GM Tips: Avoiding "Dead Air"

There's a concept in live radio and TV broadcasts of "dead air": the event where nothing is being presented to the users, the live feed being paused as the actors wait for a cue, freeze up, or anything that interrupts the normal flow. This is to be avoided at all costs in these forms of media for fear of the a powerful "Ratings" dipping too low.

Dead Air can be a huge problem in our hobby when running games! It's perfectly normal to get lost in thought as a GM during a session. Your players are staring at you, waiting for your response to their burning questions. "Did I hit the beast?", "What do I find?", "What's in the room?", "What is the name of the tavern?" are all potential causes of Dead Air and new GMs may have a hard time dealing with the pressure. 

I have found in my years as a "Forever DM" that it is just as crucial to avoid Dead Air at the table as it is during a broadcast. When I run a game, I don't prep endless pages of notes, build encounters, write dialog, or anything that would cause me to stop the game to read it. That stuff feels good to do in the pregame phase of GM-ing but I deem it useless when the pavement hits the road, so to speak. You can still write all those, but you should merely do so to help keep it in your mind. Being a slave to your prepped info will result in your game constantly hitting red lights as you reabsorb the quotes, monster stats, and minutia. 

Enough faffing about on why it's bad. Here's how I avoid Dead Air in my games. 

- my notes are always in bulleted form, separated into logical groupings for very fast retrieval

- random encounters have a # of creatures and what they're doing at the moment, nothing more

- I never write quotes for NPCs, I instead get 2-3 quick sentence fragments about their personality, desire, and hit dice

- I make sure to have a solid grasp on the system I'm running so I can recall rules quickly for players 

- I use that understanding of the game system to make up rulings on the fly when I don't know the rule or it's not contained within the text

- I try to gently nudge off topic conversations back to the game by always keeping in active role in these "sidebars" so I can steer it back to the game

The last one is truly an art in and of itself. Staying in these conversations about a joke, what we ate yesterday, or whatever miscellany that's inevitably gonna come up during a session helps build your social links with your players AND gives you the ability to easily bring it back to the game. You can insert a quip or additional joke to relate with the others then refer to the sidebar starter's PC name and ask them what they're going to do next. 

I have other thoughts about running a table as a GM I will certainly share in future posts. I think for the next topic I will muse about engaging less proactive players into the game. 

Until next time, swear the blood upon your steel will never dry!