For the last ten or so years, I’ve fancied myself a pretty good “home campaign” GM for the most part and have consciously worked on getting better, though there are a few campaigns which, while not awful have been quite mediocre. When I’ve mentioned these on social media, my players tend to apologise or feel a bit guilty, so I tend not to self analyse in public now.

Then there’s Hangouts one shots. The last few I’ve run have been really good, awesome because of the players, and ‘okay, I guess, but a little uncomfortable’ respectively. There was a dark theme the players didn’t really engage in for the last one, and I don’t think they’d signed up for that. Mea culpa.

As for con GMing and game store demos, my first one 8 years ago was pretty bad, but I didn’t quite realise how bad at the time. I pressed on, and worked consciously to improve and become less clueless about what makes things tick. I had a run of really good games for years, with the occasional miss for me personally (and again I got guilty feelings for public analysis).

The last couple of years, I’ve gone down to more like a 50% strike rate, with the highs higher than they’ve ever been before, but the lows more noticeable to me. I nearly got put off at a recent con where I ran three games and only one of the three was as good as I’d hoped, but I worked on things again, and got myself excited again to run games.

I agree that it’s not all about the GM by a long way.