About the “Epigrams Of Life & Gaming” series:

An epigram is a brief, interesting, memorable, and sometimes surprising or satirical statement. Usually under the hashtag #Musing, I have the habit of tweeting notions and thoughts and philosophizing; the 140-character limit of twitter (and yes, I know there are ways around that) by definition makes those tweets epigrams. I’ve been documenting the best of them (in my opinion) with the intention of discussing them here. Because I’m not constrained to 140 characters, I’ve been able to clarify some that had been compressed severely in order to fit twitter’s limits – but they are all still very short.

These are thoughts that run deep, or that are succinct to the point of being razor-sharp. Taken all at once, they can be quite overwhelming, and each can receive less than the attention it deserves. So I’ve broken them into batches of ten or twelve. I’m not going to present them all at once, instead relegating this to another irregular series. After each epigram, I will try to expand on the thought propounded, or discuss the point raised.

Not all of these are directly applicable to RPGs. But all RPGs involve people, and that makes them all at least indirectly relevant…

If you don’t enjoy the result, at least enjoy the process. And vice-versa.

One of my greatest assets in life has been the capacity to find something I enjoyed about every job that I had, no matter what it was, from meeting new people to discovering new cultures, from improving processes that make a real improvement in government services, to enjoying the sunshine. And a big part of the secret to acquiring that capacity is this little tip.

It applies to my GMing, too. From creating campaigns to writing adventures to making maps to creating interesting characters, either I found something satisfying or enjoyable about the process itself, or I deliberately guided the process so that the end result would be something that I would enjoy.

It’s like creating a new PC. If you find the character intriguing / interesting, and the GM engages in the character, you will always be happy to play it. If either of these is not true, your enjoyment in playing the character will either wane or be crushed beneath the growing burden of frustration. Neither negative outcome is conducive to good roleplay, and will lead to a cessation on your part as a player of any effort whatsoever. You start playing by numbers and just going through the motions.

In the same way, if you enjoy neither the process or the result of any phase of your activities as a GM, the level of effort will suffer, and the overall outcome will diminish in standard, ultimately affecting your capacity to do the things that you do enjoy about the process – ultimately, in the worst case, because the campaign shuts down.

If there is any aspect of game or campaign prep that you don’t enjoy, you need to invent or discover a new way of doing that work that is fun, or sooner or later, your campaign will suffer.

If you write something you enjoy, you’re successful whether it is a commercial success or not.

Game prep is a bit like writing a blog, or a novel, or whatever. You can’t do it day in, day out, unless you enjoy what you do. No-one gets rich from gaming or writing about gaming. Fewer than 1 in a thousand make significant money from writing of any kind – it’s a significant achievement just to earn the equivalent of a standard wage. That means that you either find some other source of satisfaction that compensates and rejuvenates your motivation, or you stop doing it – some time after you stop doing it well.

This observation is obviously closely related to the one previously discussed, and they are both about work/life balance and maintaining enthusiasm for what you do.

You can enjoy the craftsmanship of an artistic effort without liking the product. The reverse is harder. Forest for the trees?

I’m not a big fan of rap music. Most classical music doesn’t excite me, either. There are artists – both traditional and digital – whose work leaves me cold. Most poetry induces yawns. Yet, I have studied all of these things for my own enjoyment, and discovered selected works that do appeal. Even if I don’t like a piece of music, or a painting, I can still appreciate the skill and artistry of execution. I might like the way the bass guitar is played, or appreciate the fingering technique on the guitar fret, or the complexity of timing, or the use of color. Hence the first part of this statement I consider proven beyond question.

The rest of the statement gets a little deeper. Is it possible to enjoy the end result of an artistic process without appreciating the craftsmanship and skill of the artists involved? Examples that demonstrate a ‘yes’ case are much harder to find. My tastes would be different from yours, so there’s no point in citing specifics; but I would suggest that every time you hear a piece of music or see a work of art and think, ‘I would like that if not for X (whatever X might be) that it is an example. The problem is that X – whatever it is – is interfering with your overall enjoyment of the work. In effect, you can’t enjoy the forest because there’s one ugly tree in the middle of your view.

This is a statement about appreciation of technique against your capacity to enjoy a holistic view of the finished product.

Now, consider the following: The ‘finished product’ is an RPG campaign or adventure, and the craftsmanship refers to all the elements and ingredients that go into it, from the players to the characters to the maps to whatever. You can appreciate the effort that a GM puts in, even learn something useful from it, without that campaign or adventure being your cup of tea, or something that you would enjoy playing in. (First part of the statement). But it gets a lot harder to enjoy a campaign or adventure that would otherwise be a massive hit for you if there is one particular aspect of the result that you don’t like. It’s hard to overlook the distasteful ‘tree’ to discover the enjoyment that the rest of the forest would bring.

That connects this thought with the ones that preceded it. If there is a significant aspect of your campaign prep that is being shortchanged because you have not found a way to enjoy doing it, this can potentially kill a campaign no matter how good the rest of it might be. The solution is to find a way to grow your enthusiasm and skill for that section of the GM’s craft that you aren’t currently enjoying, and your game will benefit.

Nine-Tenths of the ideas you have as you are falling asleep are rubbish. But the last 10th makes the effort of recording them all worthwhile.

Our conscious minds continually filter our ideas through a plausibility screen, while distracting us with reactions and stimuli from the world around us. Only as we are falling asleep do both the distractions and filters go away, giving your conscious awareness direct access to the part of your mind where inspiration happens. The lack of filters means that a lot of what you come up with will be rubbish. But a few gems that you might otherwise have missed will also sneak through. Always be aware of these ideas, and examine them diligently but cautiously the next day.

You can tell an idea is worth the effort if you worry that you are inadequate to the task of developing that idea.

There are times when we all come up with ideas and aren’t sure if they are good enough to be worth the time they will require to develop. One hallmark of the really good ideas is that they seem overwhelming, even beyond our skills. If you undertake the development of such a great idea, either you will be up to the task despite your self-doubt, or you won’t; if you aren’t, you will either rise to the challenge and improve yourself in the process, or you will fail. Assuming all conditions are equally likely that means that 75% of the time, you will succeed in developing that idea. In fact, since you were good enough to come up with the idea in the first place, the chances of success are probably higher. So back yourself; you might be surprised at what you can achieve.

Here’s another way to look at it: If you don’t try, you will always regret it if you later realize that you might have had the skills necessary to have succeeded. So don’t be put off by the prospect of failure.

Writing is a creative process that transforms ideas into text through the mechanisms of skill and discipline.

There are a lot of answers out in the world to the question, “what is writing to you”. Some talk about the need to write, others about the work involved, others describe it as a labor of love. Still others describe it as a skill, or a discipline, or a habit that you have to get into in order to succeed at it. This is my answer, and it packs a lot of meat into a simple expression.

• Ideas – you have to have them, or you’re writing will never be worth anything.
• Skill – you need to learn what you are doing in order to succeed in transforming the ideas from the original imaginary medium to the page.
• Discipline – you need to keep doing it, for as long as it takes, or your skills will lose the edge needed.

This is true of all writing, whether it be a school assignment, a work of fiction, a blog, or an RPG.

How frustrating would it be to discover the $10,000 winning token in a packet of munchies a week after the promotion had ended…

This has never happened to me, or to anyone that I know – but I’m sure that it has happened to someone, somewhere, at some point.

When crossing the desert of ignorance, a book is both canteen and compass. Be prepared, always have one with you.

In a desert survival situation, a canteen prolongs survival while a compass gives direction. When in a situation where ignorance and uncertainty are all around, a book on the subject gives direction and enables you to get through the situation. Try to always have any book dealing with subjects that might arise and about which you are uncertain at hand when you might need.

If you must rehearse a conversation in your mind (and we all do), ask yourself what the other party MIGHT say, don’t decide what they WILL say.

We all rehearse conversations in our heads. While this advice is good in general life, it’s also applicable to GMs when they are preparing the interactions between NPCs and PCs. Don’t expect it to follow any particular script you might have in your head – because most of the time, it won’t. So rarely will the script bear any resemblance to what will actually be said that locking yourself into any particular delivery is a waste of time, and counterproductive to boot.

Instead, keep a list of the points that you want to be made in the course of the dialogue, and look for multiple ways to go from something that might be said to the message you want to deliver. And if one of the other parties makes one of your points for you, cross it off your to-do list for the conversation rather than contributing excessive weight to that particular statement by reiterating it.

I hate being wrong. I would rather admit ignorance. I hate admitting ignorance, so I educate myself constantly.

Another piece of advice that applies to both general life and sitting in the Game Master’s chair. There’s not a whole lot more to say, really – except one footnote: You never know what will turn out to be useful information. In the past as GM, I’ve drawn on information on subjects as diverse as biology, genetics, politics, history, music, art, sociology, real estate, banking, economics, computer science, software design, desktop publishing, cooking, geography, geology, thermodynamics, engineering, metallurgy, movies & media, publishing, journalism, mathematics, and many more fields besides. The more you can absorb, the more tools you have in your toolbox.

If you do something without thinking first, you will never do it as well as you could – unless it’s emoting. If you do anything without thinking after, you’ll never learn from the experience.

Another item with considerable depth to think about. The first part seems fairly obvious and straightforward – but there’s a sting in the tail. Thinking about how best to display emotion can sometimes – even often – be counterproductive, focusing too much attention on clarity of delivery while obscuring what your performance is attempting to deliver. You are far better off imagining that you are feeling that particular emotion (or something close to it) and letting that mood color your words and tone than you would ever be trying to fake them.

The counterpoint in the second half is something not enough people realize, unfortunately. Mistakes, lucky and unlucky guesses, serendipity – they can all be educational, but only if you take the time to understand what just happened. If not, it’s a sure bet that mistakes will be relived, but serendipitous lightning might never be caught in a bottle again – in other words, it’s all downhill from there. Which sucks mightily and is the best possible reason for taking the time to learn from your experiences.

The brilliance of technology is that it makes communication easier. The price is that it makes miscommunication easier.

The final installment of this particular set of epigrams. This is something that seems obvious when it’s stated outright, but that seems to take a lot of people by surprise the first time they hear this thought expressed. At the time, I was thinking about the many false “celebrity deaths” that have misled people on twitter – consider this list of premature obituaries from Wikipedia, which only scratches the surface of the phenomenon. But after I had drafted it, I realized that it applied in broader terms and to more forms of misinformation. An essential skill of modern times is the passing of everything you read or hear through a plausibility filter and verification process.

“I read it on the Internet” used to be synonymous with unreliability and misinformation. These days, the web in general has cleaned up its act a lot. Wild rumor and imaginative gossip has largely been swept aside by professionalism and corporate spin, respectively, but there are still corners that are a bit wild and woolly. Social Media are definitely one of those areas. But scams and fisching attempts and malware still abound, and the last line of defense is often our credulity and credibility.

At the same time, the level of trust that can be imputed to previously-unimpeachable news sources has steadily deteriorated, at least in Australia. Newspapers are full of editorial slant, and once-trusted current affairs programming has revealed itself to little better than the notorious National Enquirer. These days, it’s becoming very commonplace to use the internet to verify stories that run in the traditional media.

Modern society has more information at its fingertips than any past generation could have dreamed. But we also have more misinformation and misrepresented information at those fingertips. The more unlikely it is, the faster a story seems to spread, and the only solution is to learn which sources can be trusted and which to regard with suspicion. The sad reality is that this statement is definitely something that you can trust.

That’s all I have for this article. There will be more; all told, I have well over 100 insights like these twelve to share. Be sure to check out the next batch – whenever they appear!