As I delve deeper and deeper into DH and GMing DH, I've come to think of Game Mastering as sort of an art form; something to be practiced, experimented with, and perfected. A good GM must be part novelist, part actor, part benevolent dictator, though GMs will debate the balance of those three parts. I personally feel like I err too much onto the novelist side but i'm digressing.

In my experience I've noticed the following help to make a good Dark Heresy session:
-Short brutal combat(s) interspersed meaningfully through the investigation. Combats that are too long get boring, as do combats that feel meaningless or not dangerous.
-Pseudo Self-contained sessions: Dark Heresy is a game best played in bite sized chunks of ~4-6 hours in my experience. Any shorter than 4 hours and not enough gets done to be satisfying, any longer than 6 and players stop caring. In the course of a single session players should have a chance to do a little bit of everything. The best sessions are those that come to a satisfying conclusion yet leave enough questions unanswered that you want more. In other words PCs should see the fruits of their labors, but be eager to see how they matter in the bigger picture they're uncovering. The PC's take out the cult's cell, what will be the Cult's next move?
-Cohesive Overarching plot: The necessity for self-contained session too often results in cookie cutter missions that are only loosely strung together by a name or too. At the end of the campaign you want your characters to be able to look back and understand WHY the campaign ended up as it did.

So what balance of the three GM traits do you guys find best?
What makes a DH session great?
How much big-picture do you try and incorporate into your missions?
How long are your sessions?

Let's try and get a good discussion going about this, What makes a good/mediocre session GRRRREAT?

Explosions. Lots of Explosions.

And story development and a bit of Intrigue

Because of scheduling issues my group tends to meet about twice a month whenever we can work out a common day/night, and we run LONG! By long I mean start before sundown and stop well after sunrise often.

Everyone has their own little quirks and moments that bring them gamer-bliss, so I try to include little bits and pieces of things I think they will appreciate, enjoy and otherwise make the game memorable and special for them. Characters personalities and motivations are heavily tapped to make things something more than just some random mission. This stuff is PERSONAL!

I mix in a healthy dose of mystery, intrigue, epic scale backdrops with micro-scale stories in the foreground, hands on investigation, moments for special skills, training and unusual backgrounds to shine. My villains tend to be deeply offensive to at least one of the party's sensibilities. Not necessarily my PLAYERS' sensibilities, but at least one of the characters should be OUTRAGED and trembling to deal out the Emperor's Justice on the offending baddie. Mix things up. If the last three "big bads" have been awful killing machines with demon weapons and vulnerable only to a holy melta-gun during the full moon, then perhaps the next villain should be some insane scribe who wishes to offer up knowledge to the Emperor by burning every book in a vast library that (just happens) to be the secret library of an Inquisitor! Holy fire purifies all, purifies the humble text for He who dwells high upon Terra that he might learn every letter! My acolytes serve an Ordo Hereticus Inquisitor, but sometimes investigations into some reported heretical cult are in fact a stealthy xenos plot to do "bad xenos stuff". Worse, perhaps the fairly harmless looking simpletons are actually in need of a good Maleus investigation? The idea is to keep them guessing, while not suspending disbelief. Your plot twists should make sense, maybe not at first, but once they uncover enough clues the little murmurs of "holy crap, are they connected to those weird heretic monks from 3 cases ago?" will bring little happy GM moments. That look of dawning awareness as one or more of them figure out what they have stepped in this time around.

Personolize it. Make it mean something for the characters. Obviously the evil plots and schemes do not all revolve around them. Far from it! They are holy instruments of the Emperor's divine wrath, though troubled and human. Total abject bad-buttock skull crackers on a mission and serving humanity in secret, at great personal expense. They are but tiny cogs in an impossibly vast organization that spans the galaxy, but the workings of the smallest cog is vital to the smooth running of some giant metaphysical clock. They are meaningless dust, yet they are vital!

I like to mix in some comedy and light elements to offset the terrible gothic horror in sometimes absurd ways, often with memorable NPCs, bizarre scenes or just amusing contrasts. Vividly describing both tragic and glorious moments for individual characters also really helps set the mood. Also, steal shamelessly from anime. Trust me, this works great as long as you are careful to select suitable shows. Dry, dark humour really sets the mood for DH, so be shameless about it if it improves the entertainment value of the game in thematically appropriate ways. Yes, stupid, criminally ignorant gits in tattered rags spouting off junk science to the Adept and Techpriest to show how educated they are in the miraculous ways of maple syrup is just **** funny! "It's a miracle substance, it is! Cures bunions and warts! Makes paper stick together! Let's see ordinary spittle tackle that job, mate! Not up to tha' task, that's whatfore..." It is even funnier if the ignorant bastard actually has a useful skill burried in all that rubbish.

Our Techpriest is played by someone who was a 40K virgin when characer creation started and is now totally immersed in the Cult Mechanicus. His laptop now proudly displays the Omnisian Skull-Cog emblem and you would mistake him for a long-time Mechanicus otaku. The big meat-mountain guardsman on the team is wrestling with exactly which types of heretics and xenos he hates MORE! Oh, he hates them all, and it started with orks, but his list is growing! The far from athletic Schola-trained adept cheerfully wades into combat alongside the heavy hitters, smiting His foes in humble yet effective ways and is developing into an interesting person. Our noble cleric is a bit of a party-girl and was sent to the Tarsan chantries to shape up... Instead she ended up working with the Inquisition using her natural charisma and ability to drink like a Kennedy to uncover secrets. The Scintillan assassin is a Hong Kong action cinema anti-hero, doing horrible things to bad people with many, many empty brass shell casings trailing in his wake as he dreams about the interesting women on his team that are all above his social status. Then we have the noble Cadian guardsman who is their Inquisitor's designated Primus, professionally and stylishly dispatching the Emperor's many foes with lasgun and sword, giving focus to the team and shouldering the sometimes unpleasant burdens of Inquisitorial decrees so her team can focus more on what they love: Doing awful things to awful things!

What makes a great session? The players. Bad players will make the best plot suck, and good players can take a cliche and make it memorable.

When a player is into his character, when he enjoys not just what he's doing, but what the rest of the party is and is doing, everything kicks up a level and the sheer awesomeness seems to flow much easier. It usually starts with one action that the player decides "f*ck it, I'm doing it", and a GM who encourages it instead of slapping it down. Everyone laughs or cheers, and soon someone else in the party decides to kick it up a notch, and in no time everyone's gotten into the moment and is owning it. The GM fudges rolls if needed and rolls with the wave, because while a challenge is fun and all, in the end, it's about getting 4 or 5 people cheering at something that happened in the spur of the moment that is just too cool.

I'm unbelievably lucky to have 3 or 4 players who routinely hit that zone. Maybe every other session has something incredibly memorable in it, which I will, as a GM, go out of my way to give leeway for. The trick is balancing the need for those moments of awesome and the feeling that the players are playing invincible, perfect characters. Therefore, I tend to give "cool point" modifiers. If the player does something that either the GM or the rest of the party cries out as very, very cool, I usually knock the modifier down one step for the sake of dramatic moment. Audacity breeds success. At the end of the game, I let players give shout outs, and if one player overwhelmingly gets a shout out from the other players, they get to knock *one* die roll next session only down a degree of difficulty for being so **** cool. It seems to work better for me than extra XP for roleplaying, which while nice, tends to imbalance the party if you have one or two really, really strong roleplayers. The "cool point" concept allows for a far more immediate gratification anyway.

gathrawny said:

Its really all about the GM when it comes to DH in my experience. The rules and setting are so complex yet at the same time open ended that a bad GM will flounder and make pretty much everyone miserable. Its far to easy to make combats impossible and kill the group or on the other hand too easy and nobody cares. Somehow I have found the right balance where my players feel certain they are going to die on every mission but end up walking out battered, beaten and bruised, yet victorious. And they really feel that they just saved the universe from something really terrible.

In my opinion a Dark Heresy game should be run like an action movie more than a book. The pace has to be set right or else it bogs down in either too much combat or too much investigation. I think the Aliens movies are great examples of this. Little spurts of intense action all through the drama. And every time there is the possibility of someone biting it. Its never just kill 4 kobalds in room 12 for the heck of it.

I aggree with the short brutal combats interspersed through the adventure. It keeps combat types engaged and focussed even during the investigation time. I also like to have a finale. The last combat is big, and deadly with explosions and body parts flying. Every good action movie ends with this.

Self contained sessions are good but I personally prefer games that run 2 sessions. Often times players use a week in between games to really think about the plot or their last combat and come up with great and suprising things when you come back the next week. This still allows you to trade GM duties or a regular basis if that is your thing.

To be the best GM possible you have to know your players and their characters. You need to know what they can handle and what is going to kill them. Its a very important balance. If you have a bunch of bruisers with no people skills, sending them on investigation missions is a waste of time. If you have a bunch of adepts and techpriests, you don't send them into daemon combat. I know that my crew can handle a khorn berzerker, but if I put in 5 they are going to die. Its a delicate thing in DH. Too much one way or the other makes combats pointless. Watch out of mega-weapons. Giving your bad guys melta guns or heavy bolters may seem like a cool idea, until your heroes start getting one shotted. Players hate nothing more than having their brains splatted in the first round of combat because of a lucky meltagun shot. Likewise its no fun when the big bad gets capped early either.

I have found that a good way of improving your sessions is to get a high level of agreement about what you actually want do. RPGs are a strange culture where two persons can have very different expectations on what constitutes roleplaying. For example: compare DnD 3rd with Nobilis. Both games are published around the same time, both games are roleplaying games but they are so extremely different. A person that has experienced only one of them will have almost no common grounds for discussing RPGs with a person that has only experienced the other. Yet, both can call themself roleplayers.

Creating or finding agreement over what sort of roleplay is most enjoyable is very hard. Here are some experiences I've puzzled together over 20 years of playing and GMing. Mind you, this works for me. Don't expect everything to work for you.

If you are asking players to come join your campaign (or one off game, but that is seldom worth all this trouble), try to explain quite clearly what feeling you as a GM want to be the focus of the story. Comparing with known works of litterature, RPGs, films or other forms of art can be helpful. Some examples:
"Your characters will go into abandoned bases and kill slimy xenos, using cool hightech guns, like lt Ripley does in Aliens".
"Your characters will die horrible reason-defying deaths trying to postpone the destruction on the empire for another day or two, like in the classical Call of Cthulhu RPG".
"Your characters will spend days and days talking to suspects and searching for clues of corruption or crime against the empire, like a Sherlock Homes novel".
"Your characters will commit endless amounts of horrible atrocities and acts of violence, all in the name of somehting they have been told is a just cause, there will be shades of guilt or doubt in your characters mind, but the focus of the story will be your characters success, like the HBO mini-series Generation Kill".
"As previous, but without the guilt or doubt. More or less obvious wallowing in righteousness is encouraged. Like in any hollywood action movie"
"As previous, but with focus on your characters feelings of guilt or doubt in the righteousness of your actions. Hopefully you as players will be moved and inspired into considering complex moral issues, contrasted with your enjoyment of the action segments of the story. Like in Full Metal Jacket or more subtly in Starship Troopers"
"Your characters will use clever deceptions, small amounts of well placed violence and smooth talk to further the interest of the emperor. Like in Oceans Eleven"

You might not have the luxury to, or indeed the wish to, sort out a few players that thinks your way is the best way. You might be playing with mates, where the social aspect of playing with these people is much more important than that you share the same ideals. You might belong to a small roleplaying club or indeed live in a small isolated town, and thus be limited to just a few people to play with. No worries, most roleplayers do it like that and have a great time. I just take the luxury to be a bit of a pretentious bastard now and then.

Next stop is to discuss formalities around the art of roleplaing. Stuff I ofted discuss is:
"I as a GM often find it annoying when the characters splits up for longer periods of time, so I must GM two parties. It makes me feel bad for the part of my player group that have to sit around and wait."
"I want this to be a cooperative storytelling effort. I consider the saga, the story, to be the highest priority. Things like the individual characters survival, rate of success or health of mind is of much less consequence. If it carries the saga, it is good. Remember that your character is your tool, not the other way around."
"I like constructive character acting. Build stories, help your friends act out their characters by acting with them in ways that invite responses."
"I like violence to be described like in..." For simplicity, insert a movie here. Saving private ryan has a pretty graphic style with lot of depicted suffering, Pirates of the carribean have a very different style. Both works fine within the 40k world. But Braindead or Bad Taste, please don't go there.
"Some themes that will not be a part of my campaign is..." It is **** tricky to RP sexual encounters in a meaningful way. There might be other (more or less obvious) considerations. For example I have GMed a person that had such a snake-phobia that we renamed Bastion Serpentis for his benefit. I've also on rare occasions edited parts about suicide, some domestic violence scenes, etc, out of respect for a particular player.
If you have a group of at least a few veteran roleplayers, these are good subjects for discussion. If your group is mostly unexperienced, or have only played a single "type" of RPG before (most common, in my somewhat limited experience, with DnD-geeks) it might be better that you just tell them how you want things to be done.

Also take this moment to discuss OOC-formalities. Here is a short list of things that often come up in more or less explicit form:
- Scheduling. example: Every second sunday from 11:00 to 19:00, sometimes extended, but never to later than 19:30
- Expected amount of participation. Both in % of gaming sessions, and in % of time of each gaming session.
- If we scedule playing at 18:00, you should really be here no later than 17:45 to get your ass in gear. Come even earlier if you want to have time to discuss the last episode of True Blood. Some groups work better by setting a "gathering time" and then a "gaming time" 30min to 1h later.
- Snacks at/on the gaming table?
- Break for ordering pizza, talking about True Blood and eating the pizza. Roughly 21:00 to 22:00.
- Mobiles phones at the gaming table? If muted? I honestly prefer not, unless there is a pressing reason.
- Strategy in combat situations, do we discuss them IC or OOC? (rp versus strategic challenge)
- Cocked dice, dice on the floor etc. When do you reroll?
I'm sure there are more. And as above, discuss or state these things, depending on your players experience.

And lastly, make sure you get proper feedback on your GMing. Also have your players feedback the groups performance. It frequently gives rise to good discussions. I have found XP to be a good carrot for this. How and why to give xp is a completely different discussion, suffice to say I let my players rate the groups performance in a few important fields. The scale is usually 1-4. Roughly: 1= "This went bad", 2= "Sub standard", 3= "Good, as expected" 4="Outstanding!". These categories are always about how the group of players performed, not how well things went for the characters. Their ratings will then be used to calculate the amount of xp the players are awarded with. So after us having a session that went well they will be given more xp. The xp is always given in equal share to all the players, because roleplaying is a cooperative effort. There is only one category that I always include in this marking, and that is "fun". The other categories, usually three or four, are agreed upon by the group, and revised now and then. The categories are supposed to correspond to some aspect of roleplaying that we feel is important. Here are some of my categories for marking:
- Fun. How fun did we have today? Have we laughed much, sniggered, etc?
- John Woo-feeling. To get that sort of action scenes.
- Errol Flynn-feeling. To get that sort of action scenes.
- Saving Private Ryan-feeling. To get that sort of action scenes. (try to keep to one of these three..)
- The story. How much did the story come alive?
- OOC-discipline. How well did we balance OOC-talking, phonecalls, snackbreaks etc
- Teamwork. How well did we players cooperate to create a good session? (mind you, our characters might well be backstabbing each other, as long as all us players are enjoying it)
- Characer acting. How was our acting?

So these are some of the tools I use to create and maintain good sessions. I will try to answer your direct questions as well, and I will do so from the perspective of the DHcampaign I GM right now.

So what balance of the three GM traits do you guys find best?
"Guys" can be a gender neutral pronomen, right? Oh, who am I kidding, I'll say what I think invited or not. I'm not entirely sure I agree upon those three factors being the most important parts. Being able to inspire players to take personal interest in and repsonsibility for the story is the most important part, imho. If forced at gunpoint I'd say Actor is the major one of your three, because it leaves plenty of room for cooperative creativity. I try to see myself as the slave of the gaming group. I do at least twice the work and have just as fun.

What makes a DH session great?
Enthusiasm from all participants and a certain degree of agreement as to what you are doing there. See the rest of my post really.

How much big-picture do you try and incorporate into your missions?
Everything should fit into the story. Random encounters are sooo '97 *limp wrist* The players (or indeed the characters) might not need to see the reason behind a particular scene as it happens. But as the GM you should know. I have btw found out that I design campaigns by the onion-principle. This means that there are layers of "truth" and their revelations is a measure of the storys progress. It also means that the story smells and makes people cry. Generally I want the main characters to think a lot for themselves, lead rather than be led, engage in building empires (figuratively speaking, mostly), act as proper persons (rather than archetypes) and often do nasty things for a "good" cause and actually think about it. I try to create a world where the characters have the means and the motivation to do all of that.
On a connected subject: I believe in intelligent opponents. Have a read at the Evil Overlord List before you design a bad guy: tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvilOverlordList

How long are your sessions?
3.5-5 hours if we are doing it in one go with just minor breaks. Sometimes 7-10h if we have a proper foodbreak in the middle. The best quality is usually from 30minutes after actually starting to play, going on for about two hours. Then a decreasing quality that reaches an annoying low level at around 5 hours. This can be stretched somewhat by well organised 10 minute breaks, especially if you force your players outside into the *gasp* air :-) This timer resets if you take a break of around 1 hour. But the second inning the timer will tick a bit faster. This timer is balanced for a good availability of sugar, caffeine and water in various forms.

This looks like it is turning out to a very interesting thread. I've found loads of inspiration already.

Well there's a lot to respond to here so I'm not going to go through piece by piece i'm just going to throw some ideas down .

Recently I played in a long, 8-hour mission that was mostly one epic combat scene. This has led me to realize that longer sessions don't need to be worse, they just need to be more interesting. The best combat isn't fighting hordes of endless cultists. The following may sound like a really cool mission but in my experience it's not: You're trying to hold a research outpost until your tech-priest pulls some data out of the computer. This has the acolytes fighting hordes of cultists. As an added mechanic you say "hey, every 50 they kill gives them a level of fatigue" to emphasize the difficulties of holding the facility.

This wouldn't be a good mission for a few reasons:
1. I don't like to put my players at negatives. As a player it's just frustrating to operate in an environment where you're at negative because you feel more fail, and more helpless. A mission where the smog on the planet constantly gives them -10 toughness would just be annoying for instance. Be careful when you dole out negatives.

2. What a boring combat! The idea does indeed sound cool on paper, but remember that this isn't a video game this is a game of dice rolling and unless there are concepts there that are particularly interesting combat gets boring. Make combat interesting! I find daemons, psykers, and xenos to be great tools for this because of their unpredictability.

3. The tech-priest has such a boring job! Don't alienate one of your players!

Also I think that an investigation mission could be done well. It would be hard to do, but it's doable. The best investigation sequences are somewhat frustrating and confusing in that each clue opens up more and more questions. The key is to make the investigation interesting and/or throw some variety into the mix as well.

There's more I wanted to say i'm sure, but this'll do until another reply catches my eye >

I'm lucky in that I play with a group of players I'm friends with and have been playing together with some of them for 17+ years.

Hmm, to make the session great you need to...

• Keep all the players involved, even if it's just throwing in some tech mumbo jumbo for the TechPriest to deal try to cater for them all...
• Do not let combat drag, if you have 20 cultists with fruit knives in between the players and the big boss; streamline it so they can get to the main course. (Obviously the players have to be able to hand the 20 cultists cultists with their fruit knives)
• Encourage the players to identify with their characters and roleplay. Ask them all questions like what they look like and how they act and very soon you will get the players giving each other nicknames and handles. Some of the best sessions have been through the players interacting with each other.
• I've got a rough rule of thumb. Run a session to entertain the players first, you second. I've come up with great ideas that got me giggling and excited then I realised the players wouldn't get it so I've had to bin them.
• Know a bit (at least) of the players background. Always have a way to sneak in a bit of player specific information into the game. e.g. have a Noble's rival suddenly appear when they are least expected, maybe have a mind wiped character remember something weird. It will make them feel part of the story.
• If you have to say no to the players; make sure that you can justify it, there are other ways of saying no. e.g. the players want to get hold of a bolt weapon but your not sure; rather than not give them the weapon, only give them a single clip with it. They will have a to save up a few months wages before they can afford another clip or two!

However it is the people that make the session. Get your players keen and motivated for the session and you will enjoy it!

Another question I've long been curious to ask other GMs; how much do you prepare? I've run missions where I prepared too much, ones where I've prepared too little, and one's where I couldn't possibly have prepared enough for what happened. I think personally that the best missions tend to fall into the third category because they're the most interesting, but as a GM they're the hardest to deal with.

gathrawny said:

I prepare quite a bit.

• First I try to make sure I have all the information for the next session to hand so I do not need to rummage through the rulebook for anything that is expected to come up in the session. As you point out it is difficult to cater for the unexpected.
• I photocopy parts of the rulebook to create briefing sheets for me. e.g. The Crow Father in Edge of Darkness has 5 sides of A4 so I have all the relevant abilities and rules to hand.
• I try to give my players more handouts that the adventure supplies. I use the blank dataslate template and Inquisitorial Warrant template (former from Dark Reign, later from FFG DH support site) to create the handouts. e.g. planet & adventure briefings, information gleaned from systems etc. Players (well mine) seem to like that.
• If the players are going to gain an item of equipment I create a handout for it and that symbolises the equipment. The handout has the stats and description on it. When they find it on the adventure hand it to the player that picks it up.
• Re-read the section of the adventure they are going to do. If it calls for rolls you do not know off hand (e.g. climbing/falling rolls); skim the rules and note down the page number of the Core book.
• Try to ensure you have an out if a player doesn't turn up. e.g. the psykers player is ill and the psyker is needed to take on the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, have an idea in your head how to re-work the encounter

Generally I do only outlines, and stat write ups. I have set number of encounters (social, and combat) with a general idea where and when they will happen. I have a general idea of how I expect the plot to unfold. I do this because I find that players tend to balk at being railroaded into things, and the PCs do the unexpected.

PS- If they ever ask what the building is made of. Wood is only a valid answer if you want them to set fire to it. (I once spend 3 hours mapping out a whare house with taps, and undead only to have my PCs burn it to the ground.)

The truly great sessions are when the players are forced to use a little brainpower and culminates in a situation where they ALMOST die.

It takes luck and a good GM to engineer/balance an encounter so that the players escape death by the skin of their teeth. That's what heros are made of. Players want to be uber, which is natural, but it becomes boring quickly if they actually are.

Just a semi-random musing:

I've noticed that a lot of GMs will come up with a few possible situations or reasons for something happening or some such, then choose one of them on the fly to best fit the way the characters develop the stories. Obviously to an extent this is impossible to get around; a gm has to be able to adapt his story line to the actions of his players, but there's a fine line. If nothing is definite until the GM is forced by the players to reveal his hand, or nothing is definite until the GM decides to make it so, the players are thus condemned to being reactive rather than proactive. Anything that the GM doesn't have a firm cause and effect relationship in their mind for, the players can not deduce. The players can guess it, and be right, but their logic will never be solid.

There seems to be two ways around this problem:

The GM can fake it, letting the players make assumptions and deductions from the events and clues, then judging these deductions and deciding whether they're valid or not. This requires some shrewd players and a good GM, but it can also be the best.

The GM can lay out cause and effect relationships in his mind/notes and weave them into the story for the players to deduce. This is by far the most work for the GM, and if not done right can lead to too much rigidity.

I think as a GM I lean too much towards the second one, what do you guys think?

Keep combats interesting and realistic. If it is appropriate for the players to come up against something big and bad early on throw it in and use your wisdom to level the playing field.

Example: My PC's went up against an Evesor assassin when they were rank 3. Of course thingset s were a little leveled because they could commandeer countless crew members to help them and they weren't the direct target.

On the other side of things if your players are investigating random scum make them feel good when the carve through the deadbeats.

Try and give every session a new set piece. Trials, and interrogations can be as interesting as combats, how about escapes through a ruined city with half a PDF on your tail, hunting a killer in the bowels of a space craft.

Humour. Most of our sessions involve a lot of laughter. If your players are laughing they are having fun. Job done.

Anger if your players are getting angry at characters (rather than you!) then they care about the story. Job done.

Example: I had quite a funny situation last session when my PC's Inquisitor informed them they would have to co-operate with the Ordo Sicarius Inquisitor who had just aressted them. This prompted round the table protests in the finest traditions of 70's/80's cop shows. "You can't be serious Captain!"