Years later, my friends convinced me to run a new game; Shadowrun. All of us knew the material about the same and the experienced gm was on hand to help me (which I desperately needed at the time).

Even more years later, I learned another new game, Ironclaw. Knowing the game backward and forward, and loving it, made it easy to run the game for strangers. My goal, then & now: everyone have fun.

It was enough that someone passing by thought “they are laughing & having a lot of fun. When is that game being run again. I want to play.” That was 7 years ago and he still comes to all my con games.

OTOH, when I run D&D, I’m not nearly as good.

Much like job interviews, the more that you experience games, the better that you will be at it. There is no substitute for the hard knocks of that experience. We always have room for improvement. I’ve been GMing for over twenty years and always benefit from additional experiences.

My games twenty years ago were not that good at all, when evaluated by my current standards.

But this is a good article. GMing is one of those jobs that shows many aspects of a person, and it’s somewhat important to do well, especially if you want to keep your players.

That said, the first rule of almost anything is RELAX. You will do almost everything better when you’re relaxed than when you’re stressed.

I can see what your article’s points are, but if I thought about my games as being like a job interview, I would just place so much pressure on myself that my game would be miserable for myself and others.

As to the content of the article, those are some great tips for interviews and for running game. I remember being in a con game with a GM who just put everyone off because of lack of bathing. It was . . . special.

Asking the right questions is also a great tip. I mostly run a game for my group that relies of shared narrative, and asking the right questions is one of the biggest things that gets them into the theme of it. Asking “What do you do?” never garners as much response as asking “Your roll says you defeat the enemy, what does the final strike look like?”