Robin's Laws of Good Game MAstering (Steve Jackson Games, 33 pages, $7.95 eFile)
This essay by Robin Laws, game designer and author (Dragon, Star Wars Gamer, Feng Shui, Rune, Hero Wars, Dying Earth, FASA, Pinnacle, White Wolf, WotC, etc) provides several important rules that every GM should read before they set up their next game.
Laws goes through a series of important steps for GMs to follow in creating adventures and running them. It starts with "Knowing your Players," where he discusses knowing the type of gamers you group has, so you can tailor the game to fit their needs. He then covers rules systems, going into picking a system based on theme, tone, accessibility, and power balance. He mentions campaign Design--picking published or home-brew campaign worlds and missions and how best to present them. In Adventure Design, he covers how to plan for an adventure, with unstructured adventures (dungeon crawls) and four or five structure types of varying complexity. Spontaneous gaming has tips on creating NPCs on the fly and making them less 2-dimensional than most. He then covers Confidence, Mood, and Focus, with tips on how to keep the gamers interested and on-topic. Improvising covers how to make choices, handle game pace, and change the adventure on the fly to suit your gamers' needs. It ends with "the Ultimate Delimma."
This 32-page document is a must-read for any GM. While many of the "laws" presented here are obvious when you stop to think about it, we GMs sometmies forget. It's good to be reminded. Other tips are far less intuitive. If you are using a published game world, he recommends that your players read everything they can find on that world, as this will increase their buy-in and emotional investment in the game.
His advice also covers something I seldom do, but should. He says that combat and other dice-heavy sequences should include a running play-by-play dialog from the GM. One of the best GMs I've gamed with was good at this. After just about every combat action, he would summarize it with a high-energy sentence or two to help us visualize what the dice results told us, also helping to break up the monotony of repetitive dice rolls.
These and other tips offer a way for GMs to imrpove their games. Putting these tips into practice will help GMs elevate their game from talent to trained skill, which will help keep their players interested and make games more fun.