Running a tabletop roleplaying game is demanding. It requires time and effort, and it's something that often has a lot of associated costs that are easy to overlook. Just pick up your game of choice and see how many pages of rules it has–even a relatively "light" game makes a lot of demands on a game master.

The common thing that I hear from people is something like the following: "I spend a lot of time working on this, then my players come along and ruin it!"

Sometimes, players are just ornery and disagreeable and do things to spite the GM. However, more frequently it is the case that the players get the wrong cues, have different desires than the GM realizes, or the GM is not fitting their game to the players. When the GM doesn't realize this, it can be a big deal, which is why it's important to have a strong Session 0 (which I'll talk about soon), and use that as a basis for your storytelling.

The best piece of lifesaving advice I have for any GM is to respond to your players, and use them as part of your storytelling process.

In general, the easiest way to drive stories is by controlling characters. As a GM, you have some limited control of this, but you'll have at least a few characters that are out of your hands entirely.

Your job is to figure out how to tell a compelling story with the resources at your disposal.

You have tools for this; plot hooks, your own characters, and the dynamic that exists between you and your players. Of these, the one that is most likely to malfunction is the relationship between GM and player.

GM'ing is an act of collaborative storytelling, and you can't carry the story yourself.

You need to get buy-in, and that means utilizing your players to drive the story forward.
That's not the same as being a push-over, either. You can approach the game with any style, but simply look at what you want the players to do from a perspective that asks "How do I get my players to do this?"

A Case Study

In one of my campaigns the players had a very strong connection to a post-apocalyptic city that they were representatives of and had formed a sort of tribal religion around a computer that was supposed to lead them to glory in the future. If you want an example of GM laziness, I actually didn't make any of this setting up myself; it was their addition to an existing post-apocalyptic setting, and I figured it was worth going with.

In order to get them to go along with an adventure, though, I needed to come up with a reason why their characters would be adventuring. Because the players wanted to have this city be the core of their experience, I came up with further details; a northern tribe had an oracle that people would come from all over to visit, and their story began with a trip up north to visit the oracle.

That's not yet really involving the players, since, after all, they hadn't yet "bought in" to the story.

The next step was figuring out how I could use the preferences the players had expressed to tell them a story.

When the players discovered that the oracle's tribe had been destroyed by powerful forces that could move against their own home, it gave them a motivation to move on with the intended plot. Their personal goals and their goals for their tribe were aligned, or at least considered simultaneously.

As a result, I could not only figure out roughly what would be a productive element to add to the story (since it would both be approved of by the players and fit into my overarching story) but also provide the players with an experience that they would not have been able to get from a video game: the ability to have a story unfold around their endeavors.

All I had to do was include my own cast of characters to serve as supports and villains. On a rough day, my session prep could be as simple as "X wants to do Y, Z wants to do A" and by formulating simple motivations for the supporting cast I could improvise what the players wanted to find.

In your own games, identify the big things that your players are interested in and their characters want to achieve. You won't always be so lucky as to have all the players be generally interested in the same main focus, but you can figure out what they want, where they overlap, and how to draw connections between the things as you get to explore the world further.

One caution here is that the best way to do this is two-fold: having conversations with a player and through a system that rewards characters' connections with each other and setting elements and concepts. Don't trust anything randomly rolled or added as a requirement on a character sheet.

No Gift Too Small

One of the analogies I use for telling a story using a roleplaying game is that it's like spinning a spiderweb. There will always be a central core, the point from which all things flow and will eventually return, but there are many strands from this core.

When you're running a game, think of what your main core is. It can be a dramatic event, a character, or a theme. Have that determined ahead of time.

Then, work from what you have and what the players have in order to build out a story.

One of the earliest things I tried to do when I was a GM was to run games with mysteries, but they always fell flat. My hints and clues weren't what the players were looking for, and my meticulous planning and structure fell apart when the players went somewhere else.

You can run a convincing murder mystery, for instance, by coming up with the central premise. Take the following premise:

The players are members of an Organization, investigating the disappearance of one of their members. Tim, himself a member of the Organization, killed Sarah, the missing person, because she was about to betray the Organization.

Then tailor that story to the players' actions. Feed them hints slowly as they investigate, and let them figure out what they want. If they start digging into the victim's correspondence, for instance, they'll discover that they weren't the first person to access the account. If they investigate the room, they may find that some hallmark of the Organization was found there that didn't match the victim's other possessions. If they interview Tim, he'll be evasive.

You need to keep track as you go to keep everything consistent, but the seed of the story can be written even before you know what the players' intentions are, and you can avoid forcing them into one particular path.

You can also use the players' actions that would otherwise derail the story to push people onward. In a comment on a previous post of mine, @muscara mentioned a game where players had gotten off-topic by pursuing a random abandoned mine mentioned in a line of throw-away dialogue.

As a GM, that's not necessarily something that's your fault. Managing players can be like herding cats. There may be no smooth recovery from what has happened.

On the other hand, you can use the seeming chaos of players' actions to further the plot; the mine may have been used as a hideout by someone associated with the main villain. Perhaps it contains something that may give the players the edge in an upcoming conflict. Maybe it has a significant tie to some other event in the past of the world that you could explore poignantly and briefly before returning to the main story.

The secret here is to take every opportunity and say: "How can this make the story I am trying to tell better?"

Sometimes that will tie into the main plot. If not, go with the flow. Your emphasis should be on telling the best possible story, and doing so in response to your players is an effort that can bear tremendous dividends.

Side-note: The term "gift" comes from improv comedy and refers to details that come up that can serve as inspiration, something I was made aware of by @iauns, so I owe him recognition for inspiring this section's heading.

Give Players Agency

One of the things that you can even do as a GM is to give some of your hard-earned power back to the players.

This is something that needs to be approached responsibly; you can't just have players tell the story and then be arbitrary in other cases. Rather, give the players opportunities to describe key scenes, especially ones involving their characters. This works really well when you have characters from a largely undefined space in the setting, but also works when you are introducing a new character to the story.

"The officer on duty, Robert, is an old friend of yours from way back. How did you get to know him?"

You can then let the players have a say in how this connected to their characters.

The main reason you want to do this, however, is not to save yourself effort, but to act as a pressure relief. The opportunity to define parts of the world is a key part of the roleplaying experience. This is often handled mechanically, but explicitly giving players the chance to narrate parts of the universe is powerful and fosters engagement.

Wrapping Up

A good storyteller knows their audience, and a GM who is aware of their players' desires and intentions can help make a story even better.

However, this is not only a matter of quality, but also something that can help prevent burnout and disengagement; offering some of the responsibilities in storytelling to others and being reactive rather than proactive can allow more flexibility without sacrificing the quality of the story.

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Post-script: I've moved from using Steemit to Busy, at least provisionally. I'm checking it out because as much as I like Steemit, it doesn't have any sort of notification features other than manually checking for replies to my posts, and I've found that it just pushes me to have to check Partiko all the time, which isn't that bad but I shouldn't be having to jump from my desktop to my phone as often as I do.

I'm not as familiar with Busy, so please let me know if there are any issues with the post.