From Peak To Valley

In which I admit that I am not always the world's greatest GM...

Last week's Continuum session was awesome, things went way better than expected. But, unfortunately, when you're standing at a peak, there's nowhere to go but down.

Last night's Continuum session was horrid. We had technical issues on both Skype and MeBeam, that made it painful trying to communicate with the players. I didn't handle that frustration well, and made some poor GMing decisions and kneejerk reactions. The plot was okay, I guess, but the presentation and pacing were dreadfull. Other than the tech issues, it was all my fault. I should have summarized instead of trying to play something out that was practically guaranteed to be mostly passive on the players part. I could have just said "You try that for more than an hour, and it proves a fruitless avenue of pursuit. You'll have to try something else." Instead, I basically narrated and played out in full detail the efforts that were certain to get them nowhere. We were on a tight clock because one of the players (my wife) had a union meeting in the morning, and my meandering presentation of the scene and poor topic-control squandered the time we had. So, to my players, I apologize, and promise next week will be much better. It certainly couldn't be much worse.