Image by Ylanite Koppens from Pixabay

Yesterday, on Quora, I answered a question about beginning as a GM..

The question originally posed was “How can I play NPCs in DND and how can I get started DMing? This is my first time and I’m so lost.”

There was already an excellent answer to the question, so I took a more general approach rather than simply make redundant noises.

That answer is the foundation of today’s article. Anything that’s inset is new; everything that isn’t was part of the original answer (though it may have been rephrased slightly and broken into multiple paragraphs instead of long bullet points).

When you are the GM, you have four responsibilities to your game and gaming group that you have to satisfy, each and every time.

The First Duty

First, you have to make the game fun for everyone, including yourself. Interesting can be great, can even be fun to some people, but interesting alone is usually not enough.

Improvement

There aren’t a lot of shortcuts to improvement in this space. Experience at reading a crowd and motivating them is the only real education. But there are a few areas around the edges that can be studied and improved. Most of them revolve around communications in various forms.

Public Speaking

Lessons in Public Speaking assist in communicating clearly with the players. There are a number of oratorical techniques that speechwriters utilize and understanding and applying them can help the GM, too.

Debating Techniques

Studying Debating Techniques can help in the organization of your presentations.

When I was in 3rd class, my school had what was called an Eisteddfod, but that term was only loosely applicable. This is essentially a maths, english, and performing arts contest across the entirety of the school in the manner of a sports carnival.

The debate was the problem – there was only one entrant, a boy from 12th form (at the time, “class” was the term used for years 1 to 6, and ‘form” for years 7-12, because education in those years was built around classes in specific topics). My opponent was nine years my senior, and I was a shy kid and not a confident public speaker; he was the dux of the school (something like Valedictorian in the US).

At around 9:30AM, the day of the competition, the School Principal and my teacher approached me and begged me to participate, taking the affirmative position. Because the topic – “nuclear energy” – was something that I understood well, I agreed, and hurried off to my Grandmother’s place (which was relatively close by) to prepare (with permission to do so, I should add).

The debate was to take place at 2PM. I dashed off a 2000 word handwritten essay which examined the pros and cons of the subject in a realistic manner, dismissing the cons and talking up the pros.

The essay was in three parts – the first part talking up the benefits, the second part identifying and dismissing the objections, and the third part discussing public apprehensions and their validity. I keenly felt that I could have done a better job with time to research properly – it was full of unsupported assertions and generalities – but it was straightforward in presentation and comprehensive.

I got back to the Town Hall at about 1:30, notes in hand. As the ‘affirmative’ position, I went first, and simply read aloud the first part of my essay in the two minutes allowed. I was so nervous when I started that I almost wet my pants!

My opponent followed; he had assembled talking points on index cards and simply improvised around each point. His presentation was clearly better than mine, but his claims were more nebulous and vacuous than the specific benefits that I had cited.

It was then my turn again, the concept being that I would argue against the points my opponent had raised in his introductory presentation; but he had been so ineffective at countering my opening statement that (with growing confidence) I simply continued reading my essay, raising an objection that my opponent might make and explaining why it was flawed. This was, effectively, preempting his second turn in the debate.

When his second turn was, he tried to counter the points that I had made, shuffling repeatedly through his index cards to find the notes that were relevant. Where I had told a story, his response was disorganized and – at times – almost incoherent. He had been able to use the research time that was not afforded me, and was able to offer facts to challenge the opinions I had voiced – but was completely unconvincing.

It was at that point, just over half-way through the debate, that I won it. In the third phase of the debate, I was able to continue simply reading from my prepared script, first acknowledging public apprehension of nuclear energy, and then dismissing such fears as over-generalized overreactions, and concluding by inviting those listening (especially the judges) to review the entire negative case in that light – was it substantive or a ramshackle collection of paranoid thoughts?

My opponent then made his final mistake – he rearranged his entire planned conclusion to respond to my allegation, shuffling through his index cards several times (saying nothing while he did so), repeating himself, contradicting himself, and sounding completely unsure of his entire case. The judges were unanimous in giving me the victory (and none of them knew until afterwards that I hadn’t even signed up until that morning). I still have the certificate of proficiency in public speaking that I was awarded!

Okay, that’s a rather lengthy tale from my distant past (it will be 50 years ago in a few more months) – but the lessons learned on that day were the foundation of my GMing style when I got started. Content is great, but a smooth presentation and clarity of communication counts for more – you can always fill in details later, so long as you don’t undermine them with inaccuracies.

Presentation Aids

Handouts and illustrations, sound effects, different voices and accents, and even minis and battlemaps, they all enhance your presentation, especially if presented smoothly – but they are like my opponent’s index cards in the true story offered in the previous section, if you have to continually shuffle them to find what you are looking for, they will (at best) simply counteract the negative impression that results and (at worst) will fail even to achieve that.

Going in for such things is easily overdone and counterproductive – which makes any prep time invested in them, a waste. It takes time and practice to learn to integrate such things into a smooth presentation. I suggest starting with just one of these enhancements, mastering it, then starting on the next – while going lightly on the enhancement tool that you have already mastered. It generally won’t take as long to master the second, because some of what you’ve learned from the first will be transferable knowledge.

There are books and blog posts out there on effective presentations and how to create them – what works with PowerPoint might not be directly applicable to what you are trying to achieve, but indirect application of the lessons learned is still useful. It merely requires acceptance of the point being made ‘in principle’.

One of the key lessons from such information sources is that specificity and detail are the enemies of clarity and absorption. At the same time, specificity is key to sounding authoritative. How and when you present detailed specifics are therefore key to an effective presentation.

What’s more, simply telling the audience what they already know or believe may avoid putting noses out of joint, but it’s a recipe for boredom; people want to hear something new (that agrees with their existing beliefs and prejudices).

Learning how much reassuring padding to include before you branch out into something new is something that can’t be taught; for one thing, every audience will be different (the larger it is, the more homogeneous reactions will be, but a GM is typically presenting only to a very small group and will need to tailor his presentations to the group)..

The Second Duty

Second, you have to collaborate with the players and their characters to tell a story that revolves around those characters.

All of them, both collectively and individually, in equal measure, as perceived over a substantial period of time.

There are two essential ways of doing so: as an ensemble performance, and by putting the metaphoric spotlight onto first one individual and then another. Neither is usually enough on their own, but most new GMs pick one as their primary technique. See Ensemble Or Star Vehicle if you want more on the subject. That usually means that you will have to create a series of stimulating events while being flexible enough to cope when the players choose a third or fourth path through the story.

Improvement

This is such a broad umbrella that there are many subjects that can be studied within it. Here are just a few of them:

Storytelling

Everything listed in earlier parts also helps meet this responsibility, but beyond those, there are other techniques. When you watch TV, keep one corner of your mind asking questions about technique – How have the writers used events and dialogue to further the story? How have the conveyed a unified characterization despite most TV and movies being filmed completely out of sequence? What is the plot and why does it have the shape that it does? How do the characters become embroiled within the plot? Is there any foreshadowing? The list goes on and on, and anything you learn in response to any of these questions is directly beneficial to your craft as a GM.

Do the same when reading a story, or an article. Everything that you see and hear has the potential to teach you something, if you are paying attention to it.

Acting Techniques. Direction techniques. Production techniques. These are only indirectly relevant, but no less powerful for that.

Cast and production commentaries contain vast amounts of information of this type for you to digest – I try never to buy a DVD that is “just the movie”. (That, by the way, is one reason why I dislike the trend towards streaming).

Story structure

This can be a double-edged sword; while it’s a useful area of study for GMs, you have to think carefully about how they will translate to the unique medium of the tabletop roleplaying game. This is something that many of the articles here at campaign touch on, but few address directly – I know that there’s one that does, but I can’t remember its name. I’ll update this with a link if I find it.

Characters

Better, more memorable, characters never go astray. There are many books and blog posts on the subject to draw on (often aimed at other media, like fiction or TV), but a simple premise is at the heart of the best advice in this respect: good characters come from good plotlines. That’s not the end of the subject, but it’s a good beginning.

Characterization

The difference between character and characterization is a subtle one that some people may not appreciate. A good character is one who makes a notable contribution to the story, that is memorable and distinctive, and that is “fit for purpose”. But those are all superficial attributes; characterization is about the personality that fills those superficialities and gives the character substance.

So psychology is a starting point, but it tends to be rather deep and lots of it have limited relevance. There are writer’s guides to practical characterization that are more useful, at least to the novice. Sociology is another key area of study, as is History in terms of how people lived, day-to-day, and how those lives were shaped by the circumstances around them. The more you dig into this area, the more there is to know, and you soon find yourself asking questions for which there are no firm answers – “Does growing up in a different culture cause an individual to have different reactions to events and other stimuli?” for example. “What is the role of contextual interpretation in underpinning reactions to events?” for another.

Often, you can phrase the question, find something that purports to answer it, but find that you lack the foundation to understand the answer.

It reminds me of a scene from a novel (I forget which) in which, for his doctoral examination in Physics, the character was asked to explain why the sky was blue. He answered by talking about the scattering of short wavelengths more than long wavelengths, to which the examiner simply asked “Why?”. Every time he answered that question, the examiner simply asked “Why?” and forced the character to dig deeper into his understanding of physics.

Media

You aren’t alone in wanting to know about these things. Writers have been answering questions about where their ideas come from for centuries. Playwrights have faced similar challenges for a similar length of time. These days, movies and TV are at the cutting edge of the questions, and the subjects have been given more intense scrutiny than ever.

Media studies can be superficial (at school, they were a shorthand for ‘we have no lesson planned for some reason so watch this TV show for 40-odd minutes and keep quiet”) but if you dig a little deeper, there is lots of advice out there for the taking. Their techniques might not work for you directly, but with suitable adaption, they can add to your repertoire.

Narrative techniques

There are three obvious areas of study when it comes to narrative technique, of increasing remoteness to the subject.

The most direct and obvious one is about efficiency in writing – how to compress narrative and description, how to identify what’s essential and what’s getting in the way, how to make your narrative compelling and succinct and stylish, and so on.

The most indirect but equally obvious one is to study media, especially costuming, lighting, and set design. The “why” of each decision can be translated into a principle of some value to the process of GMing.

But, perhaps the most useful is to study (and ruminate on) Radio Plays. These frequently have to operate with no narration at all, creating environments through sound alone; and when they do have narration, they can’t waste a bit of it. The techniques of radio plays can therefore be very educational to the GM.

The Third Duty

Third, you have to bring the world to the players. This inevitably means that you will have to create some parts of it, even if using a published setting and ‘canned’ adventure modules..

Many GMs find it easier to do this if someone else does that hard work, which is why canned adventures and commercial game settings are common starting points, and many GMs feel no need to expand beyond them.

Others – like me – find it easier to do this if they have created the world in its entirety, especially if you become exasperated by inconsistencies in published material, or try shoehorning a published adventure into a game setting that it doesn’t fit.

One requires a lot of reading, the other requires a lot of creativity and general knowledge, both chew up time like pretzels in a bar.

One of the things that is significantly harder if you have gone down the creation path is letting go of your creation – the players can and will change things through the presence of their characters, they won’t adhere to any script you may have had in mind. Your creations are the floor-plan and carpentry; they get to choose the paint and wallpaper and what each room is used for.

Improvement

There are fewer resources out there to draw upon in this area, because it is more unique to the TTRPG environment. Other media may have similar problems from time to time, but their techniques and solutions are less relevant.

Fortunately, this makes it a popular topic on RPG blogs. Most posts on world-building or running games will be relevant. A lot of posts on plot and encounters will be meaningful in this context. Posts on game settings are usually useful.

The Fourth Duty

Finally, you have to arbitrate the rules, fairly and evenhandedly, and in such a way that you DON’T ruin the fun.

That last bit is the hardest part.

What’s more, you have to do it without sucking the life and momentum out of the game, which is even harder.

Being an expert in the rules isn’t necessary; giving a player the interpretation of the rules that he wants isn’t always the right thing to do; the easy way (rolling over and playing dead for the players) is usually much more work in the long run. But at the same time, being a rules tyrant kills the fun stone dead every time a rules issue comes up. Firm but fair and consistent is the rule – kind of like raising kids or puppies.

There are reams of advice out there that address this issue, or there used to be.

Improvement

There are lots of articles that talk about adjudications of specific rules and situations. Most of these are useless in terms of the general situation, because too many of them simply present their answer as a fait accompli without describing the process by which an answer was reached.

This frequently leads to arguments in the comments from people who disagree (rightly or wrongly) with the conclusions of the author. And heaven help you if you advocate actually changing the rules – there are people out there who consider them as sacrosanct as holy writ!

All of which may be interesting, or intriguing, or simply fun, to look at from the outside – but don’t help you much. They are nowhere near as interesting, intriguing, or fun when you’re in the middle of them.

For that reason, Johnn and I established a rule for Campaign Mastery’s “Ask The GMs” from the very beginning – specific game mechanics were only to be referenced when the question posed could be abstracted into a broader, more interesting general principle. We simply didn’t want to buy into such divisive territory.

Fortunately, such problems seem to have receded of late, perhaps exported to social media.

That’s why so much of the free preview of Assassin’s Amulet was material that didn’t appear in the main text – it was a deliberate look behind the curtains on the writing of the product, the logic behind the creative decisions, and so on, as well as a presentation of selected portions of the content. Another principle that we deliberately pursued in the writing was that the free preview contained usable and useful material in its’ own right – we had both been served up preview versions that simply excerpted a handful of pages, the contents of which were only useful if you bought the full product. They weren’t a preview, they were an advertisement.

Here at Campaign Mastery, most of the posts may be pitched at the experienced GM, but I am at pains to describe the thought processes that lie behind any in-game decisions or events described, because that tells the GM who doesn’t know how to do it what I did, and why.

Over the eleven-plus years of publication, I’ve tried to bring that philosophy to every aspect of the hobby. Most, if not all, have something written about them. It’s often just a matter of finding the right post!

Outside of these pages, studying industrial arbitration, diplomacy, and the art of negotiation may be rewarding. Those allied subjects are the closest that you will find to immediate relevance.

Putting Content In It’s Place

When you look at the totality expressed, it will be surprising to some that there is so little that’s about content.

Purely by chance, over the weekend, I stumbled across the finals of a local show called Lego Masters, which provides the perfect metaphor for the relationship of content to everything described, especially original content: This article has been about a sketch pretending to be a blueprint; content are the bricks and mortar. Content doesn’t determine the shape of the finished house; the blueprints do. And a really good idea that doesn’t fit should be set aside for another day, another opportunity.

But better bricks not only make for a prettier, more attractive structure, they may make possible structures that would otherwise be impossible. Content is important – but not as important as the four responsibilities.

In fact, Everything that I haven’t described as part of the four can be characterized as personal style and repertoire of technique. It isn’t essential, just sometimes nice to have.

These four things are the four obligations that you have to meet as a GM, and the better that you do them, the better a GM you are.

PS: When I was just starting out, I had another GM/player who wasn’t in the game but who had a lot more experience mentor me. I’ve written an article about the experience, encouraging others to do the same, but it mentions a number of the lessons he taught me, and may also be useful as a result: Bringing On The Next Generation, part two: Gamemaster Mentors