Expectations and the Theater of the Mind

This is yet another image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay. I don’t know why his or her work appeals to me so often, but it always seems to make my shortlist for illustrations!
I’ve decided to wait another week before posting the final part of the Economics in RPGs series, because yesterday, I thought up a new article.
I immediately set about outlining the article.
I know from past experience that if the outline is not substantial enough, by the time I get to actually writing it, I will be all “What on earth did I mean by this?” – sometimes those thoughts can be reconstructed or recaptured, but more than one article has been deep-sixed because they couldn’t.
So, by the time I got to the end of it, I found that I had written more than 4000 words, completed about 1/2 of the article, and didn’t have enough time to write the Economics post.
The only solution: press on and complete the new post idea as today’s article….
Excellence In GMing
A Good GM creates a game that everyone enjoys playing. That’s the bottom line – anything less than that and the game is some shade or nuance of ‘tolerable’, and that’s all that the players can expect.
An Excellent GM occasionally elevates expectations and meets those elevated expectations at least some of the time.
And a Great GM occasionally elevates expectations, setting a new standard for their table which they achieve more often than not.
The degree of disappointment when a session falls flat is directly proportionate to the level of expectations that the players had, going in.
Seems fairly obvious, right? So let’s talk a little about expectations.
Expectations
There are lots of different areas involved in GMing. It’s not necessary to excel in any of them in order to be a Good GM, but the more of them that a GM excels in, and the regularity with which they do so, the more likely they are to transcend Good and achieve Excellence.
If there is one area in which the GM regularly excels, they start edging their way toward Greatness. The more of them in which they excel regularly, the closer they come to that status.
So let’s briefly break down the process of GMing – regardless of genre – and identify the primary tool or skill that the GM uses to create and satisfy expectations in that part of the overall skillset.
- Part Eight in the Basics For Beginners series (Depth In Plotting),
- and a key article linked to within, with a slightly misleading title, Back To Basics: Campaign Structures,
- Scenario Sequencing: Structuring Campaign Flow, and
- Directed Plots, Undirected Narrative, and Stuff That Just Happens, too)
- Know the character’s capabilities;
- Have precalculated the values of any rolls and all adjustments;
- Have prepared outcomes;
- Have translated those outcomes into Narrative;
- The “Swell and Lull – Emotional Pacing in RPGs” Series – Part 1
- …and Part 2; and
- The Further Thoughts On Pacing series (4 articles).
1. Vibrancy & Worldbuilding
The world that the GM creates is thrilling, exciting, and feels somehow larger than life. Like many aspects of GMing, this is divided into two areas: Creation and Execution.
Creation, aka Worldbuilding: you need the ideas to start with, a unified view of the world as a holistic place of existence. These can be yours, they can be someone else’s, they are frequently some blend of the two. Primary tools: (a) Creativity & (b) Structure.
Execution: you need to present this place you are creating to the players, exploring it with plotlines and populating it with people. Primary tools: (c) Vision, (d) Plotting (adventure creation) and (e) Narrative.
2. Story
Once you have the world, you need to be able to create stories that explore it, that reveal the depths, and that convey the vibrancy to the players.
And they have to be good stories – exciting and/or intriguing and/or compelling. Primary tools: (e) Narrative again, and (f) Storytelling.
3. Characters
Some GMs are great at creating characters with relatable depth. It’s not enough for a character to have complex and realistic or super-realistic personalities, they have to be encountered in situations in which the players AND their characters can immediately connect with those personalities.
There are two aspects to this: Entwining established characters with the plot (modifying the plot if necessary in order to do so); and creating new characters that fit seamlessly into the role demanded of them by the plot.
The primary tools for the first are Plot Deconstruction (the ability to break the plot down into encounters, a form of Analysis that is usually considered a part of (b) Structure and (d) Plotting, and Personality Entanglement (connecting one or more aspects of the personality of the NPC with the plot in such a way that the story is enhanced or advanced because of their presence within it, which is an aspect of (d) Plotting, (e) Narrative, and (f) Storytelling).
4. Characterization
Once you’ve got a great character, one that will fit the in-game circumstances like a glove, one that will advance or enhance the plot, and one that the characters can reliably be expected to interact with, you have to actually bring them to life.
The primary tools here are (g) Voice Acting, (h) Expression, (i) Visual Representation, and (j) Theater Of The Mind. Those last two are going to be the primary focus of today’s article.
5. Depth
The adventures themselves need to possess depth. They have to matter, at least to the PCs and their immediate world. The choices of the players have to have Agency, i.e. they have to make a concrete difference in that immediate world, even if that is not immediately apparent.
The primary tools for achieving all this come under the headings of (d) Plotting and (f) Storytelling – again, creation and execution, respectively..
6. Immersion
To the maximum extent possible within the confines of a rules-based simulation of the alternate reality created by your Worldbuilding, you need to bring the world and events within it to life within the minds of the players.
Actually taking it to the extent that they can no longer distinguish it from reality is going too far, but you need to take it to the point where they can think and act as if their characters were real inhabitants of the place, forgetting momentarily that they are in a rules-based simulation.
There are times when this is not possible, and the game mechanics haul people back to reality. The key here is to designate certain parts of the story as focused on delivering immersion to an extent that disbelief can be suspended in those sections of the plot, and that this suspension of disbelief can itself be suspended when you have to deal with the mechanics.
If that sounds tricky, it often is. These are advanced applications of (d) Plotting, (g) Voice Acting, (h) Expression, and (j) Theater Of The Mind.
7. Surprise
Some plots are as predictable as a stone rolling downhill, and if the hill and the stone are themselves interesting enough, a campaign can last quite a long time with nothing more. Real longevity comes when your plot, and the ongoing evolution of the game world that results from it, throw up unexpected surprises, entanglements, complications, consequences, and ramifications. These usually take the form of Plot Twists.
I am a big fan of parallel story threads interacting to form a new and broader layer of story. These interactions can be predictable, in fact should be predictable if complete information regarding both is known, but in the absence of that perfect knowledge, are usually surprises.
I have devised advanced plotting techniques – See
– for example – and I would also recommend
— that are designed to structure these entwinings, to the point where the campaign has three, four, or even five layers of plot taking place simultaneously.
This builds in a lot of the desirable attributes already identified while keeping the process itself manageable.
Ultimately, the major tools required are (b) Structure, (c) Vision, (d) Plotting, and (f) Storytelling.
8. Mechanics
Game Mechanics perpetually get in the way. It’s no surprise that a lot of game systems proceed from the premise of eliminating or simplifying them as much as possible.
But there’s a downside to this – it can come at the expense of Realism, which doesn’t have the same definition in this context as it does in most real-world settings. Realism here is all about internal consistency of game physics and the understanding that if you do (A) in this fictional world and under the current circumstances, the result will be (B).
That can be a lot harder to achieve than many expect.
As a first rule of thumb, the less time that is required to complete any given interaction with the game mechanics, the less stress they place on suspension of disbelief and immersion, and the less they get in the way of in-game entertainment (there is a certain vicarious thrill to rolling a 20 exactly when you need it, or suddenly being dealt a roll of 1, too).
Sidebar: Metagaming To The Rescue
I employ metagaming a lot as a substitute for mechanics. For example, over the weekend, a player attacked a bot. His attack would do 20d6 damage; the bot had around 75 hit points
(it was essentially a re-tasked autonomous vacuum cleaner).20×3.5 (the average result of a d6) = 70. That meant that unless the player rolled significantly low, they would do enough damage to take the bot out. I asked him to roll his dice to hit (he did) and then roll his damage – but to only tell me the number of 1s in the roll.
You see, unless there were a significant number of 1’s – four, five, or six of them – the odds were that he was going to meet the target, even if there were a high number of 2’s and 3’s in the roll.
Even if If eight of the twenty dice were 2’s or 3’s, that is about 20 points (on average) and assuming 20 / 6 = 3-and-a-bit – call it three 1’s – takes the total to 23. That leaves 52 to reach the target, on 9 dice that roll 4 or better. Call that an average of 5 per dice, giving 45 points of the 52 required. So he might not quite have succeeded – but the odds were very high that he would have done.
Look at it another (faster) way – 75 points on 20 d6 needs an average roll of 75 / 20 = 3.75. If there were only a couple of 1’s rolled, the average result of the rest would have reached the total fairly easily – and the bot was almost certainly going to be crippled, regardless.
So I ruled (virtually instantly) that the value of the dramatic impact of the metagamed (faster) damage handling mechanic exceeded the need for mechanical precision, and move the game ahead as quickly as possible.
I’ve built an entire game system – The Sixes System – on making such assessments at lightning speed.
So, where was I? Oh, yes…
The speed with which you can implement game mechanics, and knowing when you can shortcut the processes, can be critical. It does require a very strong working knowledge of what those mechanics entail to make it happen, though.
The tool used here is (k) Rules Knowledge and understanding of the underlying mechanics.
But wait, there’s more:
There are ways of structuring interactions with the mechanics that actually enhance storytelling and immersion, just as there are ways of interacting with the mechanics that are detrimental. The latter may be the default, but it’s not always necessary.
A fast character check and bam! – an immersive, plot oriented outcome delivered in (e) Narrative (f) Storytelling form, and you close-couple the game mechanics to both player agency and immersion.
To achieve this, you need to:
– all in advance. When this prep is done, the gameplay looks like this:
“Marito [character name], you have the highest [Skill name] of the group. Under these circumstances you need to roll [x]. Please make your check now – what did you roll, a 15? Okay, Marito… [convey narrative outcome].”
9. Pacing
The pacing of your plots, and your in-session gameplay, can be a decisive factor in the quality of the game. It can enhance it massively or destroy it utterly. I don’t quite go to the extent of scheduling breaks within a game session – human biology is too unpredictable – but will constantly be aware of how far away the next point in the adventure is that suits taking a break if one is needed.
This applies doubly to where the session of play ends for the day. There’s nothing worse than having to interrupt things in the middle of something for a week or more!
I’ve done two whole series on pacing, plus a few add-ons to it after the fact:
The primary tools involved are all ones that have been listed before, like (d) Plotting and (f) Storytelling, with one addition: (l) Plot Awareness – knowing where you are in relation to the plot.
And if you have to say, “That’s as far as I was able to prep because I didn’t know what you would decide,” there’s nothing wrong with that – I’ve done it a time or two, myself.
But, if you’re aware of such a point approaching faster than would place it conveniently at the end of play, it can sometimes be worth turning down the pace a little and throwing in some random encounter just to ‘pad out’ the day’s play.
Your alternative is to Improv from that point onward – hopefully, based on broader plans that you already know and understand. There are times when that’s possible, and times when it’s not desirable. All such decisions are also elements of Pacing.
10. Pace
The last part of the puzzle here is Pace, and I touched on a real-world example in the sidebar above. The more you can avoid having the game grind to a halt for any reason not deliberately inserted by you, the better the game.
All the good things have more time to be experienced, and all the bad things, less opportunity to get in the way.
As with any general rule, of course, there can be exceptions. Using game mechanics as a delaying tactic to increase dramatic tension, for example.
In character-interaction plot sequences, I tend to try and slow the pace down to permit the characters to ‘smell the roses’. In action sequences, I try to pick up the pace. Some dramatic sequences are best served with a “stall / delay / delay / tease / delay / everything-happens-at-once-in-a-great-rush / let-the-gravity-sink-in” pattern.
All this makes game pace something that is controlled at a plot level, within the bounds of what your mechanics and your ability with the mechanics, permit.
Once again, the tools are (d) Plotting, (f) Storytelling, (k) Rules Knowledge, (l) Plot Awareness, and finally (m) Quick Improv Capacity and (n) Self-awareness.

Image by Gino Crescoli from Pixabay
The Essential Skills
Fourteen essential skills in all, manifesting multiple times in 10 aspects of being a GM. I’m going to look at each of them in more detail in a moment – but first, let’s go back to the abilities of a Good GM, an Excellent GM, and a Great GM for a moment.
Excellence, Revisited
You don’t have to excel in all of these to be a Great GM. Let me reinforce that – you don’t have to excel in all these skills to be a great GM.
You do need to excel in at least one, and preferably several of them, but virtually every GM will have some area in which they are deficient – they just have to be that much better in another to make up the deficit.
Nor is consistency a likelihood. Some weeks, you’ll be “on it” in one or more areas more than other weeks, even in areas that are nominally supposed to be your strength at the game table.
That’s why I was so careful in my phrasing of the descriptions of those three standards of GMing.
The more areas in which you excel, the more likely it is in any given game session that you will be at the top of your game in that area of the GMing art. Self-awareness may have been last on the list of GMing skills, but it’s by far the least important attribute. And having prepped workarounds for those days in which you are off your game in a given area is vital.
So, to the fourteen skills. Because all of this is context to the main subject of the article, I’ll be brief (I hope).
- Option 1: Isolated encounters in each of the three areas (town, valley, mountain climb. Vision level: low.
- Option 2: A mini-adventure or side-quest within the main adventure, it starts in the town, builds in the travel through the valley, and concludes on the ascent. Vision level: moderate
- Option 3: A mini-adventure as above that provides additional background or context for the adventure as a whole, turning what would otherwise have been dry narrative into a reward for solving the ‘side quest’. Vision level: good.
- Option 4: A mini-adventure as per option 3 that also drops hints or otherwise advances or links to a completely unrelated plot thread within the campaign, tying the campaign more closely together. Vision level: High.
- Not Necessary – To some extent, graphic representations do nothing that can’t be done with pure Theater Of The Mind plus narrative input.
- Potentially Flawed – It’s extremely unlikely that you will find exactly what you are looking for, even if you’re good at Image Searches. You will almost always have to compromise to some extent. Overcoming that requires skill at photo editing, even photoshopping, and that can take time and effort. So you continually have to assess whether or not the time lost is worth it.
- Possibly Essential – There are two really strong reasons why this is the case – first, your image can depict something that would otherwise be really hard to describe adequately; and second, a picture may be worth 1,000 words, but can usually replace 500 words of narrative – and that frees up pacing and time to play, massively.
- I see with my little mind’s eye: The power of Visualization, and
- Things Easier With Pixels, Things Not.
a) Creativity
A GM needs to have ideas. Ideas for plots, for situations that will enable plots to happen, for characters, for stories.
I’ve written a lot of articles on how to direct and focus creativity, such as The Backstory Boxes – Directed Creativity (and of course, the whole Breaking Through Writer’s Block series applies in general terms).
What might not have been stressed enough is that creativity is like a muscle – the more you use it, the better you get at using it. If you struggle in this area, use the tools linked to in this section and not only will you get better results (because of the focus) in the short term, but you will exercise and strengthen that ‘muscle’.
b) Structure.
Johnn, Campaign Mastery’s co-founder, once stated that he had never encountered someone who could keep their eyes on the big picture while focusing on the smallest details the way I could, or words to that effect.
It’s an ability that stems from my training as a systems analyst, many years ago, coupled with a natural knack, but it’s proven valuable through the years.
Well, I can’t gift you any natural ability, but I can let you in on the secrets that derived from my training. It’s all about the relationship between the two pictures.

This montage is derived from mountain-8190836.jpg by Christel from Pixabay.
The image above describes how I think about an act from an adventure, or an adventure within a campaign. On the left is the original, big-picture image.
It exists purely to get the adventurers to the summit of the peak, and that purpose is always kept in mind. The purpose is symbolized by the second image – every bit as big as the first, but more focused.
On the right are three images constructing a logical sequence from the big image, focusing on specific details. First, there’s the village (featuring the Swiss flag in this case).
Then there is the valley walled in by mountainous rises and trees that offer lots of concealment. This is the trip to the foot of the mountain.
And, finally, there is the ascent itself, depicted in the third image. The exposed face looks difficult, with a serious overhang near the summit; there is just enough to suggest that the part hidden by clouds might be easier, but the clouds themselves would add their own difficulties.
Each of these is at least one scene in the adventure, with its own narrative and encounters. I can focus on those details using the purpose as a guide and the relationship between the detailed passages, as defined by the big picture, to define and keep the purposes of each of the scenes clear.
It’s simple hierarchical thinking, where the purpose of each line of code is defined by the purpose of the section of code, whose purpose is defined by the overall purpose of the module or piece of software.
The ability to take an abstract or analog scene or situation and separate it into a structure of component parts for subsequent processing is an essential skill for a GM.
c) Vision
It’s one thing being able to come up with isolated ideas that have no connection to each other, and quite another to be able to see how two or more of them will interact when composited together into one game world, one campaign arc or plot thread, one adventure, or just a scene.
There can be tens of thousands of variables involved, if you are creating an original game world intended to sustain a whole campaign or more. Fortunately, you can use the Structure skill to break the bigger problem down into smaller parts.
Using the example from the section above, let’s look at some different approaches to the adventure sequence in terms of increasing Vision, and what I’m talking about should become more apparent:
d) Plotting (adventure creation)
This breaks an adventure concept down into individual logical stages or acts, breaks each of those down into individual scenes, with a natural flow and alternative routes to critical information, then breaks each scene down into narrative, encounters, dialogue excerpts & extracts, directions and outcomes.
If you gave 100 different GMs the same adventure outline, they would come back with 100 different adventures with some common themes and motifs. Each of them would have come up with a different plot to execute the general adventure concept.
“Tree-like / Ent-like refugees from another plane seek to destroy a village of humans, fearing their mastery of fire.” – that’s an adventure concept, a plot premise, or any of a dozen other things that it can be labeled. Ultimately, it’s an idea.
Plotting takes that idea, turns it into a story, creates multiple outcomes for the story based on key decisions by the players (well, actually, those first two are Storytelling, and then breaks that story down into a logical sequence of some sort.
e) Narrative
Narrative is description, read to the players by the GM. It is the set-dressing, casting, and stage direction for the Theater Of The Mind.
At it’s most elemental, it’s effective communication, but that description leaves out an awful lot. It needs to be descriptive, it needs to convey mood and tone and nuance, it needs to be detailed but concise, and it needs to be understood clearly by those who hear it.
That’s not an easy recipe to follow, but there’s a series at Campaign Mastery that can help: The Secrets Of Stylish Narrative.
f) Storytelling.
Storytelling is both one of the easiest things to do and one of the hardest things to do well. It even gets referenced in the description of what Plotting is, above:
In The Challenge Of Writing Adventures for RPGs, I look at why writing for RPGs is different to writing for any other medium, though there are still object lessons that can be taken from how-to’s aimed at those other destinations.
Stories need to be distinctive – A Palpable Difference: 14 Points of Adventure Distinctiveness might be useful to reference.
Ultimately, one of the best resources on storytelling here at Campaign Mastery is probably Basics For Beginners (and the over-experienced) Pt 7: Adventures, simply because it’s pitched at beginners and is therefore usable by everyone. There are lots of articles that focus on different aspects of the craft of storytelling, but not many that look at the subject broadly (because those are very hard to write, too).
But storytelling is more than that – it’s the ability to take the plot (that you have broken your story down into) and reconstructing it at the game table to tell the story that evolves from the interaction of GM-created circumstances and Player choices of words and actions.
It’s about the ability to weave every part of the content that you have within the adventure into a coherent tale, full of excitement and drama and PC agency and risk and reward.
To be a GM at all, you have to have at least a minimal skill at this. It can only get better from that starting point.
g) Voice Acting
I am not a Voice Actor. I might be able to manage a “What’s Up, Doc?” but my abilities in this respect flat-line if you even glance at them with intent.
Accents are a little hit-and-miss unless I pre-script dialogue in advance.
What I can manage fairly well is pronouncing foreign words (with exceptions) in such a way that they sound (to those who can’t speak the language for real, at least) as though they were being spoken by someone who does speak the language ‘for real’.
Part of GM Self-awareness is being aware of your shortcomings and find ways to work around them.
For my techniques in this arena, see The Secret Arsenal Of Accents and the article to which I have linked in the next section, as well.
h) Expression
When an NPC has something to say, Expression is how they say it – their turn of phrase, the tone and emotional overtones, the hesitations (or lack thereof), and so on. When this is written in advance, it is called ‘Canned Dialogue’.
I covered this subject in Speaking In Tongues: Writing Dialogue & Oratory back in 2019.
Modes of expression can supplement descriptive narrative, convey information and nuance that would otherwise need to be described painfully slowly either before or after the fact, can bind a visual impression (either represented or theater-of-the-mind) to a personality, and a great deal more.
Voice Acting or Expression – an adequate GM will be at least okay on one of the two, but you really have to be fairly good at at least one of the two to be a Good GM or better.
i) Visual Representation
There are two types of visual representation. The first includes miniatures and battlemats; the second involves showing the players an image rather than having them construct their own mental image using Theater Of The Mind.
I use the first sparingly, in particular when a complex tactical situation is taking place. It’s also good when you have a map that you can’t show to the players. When the first reason isn’t a factor, I’ll often look for some way to get the map into the players’ hands.
I am a big proponent of the second kind of visual representation. There are lots of reasons for this, some of which I’ll go into later in the article; but for now, suffice it to say that such depictions are not necessary, can be flawed, but can also be essential.
j) Theater Of The Mind
I’ve read a number of discussions of Theater Of The Mind in which the focus is on enabling players to represent the situation in their own minds.
Very few of the sources I’ve read acknowledge that the GM has to do this, too – and then describe what he is mentally “Seeing” to the players, so that they can incorporate the new information into their own visualization.
Nor has there been very much that emphasized the need for both players and GM to keep this vision alive in their minds while they are doing something else – looking up something on a character sheet or running the game, for example.
The better you are at Theater Of The Mind, the more clearly you can see things. You still have to extemporize descriptions of the events and circumstances that you are visualizing, but a clear foundation is a good beginning; without that, your descriptions can’t help but be vague and fuzzy.
Thwo articles seem relevant:
I’ll have more to say on this subject of Theater Of The Mind later. For now, let’s move on.
k) Rules Knowledge
It’s possible to run an RPG game without knowing any of the rules, so that’s our baseline for this ability.
Sometimes, it can be easier to do so when one or more of the players has the knowledge you lack, but unless they are highly honorable, you can also lose control very quickly in this circumstance.
The next step up would be to have a good working understanding of the layout and a vague but solid understanding of the rules – so you know the most common stuff, at least in general, and where to find anything else.
How far this can carry you depends on a combination of three things: how quickly you skim-read, how deeply you comprehend what you’ve skim-read, and how quickly you can make a decision based on what you’ve skimmed. For D&D 3.5, this is my level of expertise, and for Hero 4th ed, it’s not much different, and I’ve run multi-year campaigns using both of these game systems. How you rank my expertise as a GM is up to you!
I have greater facility with the game systems that I’ve actually written – though input from a contributing player sometimes trips me up, in the case of the Zenith system.
Beyond that, we start getting into various degrees of “expert”.
In Happy New Year! – Lessons from yesterday (posted in 2009), I discuss an off-the-cuff campaign that I had to invent out of whole cloth without notice.
I still remember most of the (very simple) game mechanics. To make a skill check, for example, you rolled 2d6 (or maybe it was 3d6?), with high being better than low. You could add any expertise you had in that skill to one of the dice, but could not get it to a contribution higher than a Six. Once you had Skill in something, you could buy specialty expertise within; these did the same thing with the other die. And virtually everything was done using the same mechanics – to shoot a laser pistol, you used your laser pistol skill. A specialty in aiming would help with the other die, a specialty in maintenance or repairs would not.
Character construction: 2d6 for stats, each point of stats let you take +1 in a related skill, but I don’t remember what the stats were – I may have simply used the D&D model. After that, I just kept feeding the players skill points in batches of 6 until all the characters looked reasonable. I’m not sure how equipment was handled – I think I just hand-waved the question because of the plotline.
It was all Fast and Simple – and not bad for off-the-cuff! But here’s the point: I used that “game system” two-and-a-half times in 1998. That was about 25 years ago! I qualify as an ‘expert’ in it, not because I wrote it, but because I can rattle off the core mechanics so readily.
l) Plot Awareness
How does a plot survive contact with the enemy (the PCs, I mean)? The answer is, the GM’s Plot Awareness.
This is essentially just that big-picture-to-detail forest-AND-the-trees skill that I illustrated earlier. If you keep in mind the purpose of a given scene, the players can do whatever they want – anything other than achieving that purpose is icing on the cake. You can let them go completely off-script so long as that box is ticked.
Less experienced GMs are likely to be less adept at improv – or, more accurately, at keeping control when improvising. It’s so easy to go so far over the top with a half-baked spur of the moment idea that you can completely derail everything you had planned for the rest of the adventure, and the results at the end of the day are probably going to be less satisfying than what you originally planned.
At the same time, there will be times when a plot blind spot has created a plot hole so massive that what you had planned can’t possibly survive intact; coming up with a new road map to the adventure conclusion is necessary.
It’s not enough to be good at Improv; you need to be able to moderate your creative impulses and connect your flights of fancy to the plot, and that’s what Plot Awareness does.
m) Quick Improv Capacity
I suspect that I’ve stolen a lot of the thunder from this section with the description above. Rather than repeat myself, I’ll offer a couple of quick links to articles about Improv here at Campaign Mastery:
— and turn my attention to a related thought.
Any adventure content can be categorized into one of two possible types: content that is necessary to propel the adventure into its next stage, and everything else.
Look over any written adventure – it could be a commercial module, or one that you or someone else has written – and identify how much of it falls into the first of those categories, and how much, the second.
When you improvise, your goal should be to get the PCs to the next critical moment in the adventure. You don’t (usually) care how you do that, or how long it takes, or what they do in the meantime. There are limits, but it takes a deliberate effort (on their part) to trip over them.
Keep those objectives and purposes solidly in mind, use them to censor your worst instincts, and you will be fine. The adventure might not be your most shining hour, but at worst, it will be acceptable.
n) Self-awareness
The final skill that can’t be underestimated is GM self-awareness. There are some people who seem to think that all GMs are extroverts – my experience is that a significant percentage (at least 1/3rd) are more introverted, and I speak as one of them.
You need to be able to honestly evaluate your strengths and weaknesses as a GM so that you can play to the former and deal with the latter.
Some quick advice on the subject, which doesn’t really get enough coverage:
Covering Weaknesses
Having prepped workarounds for those days in which you are off your game in a given area is vital. But even more important is making sure that one of your normal weaknesses is going to have minimal impact on the day’s play.
You can’t do that if you don’t know what they are.
Prioritizing Self-Improvement
It’s an old dilemma: work on improving something you’re already at least half-good at, or work on improving something you aren’t?
The answer, to my mind, depends on the access and ability you have with workarounds. If you can achieve a reasonable standard of success with your weaknesses intact, improve something in your mid-range of expertise, especially if it helps cover one of those weaknesses.
Again, with an honest self-assessment – both good and bad points – you can’t determine where best to invest your time and effort.
Natural Self-improvement
Finally, it should be mentioned that simply GMing successfully, despite any handicaps that you might have, is in itself a source of self-improvement.
Playing, too, can be beneficial – you simply need to occasionally put your GM’s Hat on, and try to understand why the GM of your game has made the choices he has displayed. You don’t have to agree with them. You do need to identify them and understand the consequences within the game. This need only take a few seconds; not enough to disrupt your playing in the game. Over time, you will get better at all facets of the GM’s craft – even those that you are trying to avoid.
Those aren’t the whole list of skills a GM needs, it’s just a starting point, listing the skills that are relevant to this discussion. Other skills are ancillary to these tasks, for example being good at Research (Lightning Research: Maximum Answers in Minimum Time) or at Google Image Search (Finding Your Way: Unlocking the secrets of Google Image Search, though they have changed image search significantly since that was written).
So, with all that understood, let’s get back to expectations.
Expectations, Again
Expectations come in two forms – those deriving from superficial impressions and those deriving from past experience.
Superficial impressions are those deriving from observing from the outside. That includes before and after actual play.
Experience impressions come from actually sitting at the GM’s gaming table, and they can either reinforce superficial impressions or paint an entirely different picture.
The first part is a combination of the visual representations that you have set up, props you hand out, word of mouth, and overheard gaming – usually a piecemeal impression.
The second part contains more depth and is less about game prep and more about actual abilities displayed at the table – though game prep can and should feed into multiple categories.
Both come together in the mind of any given player – new or a long-standing participant in your campaign(s) – to create a set of expectations. The better the impression created by one or both of these sources, the higher those expectations will be. Even worse, you may have been talking up the adventure or your self-satisfaction with your work, raising expectations.
BIG mistake – even worse (but not by much) than talking down your abilities.
And, of course, every past game session tweaks expectations up or down.
How good a GM you appear to be to your players then depends on whether or not you meet, or exceed, or (horrors!) fail to satisfy, those expectations.
Theater Of The Mind
90% or more of the game actually takes place in the theater of the mind. Right away, there’s a potential problem there – one player’s theater of the mind can be very different from another’s, and all of them can differ significantly from the internal visualization of the GM. And the actual shared reality is not so much a consensus as a compromise.
It only takes one misheard word, one misinterpreted statement, one forgotten detail to completely transform a player’s understanding of where their character is, who else is there, and what is taking place.
Sometimes, those errors create a comedic moment and nothing more. At other times, the significance can be more profound, as players make what are potentially life-altering decisions on behalf of their characters based on a flawed understanding.
At times, those errors are entirely understandable – when the PCs are using assumptions in place of facts, or when an NPC is deliberately trying to deceive the PCs. See The Heirarchy Of Deceipt: How and when to lie to your players. These deceptions are just ‘steering events’, they shape the story but the story itself takes them into eventual account, reveals the truth, and offers a pathway forward. The revelation of what is really going on is one of those profound plot twists that I discussed in section 7 [Surprise] earlier.
They are not the subject of deep concern. Far more important are the accidental and unintended failures in constructing a scene in the Theater Of The Mind that inevitably take place every now and again.
It’s going too far to say that how good you are perceived to be as a GM comes down to how well you handle Theater Of The Mind; everything else is a secondary factor. There can be great GMs who excel at storytelling, or at narrative polish, or at any of several other things that all feed into the Theater Of The Mind, without the GM actually excelling in that department.
That results in a moderate rating in one area that is propped up by one or more others. No shame in that, and it can result in a very satisfactory game for all concerned – with the wheels coming off every now and then.
But, because it is ubiquitous, and everything from analysis to zeal feeds into it, improving your performance in Theater Of The Mind enhances your game and your GMing chops faster than anything else that’s not both a critical skill and an abject weakness.
“He makes cardboard cut-out characters but don’t he describe them purty” is not a recipe for being a Great GM. Adequate to Excellent (at best), maybe.
So let’s look at some techniques to improve your Theater Of The Mind.
Guarding Against Error
The more condensed and effective your Narrative, the less likely it is that something will be missed by a player – but the more impact it can have when something is missed. Stylish Narrative can mitigate and guard against error, but it can’t completely prevent them.
As a GM, you need to be constantly alert to a PC taking an action that only makes sense if they have misunderstood something important in your description.
Whenever you suspect a failure of Narrative, you need to confirm the player’s understanding and intentions, just so that you are clear in what they are trying to do in your own mind. This can create tension if not handled delicately, so be prepared and phrase your queries carefully. In particular, make sure to give the impression that you think it’s your problem, not theirs – “I’m not sure I fully understand what you are trying to do,” works fairly well.
A Confusion Of Detail
Excessive Narrative often becomes confusing. It’s better to siphon off the excess and position where you can add it to the description if a player wants to look more closely.
Insufficient Narrative creates fog and fuzziness, so it’s important not to cut too far. Relay the essentials, and leave the details out – until they are asked for. This enables players to assemble a mental image and then adjust it.
Efficient Narrative
Narrative, ideally, has to be no longer than absolutely necessary, but still comprehensive enough to set the scene. I discuss this in detail in The Secrets of Stylish Narrative (again), which offers techniques for compressing and enhancing Narrative (which is anything other than dialogue offered by the GM).
Assembling The Mental Picture
Not everyone paints every mental image with the same alacrity, and some players are better at it than others. This is yet another factor that can vary from one game session to another in any given case, and can have a material impact on play – and on the GM’s conversion of expectations into actual satisfaction.
Just because it’s completely out of the GM’s control, doesn’t mean that their reputations and ability to deliver on expectations are not affected.
It’s also worth noting that this can all cut both ways – the GM has to integrate what everyone (both PCs and NPCs alike) are doing into their visualization of events. One misheard word, one misinterpreted statement, one forgotten detail (now where have I heard that list before?), and the whole thing can derail.
Creating Theater Commonalities
There are all sorts of tools, aids, and props that can be used to speed entry into the Theater Of The Mind, and which help create consistency over the critical details of the scene amongst all participants.
Careful plotting can be very helpful. Good writing is paramount. Visual representations are very useful. Images can be profoundly beneficial. Visual reinforcement and reminders are frequently helpful, but harder to orchestrate. Some form of self-correction mechanism within the narrative structure can be a lifesaver.
Vectors Of Theater
Obviously, each of these needs further amplification, but this article is growing in length – 8600 words as I write this – so I’ll try to be brief.
Compatible Plot Sub-structures
Good plotting introduces scenes and situations simply and then builds layers of increasing complexity on top of them, one at a time. I think of the initial offering as an “opening scene”, a term from TV and movie production.
In that “opening scene”, at first, nothing of important is happening, but the major features of the landscape or interior are displayed as the camera pans this way or that. Eventually, it finds someone capable of action – and that acts as a springboard to the next passage. Note that the first narrative passage ENDS at this point – it can’t continue any further, so there is a strong implication that everything significant has already been mentioned at this point.
Focused and Efficient Narrative
The narrative needs to be as efficient as you can make it, for reasons explained earlier. Avoid going into details that don’t matter, or that can wait – if you need to, you can always drop a hint that there’s more to observe about something, or even simply appended – “Your gaze is drawn to the silver locket, which is opened; on one side is a photograph of the victim, the other is empty.”
Visual Representations
Visuals – either of the figures and battlemap variety, or something more basic like the maps I showed in By The Seat Of Your Pants: Adventures On the Fly– are shortcuts into the theater of the mind, and (literally) start everyone off on the same page. Referring back to them serves as a reinforcement and clarification.
One tool that I bought because it was cheap – I didn’t expect to use it much at all – is a whiteboard, a small one about 10″ x 14″. It’s become an absolute essential, because I can draw something on it to serve as the foundation and update it as things change.
One person I know suggested a sheet of clear plastic, reasonably heavy in thickness, taped or attached permanently to the back, so that I could flip the plastic to cover the working area and add details that could then revised or taken away, leaving the original. I haven’t had the opportunity to take the idea any further yet.
Images
Images serve the same basic function as other visual representations, but they can also be used to impact other areas – an image of a character can provide a massive narrative shortcut, as can an image of a general area. Depictions of objects are less profound, but no less valuable – because the object has to be important to warrant an image.
Visual reinforcement and reminders
More than that – if the images are consistent (which can be a big ‘if’), they not only reinforce the Theater Of The Mind visualization that you want to achieve, they can serve as reminders of past displays, and as clarifications. This enables them to be a source of error correction for peoples’ visualizations..
Self-correction mechanisms
Of course, careful use of references to past description can also serve as an error-correction mechanism.
For example, describing a body, you might mention that a button has been torn violently from the victim’s shirt and his fists are clenched.
After the PCs poke around for a while, and discuss things for a while, one decides to check under the sleeves for identifying marks and tattoos. When he does so, the GM tells him that he realizes something is tightly clutched in the closed fist.
Opening the fist reveals a brass button with elaborate carvings, just like the others on the victim’s shirt.
That passage in italics is critical – because it reminds the PCs of the image created earlier and then puts it into a whole new light.
The Satisfying Of Expectations
Every player has some sort of expectation of the game and the GM who is delivering it, every time they sit down at the game table. The better the GM is by reputation, the more visually slick the presentation, the more often a GM has met or exceeded expectations in the past, the higher the expectations of this game session are likely to be.
There are those who might advocate for lowering of expectations so that they are easier to meet, and if the GM genuinely doesn’t have any practical hope of self-improvement due to real-life circumstances, that might be the right approach to take.
Outside of that limited applicability, though, it’s just an excuse for not doing your best, and for not striving to do better. That defines a Good GM, and may even apply to an Excellent GM. But is that recipe something you would consider compatible with being a Great GM?
It’s not, at least in my book.
One Final Thought
Every campaign is different.
Every GM’s strengths and weaknesses has to be filtered through their relationship with the genre of the campaign, which can color some aspects of the GM’s ability, flatter others, and put still others under pressure.
Gerry X may be a great GM when it comes to Fantasy, but comparatively weak when it comes to Horror, or Sci-Fi. Paula Y may be brilliant at Werewolf, weak when it comes to traditional Fantasy, but have an unsuspected talent for Space Opera or Steampunk or whatever.
Expectations need to be filtered from one genre to another, and from one campaign to another within a given genre. Some ability sets will port across to their genre-equivalents quite readily; others may be more problematic, and their can be surprising twists along the way, too – I’ve met one GM online who has an astonishing facility for Narrative in a Fantasy setting, but who can barely string two words together in a more high-tech situation; the language required just doesn’t come naturally to him.
Every GM has the right to expect that the expectations of them will be realistic. Well, to hope for it, at least. Another, eleventh part of the GM’s task is to provide the foundations for the setting of those expectations.
But every GM also has the responsibility of living up to, or bettering, those expectations once they are set. What do the players expect of you when you sit in the Big Chair? Knowing the answer to that gets you half-way to the goal of at least satisfying them; not knowing leaves your performance to blind luck.
Confidence comes from being ready, from knowing what is expected and having a reasonable plan for satisfying those expectations. And confidence makes everything else easier.
And there we are – a mere 8,400 words or so, exactly double the “outline” that I was finished with last night!
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October 17th, 2023 at 11:32 pm
Gerd is a German male name, short for Gerhard.
I wanted to add something to the article but oh my goodness is that impressively exhaustive.
October 18th, 2023 at 1:41 am
Google informed me that it’s also an abbreviation used for other names, both male and female. Appreciate the thought, though! Thank you for the compliment on my work; appreciation expressed is the best possible thing you could add :)