We’re James and Chuck, lifelong Game Masters who can’t stop thinking about role-playing games. We’ve spent years running sessions, building worlds, and discovering stories we never planned. Sometimes things work perfectly, and sometimes we screw up spectacularly, but we always learn, laugh, and lean on each other’s experience to make the next game even better. We don’t always agree, and that’s part of the fun. There's no right or wrong way to GM, just choices, surprises, and the joy of collaborative storytelling.
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24 - Beyond The Nene Valley Of The Dolls - it's NVRA on Good GMs Podcast!
James and Chuckie welcome Anthony Langley, retired US Air Force Major with 35 years in intelligence and reconnaissance, host of the Nene Valley Roleplaying Association on YouTube and Patreon, and a guy who has been rolling dice and telling stories since the mid-80s. His players include software engineers, a doctor, and one player who ran an ETU session from a camper van in Eastern Europe on Starlink. These are serious people!
Find Anthony and the Nene Valley Roleplaying Association on YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/@NVRA-RPG] and Patreon [https://www.patreon.com/NeneValleyRoleplayingAssociation]. Check out their ETU campaign if you want to see what a long-haul actual play looks like when it's done right.
What We Get Into:
- Give your GM brushes, not just dice rolls. Don't say "I roll intimidation." Pick up his drink. Slam it down. Look him dead in the eyes. Now roll intimidation.
- Why ETU looks like a compact setting that can't go anywhere, and why that's completely wrong
- Anthony's philosophy shift from story is prime to character is prime, and why he stopped Matt Mercer-ing his players
- Railroad vs sandbox: Anthony's approach to blending structure with player freedom across 55+ sessions
- What Anthony steals from Blades in the Dark: the flashback mechanic and position/effect, and why both belong at any table
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6 Oct 2026
23 - Pacing Gamey
James and Chuckie tackle one of the most underrated GM skills — pacing. Not going fast. Not going slow. Knowing the difference between a scene that's supposed to breathe and a scene that's just bleeding out.
What We Get Into:
- Slow isn't always wrong. A scene that feels slow might be doing exactly what it's supposed to do. The question is whether it's moving the story forward, not whether it's moving fast.
- The silent timer trick: James puts a kitchen timer on the table without saying what it's for. Players immediately start making decisions. No explanation needed.
- When players are genuinely stuck vs. when they're just spinning their wheels — and how to tell the difference by watching the table
- How to introduce new information without being obvious about it: NPCs, matchbooks, news reports, a name on a character sheet the player forgot they wrote
- Quick encounters and dramatic tasks: taking a whole scene that would eat three sessions and collapsing it into one meaningful roll per player
- Lay out two hooks at the end of every scene. Not one. Two. Give them the library and City Hall. Now they're moving.
- Don't be afraid to throw the villain at them when they're stalled. Nothing unsticks a table like a surprise attack.
- Shane Hensley's combat countdown: if a player isn't ready when their turn comes, smack the table, count down from five, and move on. Chuckie thought it was harsh until he tried it.
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29 Sept 2026
22 - Lore of the Worlds - it's Cam Rogers on Good GMs!
James sits down with Cam Rogers, novelist and fomer rlead writer for Warframe, one of the biggest game universes ever built, and the guy who's going to be running Mothership on the Good GMs Twitch channel. No Chuckie this week. Just James and someone who has been building worlds for a living for over a decade.
What We Get Into:
- Character is plot. Not the farm boy, not the chosen one...the farm boy's conflicting motivations rubbing up against everyone else's conflicting motivations. That's where the story is.
- Don't build Middle Earth first. Start with a simple person in a simple place and let the world expand around them in layers.
- Pressure mechanics: the bomb under the table, the rent that's due, the Death Star approaching Yavin Four. Tension is narrative currency - you bank it and spend it strategically.
- You're not a navigator. You're the cartographer. The world is a blank map and you're dispelling the fog of war as the players move through it.
- Don't have a death grip on your plot. The players are at least the missing third. Let them run off into the hills. Your job is to make the plot work for wherever they end up.
- Cam's closing tip: understand the structure of your story well enough that you can re-skin any narrative piece to fit the context your players have created.
Check out Cam's podcast I Love This And I'll Tell You Why [https://www.patreon.com/cw/ILoveThisIllTellYouWhy], launching this week - Thursday, October 1st!
First guest: https://quantumbreak.fandom.com/wiki/Mikael_KasurinenMikko Rautalahti, [https://quantumbreak.fandom.com/wiki/Mikko_Rautalahti] senior writer on Alan Wake and Quantum Break from Remedy Entertainment, and their newly released video game, Control Resonant. [https://www.remedygames.com/games/control-2]
https://www.patreon.com/ILoveThisIllTellYouWhy [https://www.patreon.com/cw/ILoveThisIllTellYouWhy]
Support the Show: https://www.patreon.com/GoodGMsPodcast
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