What makes a good GM? Is it hours and hours of prep time or is it good improvisation skills? What do you think for you personally and what has made games you've been a part of particularly great or interesting due to the GM?
This thread obviously comes from inspiration from Ross' Bad GM Habits thread, but I thought we could instead think of what makes GM's do well instead of frustrate and infuriate their players.
I'll start!
The other inspiration for this thread comes from my GM'ing experience from this past Friday night as I hosted a game (our group's first game) of 3:16: Carnage Amongst the Stars. The game is great because a notebook page's worth of notes and about 10 minutes of my time and I had the entire scenario, or at least enough to get us going, all prepared.
I didn't really know how I was going to end the story other than "big alien swarm attacks them in the end, OH NO!" The players were to land on the planet, make their way to Bunker 6 to reinforce Lt. Carlson's force and help him take out the alien queen. Carlson had gone kind of crazy and not much of his force was left (he was in fact taking one of them out at a time for "scouting missions" and going crazy, coming back alone).
They went off to hunt the queen taking the survivors with them, but leaving Carlson behind to "protect the bunker." They get to a cave and see some of the dead troopers armor with little sticks set around them spelling out "Carlson" and their first thought was "Oh SHIT, Carlson's been infected by the queen and is the host body for her, we gotta go kill her!"
Well, no, not really, he was just a crazy ass military dude, but I went with it, molded the details to fit the story they had all come up with, and they all got a very satisfying final fight of taking out the remaining aliens on the planet on the way to take out that bastard Carlson the queen.
It was excellent, and I've never had so much fun improvising. Basically, this thread is about good GM habits, or I guess good times had as a GM also.