Gamemastering

I am known to have opinions about everything, and especially about gamemastering. Some were formed through careful reflection; others came from watching a meticulously prepared adventure collapse in the first twenty minutes. The articles below are my attempt to explain what I think the GM is there to do, why I run games the way I do, and what I have learned when things went wonderfully right or spectacularly wrong.

At the centre of all this is a deceptively simple idea: the GM should create and sustain a world in which the players can act, and in which their actions matter. This requires a great deal more than presenting a story and asking the players to play their assigned parts. It also requires rather more than sitting back and letting anything happen. The difficult, interesting work is somewhere in between.

First, what is the GM actually supposed to do?

• How to GM: Lessons Learned with the Best Campaign Ever — my broadest statement of the craft, drawn from running Masks of Nyarlathotep three times. If you read only one article here, I would start with this one.
• The Game Master Is Neither a God nor a Judge — notwithstanding my chosen pseudonym, the GM's authority is neither absolute nor an excuse for punishing the players. Decisions have consequences, but consequences are not sentences handed down by a magistrate.
• Being the GM Is a Privilege — a rather less combative piece about why I still enjoy sitting behind the screen after all these years.

Improvisation, preparation, and the campaign that nobody planned

I am very fond of improvisation, which is not the same as inventing increasingly outrageous twists and trusting that they will somehow add up to a coherent campaign. I have tried that too. It was enormous fun, until it wasn't.

• Running Great RPG Campaigns with No Plan: Lessons from Vampire — a trip back to a delightfully excessive Vampire: The Masquerade campaign, and a frank account of what I got right and wrong.
• Running a Great RPG Campaign Without Preparation — the continuation, and a more mature approach to improvising a campaign without dictating its plot.
• The Case Against Session 0 (or Just Start Playing) — why I sometimes prefer discovering a campaign by playing it to negotiating everything before anyone has entered the fictional world.
• The Mystery Box High — on the peculiar temptation to invent mysteries faster than one can explain them.

Drama, mechanics, and making horror work at the table

A dramatic game does not emerge automatically from dramatic rules, and a horror game does not become frightening merely because the characters are helpless. Much depends on how the GM describes events, handles uncertainty, and chooses when to let a scene breathe and when to unleash hell.

• Keep Your Mechanics Out of My Drama! — my quarrel with systems that try to manufacture the story's emotional turns through mechanics.
• Ten Tips to Improve Your Call of Cthulhu Games — the closest thing here to a compact, practical checklist. Although written for Call of Cthulhu, much of it applies to horror gaming in general.
• Create Tension and Drama in Horror RPG Combat — why violence at the table should carry emotional weight, not merely reduce a few numbers.
• The Myth of Avoiding Combat in Horror RPGs — the companion argument: combat and horror are not enemies, provided the combat is actually frightening.
• Running Masks of Nyarlathotep: Tips and Advice — practical lessons from years spent with one of the great roleplaying campaigns.

And what are we doing when we roleplay, anyway?

Behind the practical advice is a more fundamental disagreement about what roleplaying is. I am interested in the experience of inhabiting a character and making choices within a world, rather than collaborating explicitly to construct a satisfying plot. I know this is not everybody's idea of the hobby. That is one reason I find it worth arguing about.

• The Divide: Roleplaying vs Storytelling and the Need for a GM — the central distinction as I see it.
• Why Story Games Leave Me Cold(er) — a more personal account of what I seek at the table and what tends to break the spell.
• We Need RPGs Not Made for Gamers — on the conventions we have become so accustomed to that we sometimes forget to question them.

This is not a complete archive, and I expect to keep adding to it. For my articles specifically about building investigations, there is a separate guide to designing better RPG mysteries. For reviews, campaign remixes, and the rest of the blog, return to Start Here.

And, naturally, if you think I am wrong about something, do tell me. Arguments about roleplaying can be almost as entertaining as roleplaying, though they hopefully involve fewer Molotov cocktails.