Anti-Grog about GMing

Just today I realized why in the last decade I have spent thousands of dollars (a lot for me) on a plethora (learned that word from the Star Wars Tramp freight guide back in Junior High) of RPG systems, and yet still haven't found THE ONE (sound the trumpets and drums):

I hate writing adventures. They drain the joy and life out of roleplaying.

And it was just yesterday the solution landed on me like a ton of bricks: Burning Wheels Beliefs.

What they do for me is allow my players to play in a sandbox the size they choose. They allow me to turn the paradigm of GM Acts Players React to Players Act and GM reacts. Which is what I realized I have wanted all along.

I want to play too. But writing an adventure isn't playing for me, it is writing. Plus, I never know what my players will be interested in doing so I always have to modify it.

My hitch in the past wasn't that I didn't know this, it was that I didn't know how to get my players to improv along with me. Beliefs help me help them do that, and after just one day of playing that way, I have found what I have always been looking for in my rpgs: the opportunity for me as the GM to be a player.

Here is just an example of what I am talking about :

The kids at the club I work at LOVE to play Cthulhu. They love the concept. I don't know why but they do. I am using Macabre Tales. Heretofore I have written up the bones of an adventure, and while they love it, it has lost interest from a large group of the kids that had played (some of that is due to the fact that they have to wait for their turn, selfish impatient bastards they are!!!)

But most of the lack of interest has come from me projected towards them because I hate that they look at me like I am a TV and they can just flip me on and an adventure appears.

So yesterday I told the 4 kids that sat down to play that I was not coming up with any more adventures (I said it nicer than that) and that we would be writing down goals for their character to pursue and I would simply oppose their goals.

This required us to back up: I summarized the Setting (1930s, North Eastern America: Vermont, Cultists, Nazi's, Monsters, Ancient Egypt...) Then I had the kids circle topics from that setting that they liked. They came up with Cultists, Egypt and Monsters (i know SURPRISE suprise)

Then I created a situation from those setting elements: Egyptian Cultists are trying to call a Shoggoth into our plane of existence (original, I know). Now came the part that I have in the past dreaded: writing beliefs. I hated this because it was so meta game, but I stuck with it and had them fill out the following sentence:

I think that the cultists are ______________and I will _________________.

They started by saying the cultists were bad and needed to be stopped, and then I looked at one kid, who didn't really like that, and I said "You can think whatever you want: what does your character think about the cultists?" Talk about a domino effect.

I cannot tell you the look he got in his eyes when he realized HE was in charge of his character. He told me he did not like the cultists getting all that power, BUT that he wanted to create a RIVAL cult, with real power. Another kid thought the cultists were awesome and wanted to help them, and the third kid wanted to do intel, so is going to spy on the cultists, and a fourth kid things the cultists are bad and is going to stop them.

That took 10 minutes, the next 40ish minutes was the easiest and most pleasent and most rewarding GMing I have done in months.

I am so thankful to know about (and how to really USE) the structural element that BW codified, in the ideas of beliefs, it has literally given me back all those games that I had sentenced to the trash bin.