based on whichever adventure setting seemed cool to me at the time. They deserved better from me.
Nava, you probably shouldn’t recommend Paranoia to anyone as their introduction to RPGs. You need to give them a chance to learn how things work, before you start punishing them for knowing how things work.
I didn’t recommend it as an introductory game, sorry if that was unclear - but I do think he’d like it.
Mind you, that level of backstabbedness means it isn’t a game to be played every week, not if you want to avoid rl assault charges among the players.
I remember one session like that - we were playing COPS, and our first mission in the scenario was to bust a drug deal. Pretty simple stuff on paper: there’s this restaurant used as a base by one gang of Triads, they have lots of dope in the back room ; another gang comes in with duffel bags full of money and they exchange money for dope. The idea was to bust in as both gang leaders were in that backroom with both money and dope on the table. And hopefully not get our asses shot off along the way.
We focused very much on that second part, because before the game had begun the DM had gone over the rules with us and emphasized that combat could be pretty deadly in this game.
So we Rainbow Sixed this thing all to hell. I think we spent a good 5 hours planning the bust - we set up snipers here, block this door there first thing, then we move here, if it’s clear we give go-code Alpha so team 2 moves over here, hey but what if the bartender is with them and pulls a shotgun ? OK so we need to have one guy to control him and… etc ad nauseam.
The actual fight took about 10 seconds, as the gangsters just surrendered when we breached the first room - they, being smart and all, didn’t want to add “shooting at the powleece” to their current dope-related charges.
We were a bit confused as to why the DM had let us waste so much goddamn time on what amounted to like 2 introductory lines in his scenario. He had a sheepish grin and said “You guys seemed like you were having a ball, I didn’t find it in me to break it up” 
And he didn’t go ‘hell with it, I’ll give them a fight so this pays off’?
Well, like I said, these were not stupid criminals. Shooting it out would have broken their characterization, and the whole idea of that part of the story - the point was to make us work to get them off the streets, to make us frustrated that even though we knew damn well they were “bad guys”, in practice there wasn’t much we could do to keep them behind bars for good once they lawyered up, pleaded guilty for some reduced time, fingered another dealer or two to make that reduced time go away altogether… Smugging it up to 11 the whole time of course.
So, in a sense, the anticlimax was sort of welcome for the DM, it’s the kind of feeling he was shooting for in the first place.
And how things work in the ‘real world’ sometimes anyhow.
You know, I think we could play a decent game of Paranoia on the board. And I bet Skald would love it. Anyone want to do it?
In my current Planescape (Pathfinder) game, my group has recently stopped a threat to Sigil that was a sentient hat. The hat wasn’t so much the problem as that it was kidnapping people.
This led into a quest that was about a stairway being built by a lady who did not realize all that glitters is not gold, to the 7th heaven. We realized that connecting this stairway together would end all sentient thought. Turned out the whole thing was a suicide plot by Mephistopheles. We put paid to the current scheme, and, with the aid of angels, convinced Mammon of Mephistopheles’ current direction. As Mammon wants to own everything, the planes turning into nonsentient oatmeal would be against his primary directive… so he’s personally inclined to stop it. He ‘thanked’ us by pulling the spine out of one of his servitor pit fiends (Think Balrog, from LOTOR), and forming it into a sword. A sentient sword. A pit fiend sword. You can’t really say no to the guy. So now we have this evil thing in the party that may occasionally seek to dominate us and is spying on us for Mammon. Luckily, we have a plan to solve that. We need to get to Asgard and have the dwarves reforge it.
Problem is that the party mage (who is sort of a member of the Addams’ Family) kind of broke reality and tossed us into a realm of nonbeing on the way there. Luckily, we figured out that the way to get out of it was to tell a myth of creation… and so it turns out we just created the home plane one of the party members came from originally.
After that, it got weird.