Many of us, have read GM-sections in RPG, RPG blogs, forum discussions, and sometimes books about the storytelling art.
All of these contains tons of interesting tips/techniques (and some will contradict each other, you don’t GM a gritty mega-dungeon and high-school drama game the same way), so I am curious which ones are your favourite and how do you use them in your game
I talk only as much as is necessary to paint the scene and hurry to prompt player action.
There’s an old bit of advice I read somewhere that the sooner you ask players, “What do you do?” the smoother your game is running.
Those really old AD&D modules with 3/4th the page taken up by boxed text? People tend to zone them out. WotC did studies on this and figured attention starts to drift after 2-3 sentences.
But it goes beyond boxed text. Any time the GM is sitting there talking, be it narration, exposition, or – worst case scenario – two NPCs having a conversation, that’s time the players have to sit there trapped in an unskippable videogame cutscene.