I don’t just mean the love and friendship themes groups often have trouble getting comfortable with (though to be clear, I’m not excluding them – these are huge). I’m talking about times when what you eat or the particulars of going to the bathroom temporarily consume you. I may sound picky here, but the combined effect boots you out of any pretence of simulation (which is why the identification of “simulation” in RPG theory never worked to begin with, and is still treated as a dust heap for things people have trouble with).

RPG settings can’t provide a simulation of what an authentic narrative would be like in a speculative world, but that doesn’t mean they can’t feel authentic. Suspension of disbelief enters the picture here, because despite everything I’ve said, the players need to be able to commit to sincere participation. It’s your job to work with your resources and the game’s, producing an end result your friends can jump into with gusto.

The two basic ways to do this are by either changing the setting (and sometimes the rules, where players believe they represent game “reality” – they don’t, but this semiotic shorthand is pervasive and often even useful) or by identifying implausible points, explaining why they exist and moving on. Aeternal Legends features the latter method in action, as we explained that the supernatural is hidden but pervasive just because that’s really cool.

(Let’s be clear, however, that players are expected to make a good faith commitment to getting into the game. You don’t have to constantly appease unreasonable players.)

Beyond suspension of disbelief, authenticity comes from setting up the rules as a point of tension against traditional narrative structures. We all know how traditional stories work because we’ve been educated to anticipate their structures. We expect writers to build stories with a certain rhythm and economy. Instead of looking at a rules set’s defiance of these as a flaw, we should see it as an opportunity – the opportunity that makes tabletop RPGs worth playing.

It’s not easy. It means that sometimes a failure is just a failure. It means that sometimes an NPC upstages the PCs. Looking at these events as RPG failure modes is a huge mistake, but an understandable one, because these are hard situations. They represent an encounter with the kind of anti-story situations that appear in real life. It’s the GM’s responsibility to help players make the most out of these difficult but powerful creative opportunities.

Emphasize that player characters are important because they get the most attention, not because of some in-world power play. There was an RPGNet thread recently where folks complained about Divis Mal being central to Aberrant. This is only true if the GM goes on an on about Divis Mal as if he’s being played at the table. It doesn’t matter if they don’t beat the bad guy or if anything procedurally interesting happens. The characters sitting and chatting is inherently more important than what some NPC is doing, no matter how impressive it is. Instead of using in-world events as a crutch to demonstrate to players that you like them and are interested in their characters, get genuinely interested. Use your omniscience to ask probing questions and help them apply the results to their portrayals.

It’s like being in love. You don’t make artificial demonstrations every day, but you’re interested. No word is wasted, even when the talk isn’t about poetry or storming the castle.

This one was inspired by a Youtube video. It’s extremely silly and incredibly nerdy, and I may not be able to communicate my message because of it, but what the hell: at least it’ll be good for a laugh.

I want you to watch a video where William Shatner talks about Star Trek V.

Are you done laughing? It’s pretty funny. It’s important, too. Not Shatner’s specific thoughts, but the fact that he articulated them.

He was at the height of his power. V was his movie. Kirk was his character and nobody could take that away from him. So the video above probably represents the apex of self-indulgence — but think about this: William Shatner could have sleepwalked through this part (who else was going to play Kirk back then?) but he didn’t. He actually prepared a deep motivation for Kirk despite the fact that it’s a silly film with a silly character in a bizarre situation, and there were no penalties at all for not preparing. Say what you want about William Shatner’s acting chops, but you can’t accuse him of laziness.

I’m not. Talking. About dramatic. Pauses. Players have very Shatneresque privileges because you need them to commit to the game. You trust them to play their characters as they see fit and for those reasons, it’s very easy for them to sleepwalk through the part instead of developing it. Fight that. Raise the inner Shatner on the Mount, and then bind it.

Raising the Shatner: Push the players for meta-reflection on the game constantly. You know the off-topic punning and and crap that happens in tense scenes? That’s you and your group doing it wrong. You’re reflexively seeking that meta-reflective (beyond the in-world perspective – and isn’t that phrase back there a mouthful?) space to get a handle on things, but without an articulated goal you just spin your wheels. You can use humour here, by the way. Instead of Monty Python, topical political satire. Instead of puns and impressions, cultural references designed to speak to who the character is. In all cases, You have to force the players to back up for a sec and consider motivations.

Funny thing: You will effectively end up breaking in-world narrative progress all the time by asking players about character feelings and stances, or riffing off OOC moments to dig deeper. But post-session players will often report that they felt more immersed and in more of a flow state. As I said, Raising the Shatner works best when we piggyback off of cyclical micro-retreats from focus that naturally occur in the game. Open these up into a new, free space for exploring the game, where you prepare like an actor in the moment, instead of doing the heavy lifting before play. You want them to feel as free to elaborate on their roles and as unsself-conscious as Shatner himself.

Binding the Shatner: You may want players to use their power to feel free like Shatner does, to wax poetic even about being an elf, which on another level is Trek-silly, but you don’t want them to go too far and be Star Trek V silly. That’s the danger. Don’t just veto or name-call stupid ideas. Challenge, challenge, challenge. Your job is to turn even crap characters into gold be assailing them with condistions under which they must evolve into something better. Challenges can either come from within the world or from the metagame level.

Give brooding loners brothers. Tell people with Mary Sue concepts to justify their combination of competence and lack of formal social power (Mary Sues are awesome, but usually not in charge). Does Mary Sue have an enemy? Is she incredibly unpleasant in a couple of key situations (and not just by being annoyingly awesome, since you want to fix that). Toss out life-changing ordeals, strange, fictional social mores. Bind the Shatner.

Find a balance. Tell players to take charge of the Shatner within – but carefully, carefully now.

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Poor integration causes a lot of frustration – so much that groups could fall apart without ever understanding why. The stereotypical antisocial character is often born of a player with so little trust in the world that deviant, amoral behaviour is the rational fall back. Being a bastard elicits information, because everybody has to deal with the bastard and reveal their tactics and resources thereby.

(This works both ways. Bastard GMs are often this way because they don’t know the players’ interests, so they poke, prod and slap to get that information.)

In a traditional RPG the goal is an immediate, deep experience, akin to actually being there. Literary critic Roland Barthes described a state he called punctum (with connotations of puncturing – wounding) in his book Camera Lucida, where the barriers between a sign and what it signifies (in Barthes case, photographs and their subjects) break down, so that (for example) you see a picture as a person. Game procedures tend to be very good at creating a sense of being in the world, but portraying the world on the fly is a challenge. If we had a real “picture” we’d get right to punctum, but RPGs give us ethereal worlds in our heads.

It doesn’t matter whether the game world is very much like our own or an odd fantasy setting. The critical difficulty is that it’s incomplete. There are plenty of commonsense things about the world that don’t come into focus until somebody asks. Look out the window and you know who’s walking down your block now; you don’t always know that in the game without the cumbersome process of “declaring” that you’re looking.

Think of heist scenarios. These involve milking setting information for advantages. The guards will be here. The festival crowd will move down the avenue there. They sound cool in theory but in practice, in-character heist plans often lead to confused, circular discussions. Players just don’t have enough information to take confident ownership of the scheme. They don’t know if they can get lost in the crowd of the festival. They don’t have an accurate picture of the rooftops they want to leap over.

“You know” is a powerful pair of words. Be prepared to fill in gaps in player knowledge by telling them what you consider to be common knowledge and common sense. Don’t both with game systems on anything the players need to know to authentically function in the world. By the way, this is why licenses and genres are so popular. They provide big, ready made sets of signs and assumptions: basic “navigation tools.”

“What do you need to know?” is this technique’s companion. Step in and ask a version of this question whenever players reach an implausible in-character sticking point (plausible sticking points are another matter – it’s not your job to constantly undermine tension). But don’t rely on the players asking common knowledge questions and don’t treat common knowledge like an asset to bargain for. You should use multiple methods to volunteer information about both the particular scene and the world as a whole.

Barthes talked about punctum, but also studium, which is a more analytical relationship. Punctum relies on not only a global perception of the sign, but a detail that’s placed in a powerful enough context to hit hard. A great GM loads the players with information to permit analysis, but in such a way that the action of the scene resolves it all into those telling details – “punctures” between the player/character divide. When you do it right, you can drive an emotional, memorable experience.

Let’s get started.

Though the forceful GM looms large in the imagination like a petulant god, the truth is that many GMs don’t use force wisely. GMs have access to more force in the game system, have more information about the game system and are part of a social setup where you have to listen to them – but they often miss the opportunity to learn what the players are thinking.

It reminds me of playing at Tai Chi push hands. Push hands is an exercise where you try to maintain constant contact with the other person with the end goal of staying balanced while knocking the other person of balance. It’s easy for larger guys like me (I’m 6’5″) to use physical strength to just blow through your partner, but there’s always a bigger or more skillful guy. You can’t improve without learning to sense pressure as well.

But this isn’t about “Yielding to get your way, Maaaan.” Tai Chi players sometimes fall into dysfunctional ideas about power. You need to push, too. You need to learn from that response. Otherwise you have two weak people barely making contact and falling into fixed patterns.

Yeah, so it is with GMing. You have incredible power, but you need to use it to draw out information. Here are three examples, techniques, whatever – just read ‘em:

What’s Your Intention?

One of the most common destructive patterns in game play happens when players treat their characters’ inner lives as a secret from the GM. That’s when you get a surprising “I stab Ally McBuddy in the back!” and grumbling that quiets down as soon as you look at the player in question. Get in there and ask the player what her character is thinking, what her hopes and dreams are – they should have no secrets from you. If the player wants to keep it a secret, stick to email or private conversations.

Stop thinking of yourself as the World and NPC Guy alone. Your dominion goes right into the characters’ heads. This also helps players by getting them to better define their characters.

Opinion Polls

I figure that about half of your mistakes are going to feel like they’re going to be a screwup before you even do anything. You have the power to stop at that point and get player feedback. This is especially handy when it comes to difficult bits of the rules that intersect with very subjective aspects of play. For instance, I almost always do this before pushing a Morality check in World of Darkness games, because the system really does rely on a community standard of what’s right, wrong and psychologically taxing.

A word of caution: Don’t provide an easy channel for player gratification here. People do not always want the same thing in the long term as they do in the short term, and sometimes suffering is necessary for a meaningful session. Save this one for when you’re genuinely stumped. Also, this is not a vote. You can’t use democracy. As GM, it’s your job to build participatory consensus. Note that I said “participatory.” That means that nobody “stands aside.” They all get on board.

Post-Game Notes

Many groups automatically fall into a post-game bull session about what worked and what didn’t. Add some structure and detail to this. Elicit opinions and manage the spotlight so that everyone has room to provide detailed feedback. It’s a good idea to jot questions down before the session or while it’s happening, but once the session’s over use these as an inspiration, not a list. Otherwise, the post-game chat feels like tedious work, when it really should be an extension of normal socializing.

In a troubled group this kind of thing can generate recriminations. I have to admit I can’t tell you much about what to do here since I haven’t experienced this since I was a teenager. The best solution, I think is never to leave any feedback hanging without a constructive solution that draws upon the responsible party’s strengths. It’s your job to observe and suggest those. Players are often not aware of their own merits.

You are the godlike GM. You are omniscient, but sometimes you talk before you can listen. That’s your duty and privilege. Take the role of a benevolent inquisitor and get to it.

We write rules that limit his (or her, but I’m going to say “his” from now on because the stereotype is patriarchal). We limit the idea of roleplaying to one model, and develop rules for each process within it to get him off the table completely. We want to chain or kill this incompetent, wrathful god.

Every solution creates new problems. GM-constrained or GM-less games make the game the ultimate authority, and it’s even less suited to particular group because no text can replace empathy and a shared history. Anti-GM games tend to have a narrow scope and rigid structure – without those, they can’t really take over the dead god’s reins. This doesn’t mean they’re bad fixes for the GM problem, but they highlight the fact that a good GM is an asset, not just a necessary evil.

Tabletop RPGs have failed to teach people how to be good GMs. I’ve personally failed because I’ve written numerous GMing sections and they’ve rarely had any impact. As time went on I learned to impart better advice, strike a balance between the practical and idealistic, but in professional work you always have to stick to the context of one game or supplement.

This blog is different. I don’t have to talk about any game in particular, so I’ve got the freedom to really get the essence of great GMing. Let’s talk about it in a series of posts, starting now. I’ll avoid repeating a lot of common advice and take a different direction than Robin Laws, the king of procedural GMing advice. Good GMing is one of the things that set tabletop RPGs apart from other forms of roleplaying. It may even help the hobby to survive as electronic games get better and better at replicating (or improve on) the rest of the tabletop experience.

This is called “GM as God” because it’ll talk about the traditional GM: the guy with unlimited power, the potential game breaker. Let’s get started.