Heya all. I'm enjoying GM'ing a lot. Am new to it, and have had three (three or four hourly?) WFRP sessions so far.

The only thing I'm worried about is that my adventures tend to veer far from the story line and tend to miss out bits completely. Is that normal? Or am I trying to control/perfect things too much as a beginner?

That's the art of being a GM: keeping things 'on track' while giving the illusion that it is off the rails

It seems perfectly normal. There is always more than one way to get through a scenario.

A bit of advice though. You will burn-out less often as a GM if you let most of the pre-writing do the work for you. This is true in any game system. Players may surprise you however with their cleverness. Embrace that and still try to give them as much "meat" of a scenario as can be possible without feeling forced.

jh

Thank you.

Welcome to the system and GMing.

Part of the fun of tabletop play is spontaneity and being able to try a strategy not anticipated by adventure writer etc. If the GM knows the scenario well they can roll with this - even better if it is (as many of the WFRP scenarios are) not strictly a "map" but really "a situation, with factions/NPCs who have agendas".

A dungeon is short-circuited if players "skip to the final room", but a "situation-based adventure" is much more resilient and the key ingredients and factions, scenes can often be used even if they appear in different circumstances or order, and can be remixed by a GM to keep the evening interesting.

To me, part of the fun of GMing is seeing what players do that "makes it turn out differently". As Emirkol is saying, let players win what their cleverness or luck gives them but then build on it. The art of GMing is learning instead of "no" to say "yes, but, yes and, etc." In WFRP dice terms, let them have the hammers and then hit them with the chaos star in a way that doesn't deny what the hammers win but keeps the situation alive and in doubt.

Now, if players are just "off the wall", expecting unrealistic things or not "behaving like their characters but like wargamers", well that's a different thing.

when using the published official scearios and stories of WFRP it is easy for players to "miss out" on certain bits of the story. i personally think that these scenarios tend to throw twists at the playes without any foreshadowing so its hard to get into that.

with a few years of running warhammer games i am now at the point where i write the campaigns myself. i usually just put down the most important plot points and some flavour text where appropriate and let the players just have it their way.

believe me, even if you have 10 different outcomes thought up for one situation (and i had at some point), they always, always do something different

but that is what makes GMing so much fun. reacting quickly to the new situation and make it look as if you expected everything!

there are as many GM styles as there are GMs. so it´s hard to say how it is best to organize your game. it´s really a matter of trying and seeing what tends to work best for you and your group, and then pushing it all a little over the comfort zone just to keep things exciting.

personally, I think having a strick storyline in your head is one of the biggest dangers of being a GM. as neph put it, players will always, always do something different. and one thing that makes it all so rich and fun it's to avoid entering a mindset in which you are struggling with the players or with the story itself. don't struggle: just roll with it. don't become their enemy, avoid the necessity of forcing things. imagine what could happend with the "original" storyline (the one you had in your head) with the differences added to it and present the next step in that way, even though you are not sure where it will take things.

it's really common to get to a spot where you really don't have a clue about what will happend. if it's a moment where you nedd to present something to the PCs, and you don't want to describe the nest scene without careful consideration, just end the game for the day, be open about needing to plan, and present some alternative entertainment. I've seen it happend more than once, and players tend to get it as quite an achievement as you enjoy their ability to be creative, to push things beyond what you had imagined and the simple chaotic nature of RPG.

when I plan an adventure, what I do is have a good idea os what is happening in the scenario, what will happend if there are no intrusions and in what the PCs probably are going to try first (one, two or three things). I also get inspired by thinking about a couple os scenes that I would like to describe, and I usually work my adventures from one imagined scene to another, surfing the flow between what I had prepared. I'm the opposite of nephtys: I had always written my own adventures, but with WHFRP 3e I'm only running the printed ones. what I do is that I kinda re-create it all to make it get a feeling of belonging, to be able to actually feel the story in my hands. and to adapt it to the game style of my players and their characters. a couple of things I change, but with most of it it just needs some changes of perspective.

anything that I do with them, the real work is to be able to flow the momentum. it's like being something between a surfer and a stage magician, always with some trick on the sleeve...

Thank you all.